1/25/2024 0 Comments Rico paid in fullIn many ways, this paternal erasure is appropriate, or at least telling. They don’t give their audiences enough credit to watch a film about people struggling with poverty and addiction and making poor choices, so they litter their screenplays with on the nose morality espousing monologues from their Pookies and their Errols. But those films are too close to their subject matter. gangbanger classics, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society by the great John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers. I’m thinking specifically of Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City, Spike Lee’s Clockers and the L.A. There are plenty produced by the outburst of social message films from the early 90s. This isn’t to say there’s only one film about selling crack or smoking it. But throughout its run as the inner city drug of choice in the mid-80s, into the ’90s, we never got the great film the crack epidemic warranted. It’s often quite accurately referred to as a dream.Įvery major recreational drug in this country has its foundational articles of cinema. It’s a beautiful thing, this myth of ours. Our hero must identify the hypocrisies in a system built in opposition to their desire to succeed, to ask for more from their lot in life, and at least for a time, to achieve their goals armed with resourcefulness, cunning, bravery and the people around them. Often the quest requires a crime, as history and its laws are written by the winners, looking to hold on to what they stole. ![]() The myth has been retold many times for many groups of people, but the beats are all more or less the same: An American senses an inherent unfairness in a system or institution, and armed with an idea, a code, and a family, embarks on a quest to right the wrong, to make his or her way in this strange country we’ve all found ourselves in. What follows is a story that this nation has told itself since we broke with the English over a tax dispute. The first line in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 epic The Godfather, is delivered by an undertaker named Amerigo who says, “I believe in America”. If Abe Beame was a rapper, he swears to god he’d talk his shit. ![]() Please support the hip-hop internet’s hardest working collective of hustlin’-ass writers by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon.
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