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 favorite films: the 91-minute cut of 1995's FRIDAY. 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 right 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.]
