Boyz N the Hood

Crenshaw neighborhood of South Central LA 1984-1991. This is a great movie. Definitely not children's material. Not something I would show an 11 year old kid [my age when the film came out]. But nevertheless an important film in understanding portrayals of urban life. John Singleton definitely brings the harsher side out. You have elementary age kids finding a dead body early on. And that loose end is never tied up. Divergent sounds are all throughout. Low hovering helicopters. Police sirens. Ambulance sirens. Crying babies. The vendetta which unfolds in the film results in 4 young men being murdered. And the original incident involved two people merely bumping into each other. Maybe I missed something in the film, but that was my read of the story. The most disturbing scenes of the movie is when the blood soaked corpse of Rick, a budding football star about to head to university, is brought home into his mother's home before the paramedics are called. It is horrifying. A crying child, a screaming mother, and a hysterical girlfriend try frantically to revive Ricky.

John Singleton's, the director here, probably the most authentic and important person in the film industry for portrayals of urban life among African-Americans, if someone disagrees they might point me to another direct with whom I should become familiar. I found one of his other movies, Baby Boy, also to be authentic and fascinating.
There's significant alienation between Tre, the main character, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., and the people around him. But "the hood" is also a place friendship, beauty, and love. Its painful to watch at times. But his parents both display heroic efforts to raise their son within a difficult context. The redemptive theme of the movie is most strongly developed through Tre's father, played by Laurence Fishburne. Tre's father is morally upstanding and a constant source of wisdom for his teenage son. He's a voice of reason to other young men as well. He reminds me of Harper Lee's Atticus Finch. Furious plays the key role in steering his son Tre away and out of the cycle of revenge and violence. What sticks out the most to me is the character, Darrin, "Dough Boy," lamenting that there was nothing on the news the day after his brother was murdered, only national, and international news, and in his own words, "either they [media] don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood." Sadly, that is probably a pretty accurate description of how a lot of people feel about urban violence, "not our problem." That's probably Singleton's most important statement in the whole film. At the start of the movie he cites this statistic, which I had never heard, "One out of every 21 Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime."