My first Spike Lee movie!
This is a story of a white Italian family who owns a pizza place in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. On one hot summer day, a black customer notices that the pizzeria has no photos of black men/women on their Wall of Fame, so he tries to convince everyone in the neighborhood to boycott the restaurant. The racial tension builds throughout the day until everybody decides to go crazy and just go after each other. Netflix definitely lied to me when it told me that this would be a comedy at some point. The one line in the movie that made me laugh was, "I don't fucking curse that much." Oh, and I did enjoy the pizzeria owner going Office-Space-fax-machine on the guy's boom box. I'm sure that wasn't meant to be funny, though.
I can see points of the movie... violence does not solve violence, racism runs deep through generations, and people can generally be idiots who don't think through their actions. I just didn't like that throughout the movie, even before anyone provoked them, absolutely everyone was hateful and violent. There were only two characters who were even close to likable: a drunk bum and the pizza delivery guy's sister, and she only had 10 lines in the whole movie. Also, even though cussing doesn't bother me (note: I don't cuss much myself because I sound like an idiot when I do,) this was out of control. Every other word isn't necessary. It was distracting.
The acting was great, the messages were important, but the movie was just slowwww...
Rating: 4/10
Big names: Spike Lee (directed and played the pizza delivery boy), Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez, Martin Lawrence
ok, so I'm following you, you are my inspiration and i'm pissed at myself for letting you watch 2 movies before I decided to join you!!!!! love you girl!
ReplyDeleteI had to watch this movie in college for an assignment. I really liked it. It's definitely a must see because the racism in it isn't just black/white, but almost cultural as well - like with the Asian couple across from the pizzeria. And really, they were all just really hot.
ReplyDeleteSab, you'll catch up! It's Trav's turn for the Netflix movie right now, so I'll be watching that and returning it before we can do Ben-Hur.
ReplyDeleteSar, after I wrote this and thought about it, I decided I liked it more. It's more about showing people dealing with the frustration of how exactly to do the right thing than it is a story about anything.
ummmmm.....and during my research of my next movie, I found out that Pulp Fiction uses the word "fuck" 25 more times than this movie:)
ReplyDeleteWow, I really can't believe that. I mean, I noticed there was some cussing, but didn't think it was nearly as bad as this movie. "Goodfellas" uses that word a few times, too, btw. I think according to imdb, it was like 2 times per minute or something. :)
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