Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing (1989)
Director: Spike Lee
Cast: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Rosie Perez, John Turturro, Ozzie Davis, Ruby Dee
Memorable line: "Always do the right thing."

Just as the decade of the 80's was about to come to an end, Spike Lee closes it by giving us the best movie of the decade in Do the Right Thing.

Charged with energy and anger right from the start, Lee gives us a day in the life of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in which the neighborhood starts at a low simmer and by the end of the day boils over into a cauldron of hate and bigotry. Mookie (Lee) is a pizza delivery man for Sal's (Aiello) Pizzeria. Sal just wants to make a good pie and get along, but his son (Turturro) turns out to be a stone-cold racist who stirs the pot to a super-nova like temperature. The climax of the movie leaves you spent and wondering why it all had to come to this.

At times, the dialog sometimes comes at you a machine-fun like fashion and Lee has a playful way with the artifice of filmmaking that provides the movie with an infectious energy. The music pulses and hums throughout the movie to up the tempo, but the film is not without slow moments as neighborhood denizens like "Da Mayor" (Davis) and a group unemployed men shuffle in and out of scenes dispensing wisdom and nonsense in equal measures.

When released, the film was a lightening rod for criticism as some thought it incited racial violence, but my take is that it was always a commentary on race relations and society's tendency to ignore the problem until Do the Right Thing explodes in your face.