Thursday, July 9, 2009
Uncategorized Do the Right Thing still provokes at 20th anniversary
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 1:50 PM
“Wake up!” The first words of director Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing echo the last lines of his previous film, School Daze. Most aspects of Do the Right Thing — celebrating its 20th anniversary with a Fox Theatre screening July 11 — emphasize Lee’s sensibility as a cinematic provocateur. With the urgency and energy of an alarm clock, Lee tried to rouse movie-goers from their complacency and urge them to look around, register to vote and “Fight the Power,” to quote the Public Enemy song that recurs 15 times throughout the film.
In his early 30s at the time, Lee celebrated vitality over subtlety at nearly every chance in Do the Right Thing. Rosie Perez’s pugnacious dance moves during the opening credits’ rendition of “Fight the Power” sets a tone of confrontational pride and high-spirited indignation. Lee’s camera hungrily seeks and reveals information of the cultural cross-section in a block of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the midst of a heat wave.
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(Image courtesy Universal)
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