El Cosmico here, along with Alexandra DuPont, with a double-dose of reviewing power, taking in an exceedingly excellent double-DVD edition of Spike Lee's breakthrough and signature piece, DO THE RIGHT THING.
One of the great things about DVDs is that they give the reviewer-come-lately, webfolks like myself, a chance to review a film that's long since out of the cinemas. Most of the time, I really don't give a damn or think much of the latest flicks to come out on DVD, so why mention them at all? Better that many should just be forgotten. Not so with DO THE RIGHT THING.
I had forgotten just what a beautiful and lovingly made film this was until I saw it again with all of the wonderful extras that have been included. Ms. DuPont lists them all methodically below, so I won't get too redundant on you, but suffice it to say that one of the best things about this particular Criterion edition is that it really gives you an insight and a level of empathy with the director. Taken as a whole, all of the extras point clearly to exactly where the director is coming from, what the actors see in their characters, what the goal of the film was, and importantly, it helps in understanding whether and how that goal was reached.
Like I said, it's a beautiful and lovingly made film. When I got the DVD, the first thing that popped into my head was the violent ending. The confrontational nature of the film, which was a source of controversy, mostly by those who didn't care to think about it. What I should have remembered was the warmth with which all of the characters were treated; the depth of understanding that was shown in their relationships. Most of this film, almost all of it, is an affectionate portrait of a community, with all of its quirks, its strengths and failures.
More than that, there is such style in this film, it makes you wonder how so many directors get away with the rampant blandness that dominates film. Spike is one of the few contemporary directors, who, like the Coen brothers, has a genuinely distinctive look and feel to his films. They feel like paintings, done in a particular artist's fashion, or like music, played with panache and flair. When you're watching a Spike Lee film, you can FEEL it. There's a real artist at work in these movies.
I know, lots of you don't like Spike because he makes you feel uncomfortable. Maybe you feel accused of something, maybe you think he beats issues silly. I just like the conversation. I like that someone is giving his heartfelt opinion on something, and that he's not completely full of shit. To be sure, I disagree with some of the things that Spike says about the film. He thinks Sal is a racist. Danny Aiello and I don't. I think that if you call Sal a racist, you have to call just about everyone in this film a racist. Pino is a fucking racist pig bastard, but while Spike seems to think he gets it from Sal, I think Pino gets it from his friends, who we never see, but who are talked about. In that same conversation, we hear Sal talk about "these people", referring to everyone in the neighborhood. Spike mentions in the commentary that a comment like that is something like a separation, a way of calling them different. I watch that scene, though, and see Sal trying to explain to his worthless, racist son, that he, Pino, and Vito have more in common with the people in their neighborhood than they do with other "American Italians". I can almost hear Sal calling "these people" "our people", but being afraid to say something like that to his fool of a son, Pino.
There are lots of things like this, where I just disagree with what Spike says, but his skill in this film is that even though he interprets scenes differently than I do, they're still accessible to my viewpoint. I disagree with the order of the quotes at the end. Did Mookie do the right thing? Hell no. But I understand why he did what he did. I understand why all of the characters went the way they did. That doesn't mean that I like them all, but it does mean that I like this film. A lot.
So, this week doesn't provide the best in cinematic fare at the local megaplex, but it does provide the opportunity to own a significant work of true art, of truly important American cinema, presented as it should be, in a spectacular special edition from Criterion.
Well, enough from me, here's Alexandra DuPont, with a great and detailed breakdown of the disc, courtesy of the fine folks at DVD Journal.
I. A Fawning, Box-Cover-Ready Blurb for Do the Right Thing: Criterion Edition
Do the Right Thing deserves "The Treatment" as much as any movie Criterion's ever licensed. This is why DVD players are worth buying: to showcase a pristine print, plus a gaggle of supplemental materials that pile up taller than a congressional report.
II. Why the Criterion Double-Disc Treatment?
Well, for one thing, the movie's historically important. Do the Right Thing dropped onto cineplexes like an atom bomb in 1989, opening the financial floodgates for a new wave of black films that included Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society and other, less deserving titles (including, I'm afraid, the post-Boyz career of John Singleton and many of director Spike Lee's subsequent films, which, excepting Malcolm X, have tended to suffer from goofy structural flaws and thematic deck-stacking).
But to the devil with economics and social context! Most important, Do the Right Thing is very nearly the only film about race to avoid pedantic sermonizing (or at least unfunny pedantic sermonizing), precious moments and/or the aforementioned thematic deck-stacking. Instead, the movie's sexy, funny, lean, mean, theatrical, surprising, tightly constructed — and shockingly balanced in its empathy for (and condemnation of) all racial viewpoints. Roger Ebert puts it nicely in his "liner notes" for the Criterion edition:
"...it seemed to me that any open-minded member of the audience would walk out of the movie able to understand the motivations of every character in the film — not forgive them, perhaps, but understand them. A black viewer would be able to understand the feelings of Sal, the Italian-American whose pizzeria is burned by a mob, and a white viewer would be able to understand why a black man — who [sic] Sal considered his friend — would perform the action that triggers the mob."
