Do the Right Thing - 25th Anniversary

          This "Spike Lee Joint" depicts racial tensions in Brooklyn during a heat wave. Perhaps inspired by the hot summer of '77 that Lee spent documenting on Super 8mm, we follow different characters in the neighborhood as they go about their day. Besides having written, produced, and directed the film, Lee starred in it as Mookie, a black pizza delivery guy working for a family of Italians. The Italians are the only white people in the neighborhood, but they get along with everybody else - for a time. Tension arises when Giancarlo Esposito's character, called Buggin' Out, starts complaining that there are not any black people on the wall of fame in the pizzeria. Another character on the block is called Da Mayor, for he is an elderly man who has overseen the happenings of the neighborhood for years.
          Of course, it is interesting to follow around Lee's wild assortment of characters, but perhaps the best aspect of the movie is the use of color to show the boiling tensions. The weather is hot to match the metaphorical heat rising in the neighborhood, so it only makes sense for hot colors to be used. One whole wall in the neighborhood is painted the brightest red you will ever see on bricks. Less blatantly, a nice yellow light disperses through the window in an apartment in the very beginning of the movie. Yellow is the least severe of the three colors of heat, so it shows how normal and settle everything was in the morning that day that everything went wrong.
          Twenty five years later, this film still carries itself. It is taught in film schools, including in the color temperature lesson on filmmakeriq.com (there more discussion about the cinematography and coloring can be found), which puts Ernest Dickerson's cinematography against that of Roger Deakins in Fargo. The title is always amusing, too, particularly after seeing the climax. Did the inhabitants in the neighborhood really "do the right thing," or did they just add more fuel to the fire?