Do the Right Thing

“Always do the right thing.” A delivery guy working at a family-owned Italian pizza shop, a radio man broadcasting from a glass window, three old men sitting on their stools commenting about the community, a drunken but wise old man preaching to the young, an old woman observing from her stoop, and a boombox guy strolling and blasting "Fight The Power" on the whole neighborhood living on their mosaic, energized Saturday under a sweltering summer. All the overlapping generations and racial divisions crisscross as the heat rises, the tension rising when a dispute between a young man and the pizza owner escalates into a mutiny that blazes through the whole block. Spike Lee captures everyone’s life living their mundanity through vibrant, diverse environments and scenic street corners. This movie exudes an incredible sense of social humor, structural racism, gentrification, and systemic injustice issues in unadulterated aesthetic cinematography, then evocatively swerves into profound political sequences, transcending itself from uproarious comical sequences into a tragedy of brutality. Another thing i love is Radio Raheem’s “Love and Hate” brass knuckles and his monologue, which is an homage to Robert Mitchum’s knuckle tattoos from The Night of the Hunter. Essentially an important piece of a movie whose relevance still remains intact until this minute, purely astonishing.