Domino, motherfucker!

On Boyz N the Hood:

This story has been told so many times. It has a new face in this movie though. It a coming of age story about life in the hood. Tre moves into the hood to live with his father, Furious Styles, so that he can 'become a man'. His neighbor, Do, is his best friend growing up, who gets but in juvie for shoplifting and is in and out of jail ever since. This movie brings back the idea of the hand of love and the hand of hate.

Tre is the hand of love in this movie. He is a good kid, he always tries to do the right thing. Furious Styles did a good job of raising him to be a conscious, black, young man. As a father, Furious styles tries to educate his son, and how it is different to grow up as a black male in South Central LA, as Do puts it, "Tre, your pops is like motherfuckin Malcolm...Farrakhan". Even with his father's love, life is still hard for Tre. At the climax of the movie, Tre watches his friend Ricky get shot down for no good reason. After that it looks like the hand of hate is winning. In a previous scene, Tre goes to his girlfriends house and swings around violently because he hates life in the hood. Tre gets a gun and sneaks out of the house to go seek revenge with Do. On the ride over, Tre makes the right decision though and asks to get out of the car.

Do on the other hand, is the hand of hate. He can't make the same decision that Tre did. Whether it was because he never had a father, or because he had already spent so much time in jail, or because Ricky was his own brother and he wanted to do something right for once, Do did kill his brother's murderers. Not only did Do and his crew gun the assailants down, but once they were on the ground, Do got out of his car and made sure each of the bodies was dead by shooting them again if they were still moving and talking. An interesting point is brought up about black-on-black violence. As Do walks up to one of the men he gunned down the guy says that he didn't even kill his brother. It doesn't matter to Do though, he kills him just for being there. He does this because he is so full of hate, he was socialized that way. And it wasn't what was on television or what he was listening to, but because it was all that was there. He never had a father, his mom did not love him nearly as much as Ricky, he was in jail or juvie most of his life, hate is all he knows. At the end of the movie though the hand of love reaches out to the hand of hate and Tre lets Do know that he "still has one brother left".

The movie ends in the same way that it is introduced. The movie starts with statistics about black-on-black violence in America, and the movie ends saying that Do dies a few days later and Tre went on to college and raise a family, et cetera. Boyz N the Hood is almost like a Lifetime movie, except it is not unbearably lame. The story makes sense and the dialogue is good, it is a real good movie, but it still has the message and the lesson.

Starting with Do the Right Thing there has been a paradigm shift in the soundtracks in the movies. It was first noticeable in 1989, that instead of Ray Charles, Earth, Wind, and Fire and Isaac Hayes producing songs for the movies it is all rap and hip-hop. I am sure this trend will continue. The weird thing is this change seemed to happen in a split second, i wonder if that was similar with the music change in real life too. Next on the list is Don't Be a Menace in South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood