"They want us to kill ourselves."
1984. Ten-year-old Tre Styles lives with his single mother (Angela Bassett) n
Los Angeles. She can't handle his shit and sends him to live with his
father, Jason "Furious" Styles (Laurence Fishburne) n the hood. Some STAND BY ME
shit happens and suddenly it's 1991 and 17-year-old Tre is now 23-year-old Cuba
Gooding Jr. who looks like he's 30 and hasn't slept n 4 days. He also has
a shirt with two random dots on it. N order to show off his shirt, he goes to a
neighborhood BBQ party where we're introduced to the important characters n the
film. Namely, half-brothers Darren 'Doughboy' Baker (Ice Cube) and Ricky Baker
(Morris Chestnut). Doughboy and Ricky might be brothers, but they
are very different. Ricky is a football start who hopes to get a football
scholarship while Doughboy is a drug dealing gang member.
What can I say about BOYZ N THE HOOD that hasn't already been said a
billion times by people who actually get paid to write about such things?
Probably nothing. It's definitely a product of it's time and dated as fook, but
it's still a great film and historically important. It's also unfair to
carelessly lump BOYZ N THE HOOD nto the "
hood film" genre thinking that it's nothing but endless drive-bys and people randomly yelling
"motherfucker", because BNTH is more of coming-of-age than anything
else. It just happens to take place n the hood.
Good pace, hit or miss acting, less violence than some might expect, Duck Hunt, awesome early 1990's Los Angeles scenery, uneven
direction (that kinda adds to the film n a weird way), dude getting hit with a garbage can, so many loose ends n the
script that is seems like the movie is more a fable than an actual story,
multiple now iconic scenes and characters, actors that all (distractingly) look
5 years older than their characters (example: 22-year-old high school footballer
applying for college), badass dated fashions, vintage cars, a Freddy Krueger
reference, director cameo (Mailman), an Eazy-E dis, dated slang that I still use, male dominate story, interesting soundtrack that features everything from 2 Live Crew to The Five Stairsteps.
BOYZ N THE HOOD is mandatory viewing for anybody interesting n American Cinema or just good films n general, but for me personally the single greatest thing about BNTH isn't anything to do with the film itself, but instead its obvious influence on one of
my absolute favorite films of all time: the 91-minute cut of 1995's FRIDAY. [I'll save my 200,000 word love letter to FRIDAY for my review of the film.] Watch them back-to-back and you'll see what I'm talking about. Hell...Cube's even wearing the same exact clothes n the opening scene of FRIDAY that he was wearing n the last scene of BOYZ N THE HOOD! Half-dead motherfucker. Come on, sister!
If you need me, I'll be outside raking leaves n a yard with no trees.
[Fun fact: I remember going to Wal-Mart after this film came out (and before I
saw it) and being confused as to why so many people were walking around with
baby pacifiers n their mouths.]