Well, exactly. Which sort of leads me to
III. The Story
It's the hottest day of the year in New-York's Bedford-Stuysevant neighborhood. The movie follows 24 hours in the lives of nearly two dozen broadly sketched characters — among them a bum (Ossie Davis), an Italian pizzeria owner (Danny Aiello, never better), his Cain-and-Abel sons (John Turturro, Richard Edson), a delivery man (Spike Lee), a single mother (Rosie Perez), a radio DJ (Samuel L. Jackson, credited as "Sam Jackson" back in '89), a neighborhood activist (Giancarlo Esposito) and a young man (Bill Nunn) identified primarily by his 20-"D"-battery-requiring boom box and "LOVE" and "HATE" hand rings (lifted directly from Night of the Hunter).
IV. Parenthetically:
I should note that this movie isn't set in the real-life Bed-Stuy neighborhood; rather, it's set in a brightly-colored alternate-universe Bed-Stuy that's pretty much devoid of both serious crime (until the climax, anyway) and drug use. As one friend rather brutally puts it, Do the Right Thing's Bed-Stuy feels a bit like "Sesame Street" with racist epithets.
But the reductive treatment of the film's milieu is important: For one thing, it focuses the movie (and the viewer) on the racism theme without distraction. Still, this thematic exclusivity caused no small amount of consternation among PC critics in '89: They decried the dropping of Bed-Stuy's drug problem as if Lee should be responsible for shouldering All the Problems of African-American Culture in one sitting. (Lee beautifully addresses his reductionist choices in one of the film's extras, BTW, which I'll get into later.)
V. Anyway: Back to the Story
At first, Do the Right Thing seems essentially plotless — a fast-paced Slacker filmed at Dutch angles — with all these myriad characters wandering the neighborhood and sitting on stoops and crossing one another's paths and arguing and often as not being extremely funny in the process. (Keep an eye out for a very young Martin Lawrence in his first screen appearance.) But when Buggin Out (Esposito) notices that pizza man Sal (Aiello) doesn't have any African-Americans on his "Wall of Fame," he tries to "boycott [Sal's] fat pasta ass" — a minor grievance that escalates over the course of the day, eventually drawing all the film's characters into a full-fledged riot.
VI. Why that Broad Plot Sketch Fails to Capture what Makes Do the Right Thing So Extraordinary
For me (and, one assumes, the fine folks at Criterion), the movie's damn near pitch-perfect — lightning in a bottle, a magic confluence of cinematic players.
There's the writing, for starters — revised and sharpened during the rehearsal process, if the disc's extras are to be believed. As mentioned, the dialogue's extremely funny — filled with arguments that defy the normal trappings of the "message film" because winners are seldom if ever declared. One minor example: Ossie Davis' bum character, who calls himself "Da Mayor," gets into a tete a tete at one point with four kids. He starts out telling his nobly intoned sob story, which the other kids interrupt and more or less demolish — a complete inversion of the usual "These-kids-nowadays" conversation. Also: What other screenwriter would dare to interrupt his narrative without explanation to stage a mortifying (and disturbingly funny) montage of characters staring straight into the camera uttering strings of racial slurs?
(Also, a parenthetical and not-at-all-important note on character names: Spike Lee has become sort of notorious for the bizarro monikers with which he saddles his protagonists — the worst example being his naming Wesley Snipes' character in Jungle Fever, good Lord, "Flipper Purify." But Lee's naming instincts were never more spot-on than here: Buggin Out, Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mookie, Radio Raheem, Coconut Sid, Sweet Dick Willie, Officer Ponte, Mister Senor Love Daddy.... If you can find it, it's worth tracking down the out-of-print Do the Right Thing making-of book, which contains Lee's excellent set diary: At one point, he lists more brainstormed character names: True Mathematics, Pain, Sweet Feet, Re-Re, Clean Head, Bleek, Peace God, Born Knowledge, Knock Knock, Indestructible, Be So Mighty.... Many of these names show up in his later films, BTW.)
Then there's the acting: Though broadly sketched, most of these goofily named characters generate a surprising amount of empathy, even when they're saying unlikable things. Special praise goes out to Esposito for his high-speed rantings; Aiello for his transcendent Italian hothead (a character rumored to have been carved out of arguments with Lee); Davis for elevating his "worthless bum" character well above the realm of cliché; Nunn for a monologue on his LOVE and HATE rings; the late stand-up comic Robin Harris for staring straight into the camera and saying terribly ribald things; Lawrence (in a tiny part) for never moving his lower lip, to hilarious effect; Rosie Perez for somehow making screeching an endearing character trait; and young "Sam" Jackson for binding the narrative together with smooth disc-jockey interludes.
