“Always do the right thing.” “That’s It?” “That’s It.” “I got it. I’m gone.”

20 years on… So many great lines in this thing. A movie I loved then, and appreciate more and more as time goes on.

And how’s this for an image? Though like great lines, this one has ’em to spare.

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LA Times has an interesting article with quotes from the people who made the movie.

Lee: To this day, no person of color has ever asked me why Mookie threw the can through the window. The only people who ask are white.

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“My people. My people. What can I say? Say what I can. I saw it but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it what I saw. Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?”

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mauer

Mark Mauer likes movies cuz the pictures move, and the screen talks like it's people. He once watched Tales from the Gilmli Hostpial three times in a single night, and is amazed DeNiro made good movies throughout the 80s, only to screw it all up in the 90s and beyond. He has met both Udo Kier and Werner Herzog, and he knows an Irishman who can quote at length from the autobiography of Klaus Kinksi.

5 thoughts on ““Always do the right thing.” “That’s It?” “That’s It.” “I got it. I’m gone.””

  1. I want to say more than this bland comment, but–I love this movie, more even than my first 20 viewings. I teach it about once a year, and it works so damn well, is so challenging and funny and lovely and angry. It’s interesting to watch it with folks who were born after it came out, who have maybe a thin sense of Lee as a cable-news provocateur… far removed from his iconicity and from any sense of Crown Heights, or even Rodney King, hell for most far removed from their own Minnesotan context, the movie *still* simultaneously unnerves and delights.

    Lee’s respected, but not nearly enough–his body of work is as astonishing as any American’s oeuvre, and this is his finest. (Note: Ed Guerrero wrote one of those BFI companion books for DTRT, and it’s pretty good…)

  2. I think the performance that I’ve most reassessed over the years is Giancarlo Esposito’s Buggin’ Out. Following the dictates of his name, Buggin’ is never more than 3 steps from furious, and the script and shooting cartoonishly amplify, make a caricature more than a character. Yet Esposito, always playing it big, manages to convey hints of confusion, emotional complexity, a dogged concern for others (despite a preening self-righteousness that never goes away).

    What I love about this–and many of Lee’s films–is the head-on collision with stereotypes and dismissal. African-American political leaders are often represented as foolish loudmouths, ego-driven, mountains-from-molehill sorts who disrupt in ways that make it hard to see past the messenger to the message. But like Lee’s point about the trashcan, Buggin’ becomes a kind of litmus test for the prisms through which various audience members imagine what’s true, and obvious. I have had a billion conversations where someone notes how crazy Buggin’ is, only to have someone lean back and say whoa whoa whoa but he’s right. And both speakers are surprised by the failure of the other to grasp their respective alternative readings. Lee in some way stages the way we represent race and racial conflict, and forces audiences to engage not just with character but with a critique of such representation–he makes us think about how we see, and how “we” see differently.

    Guerrero calls Lee a poet of the dialogic–Lee’s films remind me of Tony Kushner’s plays, where at their best every character doesn’t just have a backstory or a deep history but enacts, stages a position in an argument. And the text ends up being a swirl of competing voices, and producing that argument in its audience.

    E.g., http://strimoo.com/s14377957 — this scene is shot like contrapuntal music, part of a series which sets up conflict through shot-reverse-shot and wide-shot, inviting us to see contrasting positions but also the context all the speakers inhabit; through the course of this film’s “day,” we see this editing pattern again, and again, as tensions escalate until the final conflagration. And then, the next day outside the burned-out pizzeria, Lee restages that editing–Mookie, then Sal, then Mookie, then Mookie and Sal shot wide.

  3. Great film. I, too, love to teach it. One of my favorite shots is of Da Mayor, standing in front of Mother Sister’s apartment window. It’s dusk. He’s just saved a young boy from being run over by a car. Mother Sister is impressed, which sparks just a hint of hope in Da Mayor’s heart and, just then, the street light behind him pops on.

    Oldboy

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