Salient

Classic Film: Doing The Right Thing

By Haimona Peretini Gray | 5 May, 2008

In 1938 Frank Capra released a light comedy named You Can’t take it with you, it was well received as most Capra films are, even winning Oscars for best picture and best director. It’s a nice, old time comedy that’s pretty easy to watch but when trying to write a review of it for it I came up with nothing, it had meant nothing to me, it wasn’t bad it just didn’t affect me in anyway. To make a film meaningful it must be emotional, not forced or melodramatic but real, the writers needs an idea and the follow through to make sure the idea is actualised. It needs to be more like Do The Right Thing.

The film is set on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant (the birthplace of director Spike Lee) during the New York heatwave of the summer of 8something. The intense brightness of the cinematography sums up the simmering tension in the neighbourhood. No film of recent times has had it directors stamp so clearly on it, the story of Mookie is the story of Spike Lee, his description of racial tension have often been misunderstood, they are those of someone who has faced them head on not just someone who’s studied them from a distance.

The films intelligently asks questions of the viewer, this isn‘t a film of easy answers to real question, race is not dealt with as the problem, something that can be answered and then forgotten. I have gained more from Do The Right Thing than I have from any of my time at this university, It’s not a film I can recommend, it affects people differently but it spoke to me in a way no other has.