Fly Away

Director : Spike Lee

Rating : *3/4

To start off,

SORRY, SPIKE LEE, BUT I DID NOT LIKE THIS MOVIE AT ALL.

Now, I'm not being a racist here. I'm not saying this because the black people had something against Koreans in the movie and because I'm Korean. Nuh-uh.

It was a good movie with a good motivation with a good message. HOWEVER...frankly, I cannot pinpoint to why I don't like this movie. It just bothered me throughout the entire--okay, maybe not the "entire" but majority--movie.

ESPECIALLY the scene where Mookie (Spike Lee) is massaging Tina with ice and it showed...yeah. that part. Man, I was eating my sandwich! It's not supposed to pop up like that for no apparent reason. Obviously you can see that I am not up for such graphic human-ography.

Anyway, to show the character personalities and cultural differences distictively, the characters in the movie had such unique, distictive names such as the main character Mookie, Smiley, Sal, Buggin' out, Radio raheem, and "mother sister." The background and foreground music also showed strong cultural characteristics. The Mayor also tells Mookie in the beginning to "stay black" and "always do the right thing." Oh, there's the title of the movie.

There's a reason why the Mayor, not mother sister, said "always do the right thing". We can see, at the end of the film, that Mayor is the only truly "good" one who was trying to promote peace and justice. Even mother sister shouts "burn it down" when people were burning and destroying Sal's pizzaria.

This movie is not just in favor of blacks. It shows that it's not just whites who ignore and look down and have prejudice against blacks; blacks also insist that they are superior over anyone (other than black) in "their" own neighborhood--i.e. Koreans. Blacks also have no respect for each other either: young black guy yelled at Mayor for whatever the reason.

This movie depicts on the cultural differences and conflicts and says "everyone's a racist." Spike Lee uses canted angle to show the distorted minds of people when they burn down Sal's pizzaria and when Radio raheem walks into Sal's pizzaria.

It also has ironic sides. Sal says "there is nothing like a family working together" but that principal is ruined and completely destroyed even before the actual pizzaria was burned and destroyed. Sal's sons have conflicts with each other as well as with Mookie.

Sadly, despite all these nice messges and all, I think it will stay as my least favorite movie from this class...