Do the Right Thing - Out-dated?
 

I watched this fantastic film last night and started to notice that the film seemed dated. I found it to be a fine film with universal themes but not timeless. The one scene where Mookie is talking to Turturro's character about who is fav actor, athlete, and musician is seemed so dated with Turturro's replies. And the lines about Jesse Jackson made me scratch my head. Anyway, I still enjoyed the film.

Yeah, it's dated.

And you know what, despite the lack of a world war and such, Casablanca's still good.

:D

From the thread title, I assumed you meant that "Do the Right Thing" was no longer relevant this day and age. My bad. Wait, do people still say that?

Dated? Not at all.

*puts in DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince Tape*

[tunes]Dum do do do do dum dum, nightmare on my street.[/tunes]

Aweeee, yea.

Perhaps the pop-cultural details are dated, but the themes are as relevant as ever, IMO. And the film is good enough to stand the test of time.

I watched this again just a few months ago, and "dated" never crossed my mind. Contemporary references may somewhat lock the movie in a specific time frame, but that is not "dated" - if that was the case, every WWII movie, every historical epic, etc. etc. would have to be considered "dated".

Spike Lee still hates white people. Doesnt seem all that dated to me.

Warriors is dated.

Yeah, I can't believe Spike Lee didn't have to forsight to go forward in time and have his characters make references to the celebrities and events of our time. Hack.

Even as a cracker, I find DTRT to be an incredibly even-handed movie. Always have.

Any movie that mentions a then-big name singer or actor will seem dated fifteen years later. I believe Springsteen and Eddie Murphy were mentioned specifically in DTRT. Bruce is still playing, and Eddie can still be someone's favorite actor...as long as they like crappy, watered-down, family flicks.

Roger Clemens is still pitching...

Charlie Goose is right. At least Spike chose actors and musicians who were so famous that 15 years (and probably 50 years) later people still know who Springsteen, Eddie Murphy, and Prince are/were.

What's particularly "dated" are the clothes. It's like a time capsule of a time when urban kids wore more dayglow than a womens' aeobic dance class.

Italian-American and Korean stereotypes are still going strong last I checked.

It can be interpreted that way. Unfortunatley if you watch the special features on the Criterion dvd you'll see that Spike never intended the movie to be even handed. Listening to him try to justify the destruction of Sal's place made me laugh.

Yeah, he's such a rascist director, he would never cast white people to star in his films. People like Ed Norton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Anna Paquin, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox.

But then maybe you know something they don't.

I'll second Spike Lee as a racist. As RyoHazuki said, take a look at the supplements on the CC disc. He isn’t racist against whites, he racist in favor of blacks. He frequently makes statements that suggest blacks deserve preferential treatment to make up for every bad thing that’s been done to them.

True racial harmony is when no one goes out of their way to do anything negative or positive for a person because of their race.

I love DTRT, but I've always felt that Spike Lee blundered into genius on that film and he hasn't done anything to equal or even come close to it since (Not to mention several films that were downright dreadful, just painfully bad, inexcusably bad...like Girl 6, He Got Game, and Get On The Bus). He doesn't strike me as a particularly bright guy with very much to say. He talks slower than a 90 year old man with Parkinson’s, and he stutters and stammers to get the ideas out of his mouth. Appropriately enough his films have the same difficulty: They can't clearly communicate an idea. Watch He Got Game to see a director desperately strugle to say something about the plight of incarcerated black men in America and the absentee patriarchal families they leave behind, and then come up totally short and really say nothing at all.

I think with DTRT he actually didn’t make the movie he set out to make. The movie he set out to make would have been awful. But somehow along the way during production something magic happened and it became a film that works magic. If he’d been able to make lightening strike again I wouldn’t say this, but in my opinion he just hasn’t

Fight the power.

Still spike lee's best film.

And there are no black stereotypes in the movie either, I guess.

No angry black guys who find racism in everything, and no guys walking around with a big tape player. And Mookie wasn't a stereotype, either.

The stereotypes in DTRT were one of the intnetional themes of the film.

Yeah, I found it somewhat troubling to follow his logic. He wants us to cheer for Buggin' Out or Mook after they destroy the shop, but I can't because Sal his just such a sympathetic character. It's Spike's own fault, he writes Sal has doing many things he doesn't have to, paying Da Mayor to sweep, not firing Mook for doing a pretty lousy job, and even holding the store open for the same group that would eventually destroy his shop!

Truely Sal is not the 1 dimensional character Lee wanted him to appear to be. Yes, he doesn't want pictures of blacks or rap music in his parlor, but is that any reason to destroy it!?

Interesting. Am i the only one who saw Mookie's garbage can throw as an act of saving Sal and his sons? That's what I thought when I was watching it last night. Although I'm sure it can preceived in other ways.

White Boy #1: "Hey dawg, shorty thinks he's Asian and shit."

White Boy #2: "That cracker is white! Can't he see that, yo!"

And on the other hand, who gives a crap?

Regardless of his "intent" (which is at the bottom of any critic's artistic concerns), Lee's film remains racist and insultingly simple-minded in its treatments of Italian-Americans and Koreans in particular.

I don't think that Spike Lee meant the destruction of Sal's was justified, so much as it was understandable. It always seemed to me that the movie was about how racism effects all of us. It wasn't Sal's fault the police murdered Radio Raheem, but he still bore the brunt of people's anger. Anger that may have been misplaced, but was still justifed anger.

That is what i thought as well when watching it. It just seemed like Mookie's character showed an almost reluctance and resignation to having to "do the right thing" and throw the can. I really do think the act of destroying the shop was an act of saving Sal's life.

Then again i really like Spike Lee's work so i could be a little biased. Bamboozled has been my most watched one so far - moves me to tears at several points.