I could go on and on. Ernest Dickerson's vibrant, complex cinematography (despite relying a little too heavily on cocked angles) is practically a character in the film; his use of light and color to convey sweltering heat is among the film's greatest pleasures. And the score by Bill Lee (Spike's father), featuring Branford Marsalis, is one of my personal favorites: It's jazz by way of Aaron Copland, with a tender, mournful sound that contrasts nicely with Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," which blisters throughout the film.
VII. So It's Criterion Already. What About the Damned Extras?
Do the Right Thing is deeply ingrained in the currency of my film-geek friendships, with lines and nicknames quoted to this day; as you can imagine, to this writer's eyes, the Criterion two-disc edition is like holy writ. Here are the extras — far more than you can enjoy in one sitting — in varying degrees of detail:
Scattered throughout are video introductions by Spike Lee, each about a minute-and-a-half long, featuring Lee leaning way too close into the frame and intoning quietly. Truth be told, many of these snippets have the substantive value of variety-show intros, and don't seem adequately prepared, but I'm still sort of glad they're here.
The audio commentary features Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, production designer Wynn Thomas, and Spike's sister Joie. It's a dense commentary, though somewhat apocryphal (Lee references a Jackie Robinson biopic, for example, that he hasn't made yet, though he says it's been released by the time we're hearing this). Kudos to the participants' acknowledgment of the film's inherent theatricality — its sacrificing of realism in the service of theme.
But the real treat may be Spike Lee's videotaped behind-the-scenes footage, which includes the read-through, rehearsals, character-development discussions with key performers, set construction, and the film's "wrap party" (during which Lee is given a Larry Bird Celtics jersey by the crew). It's all messy and hand-held and full of improv that goes nowhere fast, but there are some treasures to be found:
- The read-through and rehearsals are marvelously unpretentious — familiar to anyone who's been in community theatre, really — and feature now-established actors chipping in eagerly. (Martin Lawrence in particular is a riot as he practices paralyzing his lower lip.) It's here that Lee's challenged on the "drug-free Bed-Stuy" issue. His reply? "You can't just have drugs on the side and not deal with it."
- Danny Aiello exhibits an assertiveness that I'm guessing had quite a bit to do with Lee's racially balanced approach.
- It's fun to watch Lee repeatedly interview a very green, quietly nervous Rosie Perez with his camcorder. He'd reportedly "discovered" her in a dance club, and he needles her into going off on the pretensions of other actors and her lack of ambition to be a movie star.
There's also a 60-minute documentary, "The Making of Do the Right Thing," that is, as Lee puts it in his video intro, "not one of those regular bullshit EPK things," God bless him. Directed by St. Clair Bourne and produced by Lee, the doc tells a fascinating story — how the producers took the real Bed-Stuy and turned it into a fantasy Bed-Stuy, painting murals and using the Fruit of Islam (Louis Farrakhan's security force) to clear drug dealers out of the neighborhood so shooting could proceed. Under the same "Making of" menu, you'll also find the five-minute "Back to Bed-Stuy," in which Lee and line producer Jon Kilik revisit the Bed-Stuy locations. It's terribly poignant, 11 years later, to see the mark the movie left on the neighborhood — the fading murals, the wall that's still "fire-truck red," the grassy lot where Sal's Famous burned to the ground.
Also on the Supplement disc: Public Enemy's music video for "Fight the Power," directed by Spike Lee; The 1989 Cannes Film Festival press conference with Spike Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson and Spike Lee; storyboards (viewable one-at-a-time or three-at-a-time) for the riot sequence; a video interview with editor Barry Brown; and the theatrical trailer and TV spots.
Increase the peace,
— Alexandra DuPont
dupont@dvdjournal.com
Rating: four stars
- Color
- Anamorphic widscreen (1.85:1)
- Two-disc set: Disc One (the movie) is RSDL dual-layer edition
- English (PCM Stereo, Dolby 2.0 Surround)
- English subtitles
- Audio commentary with Spike Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, production designer Wynn Thomas, actress Joie Lee
- Video introductions by Spike Lee
- 60-minute documentary: "The Making of Do the Right Thing"
- Spike Lee and line producer Jon Kilik revisit the Bed-Stuy locations
- Public Enemy music video for "Fight the Power," directed by Spike Lee
- 1989 Cannes Film Festival press conference with Spike Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson and Spike Lee
- Spike Lee's videotaped behind-the-scenes footage, including rehearsals, set construction, and wrap party
- Storyboards (viewable one-at-a-time or three-at-a-time) for the riot sequence
- Video interview with editor Barry Brown
- Theatrical trailer and TV spots
- Dual-DVD keep-case
Wonderful as always, Alexandra, many thanks.
