Rent Do the Right Thing (1989)

Could this be Spike Lee's best film....... - Do the Right Thing review by CP Customer

Do the Right Thing follows a day in the life of Mookie, an intelligent but lazy Spike Lee who delivers Sals Finest Pizzas around his neighbourhood in Brooklyn. It's the hottest day of the year and the film builds as tensions between the blacks, whites, italians, hispanics,koreans, parents and children start to boil over...

But that's not the point - the point is that all these people seem to live together happily until a series of insignificant events expose the prejudice lurking below the surface. It doesn't preach, it's colourful, lively, full of humour, it has great music, great performances from Danny Aiello, John Turturro, Ossie Davis and Spike Lee.

Don't expect New Jack City gunfights or drive-by shootings, it isn't that kind of film, it's about real people and the irrational ways they react when forced to live in tight communities.

I first saw this film years ago but it hasn't dated at all.The core message is just as relevant to any British city now as it was to Brooklyn when it was made.

This Is As Good As Cinema Gets - Do the Right Thing review by griggs

First trip to Bed Stuy on my last visit to New York, and I couldn't stop thinking about Do the Right Thing the whole time I was there. Brownstones that were once tenements have mostly gone single-family now, and — oddly fitting given the film — there were way more cyclists around than you'd expect (RIP to Buggin Out's Jordans). Every so often, though, you'd spot the old crowd still holding court on a stoop. It clicked why Spike Lee needed exactly one block for this film. The characters are still there, you've just got to look harder.

Watching it after that walk hit differently. It kicks off with Rosie Perez throwing punches to a Public Enemy track over the opening credits, and that's basically the film's whole mission statement before a single scene's played out. The heat isn't just weather, it's a fuse. A slice of pizza, a block party, a radio cranked too loud — none of it looks dangerous until it suddenly is.

The bit that still floors me is the slur monologue sequence — each character turns straight to camera and lets rip, and it goes on just long enough that you start squirming in your seat, which is clearly the point. Samuel L. Jackson's radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy, is the one who finally shuts it down, and you exhale with him. Radio Raheem's LOVE/HATE knuckle-duster speech, lifted straight from Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, is the film in miniature. Then there's Ossie Davis as Da Mayor and his real-life wife Ruby Dee as Mother Sister, quietly holding the block together — the heart nobody talks about enough.

By the time Raheem dies, the whole thing's been building since that first shot of Perez dancing. People who mourn Sal's pizzeria have missed it — the tragedy is thinking politeness was ever going to paper over injustice. Lee doesn't give you a tidy ending. What you get instead is a mood that sticks, the same way Bed Stuy has stuck with me ever since. This is as good as cinema gets.

Timely movie - Do the Right Thing review by JG

This could have been written about race issues today, a re run of the killing of George floyd, shameful that we haven’t made more progress as a society. Powerful messages delivered in a powerful way, no holds barred, you can feel the heat and the tension coming off the movie, a must see