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Do the Right Thing (1989)
Critics warned it would start riots. It was nominated for a screenplay Oscar and lost Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy.

:STATS
[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 120 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | Spike Lee
[icon:CHART] Budget | $6 million
[icon:TRENDING_UP] Box office | $37.3 million worldwide
[icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Ernest Dickerson

:INFO
A Neighbourhood As A Pressure Vessel
Lee confines the film to a single block in Bedford Stuyvesant over about twenty four hours of a heatwave, and lets the temperature do the structural work. Ernest Dickerson shot through warm filters and lit interiors with orange, the wardrobe is built from primary colours, and the camera tilts into Dutch angles as the day goes on. For most of its length it is a comedy about a street: a pizzeria run by an Italian family with a Black clientele, a radio station, three men under an umbrella, a man with a boombox. The argument that detonates it is about a wall of photographs. Lee refuses to make anyone simply right, gives Sal genuine affection for the neighbourhood, and then stages a death that makes the question of who was reasonable beside the point.

:JOURNEY
Watching Do the Right Thing
3 Announced
2 Warming
3 Questioned
4 Escalating
4 Organised
5 Detonated

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Da Mayor · Do the Right Thing · 1989]
Always do the right thing.

:CHECKLIST
What to watch for
[ ] The temperature tracked in every scene by sweat, fans and water
[ ] Dutch angles arriving gradually as the day gets hotter
[ ] Two closing quotations, from King and from Malcolm X, left unreconciled
[ ] Radio Raheem's love and hate monologue lifted from The Night of the Hunter
[ ] Sal written with real warmth so the ending cannot be filed as simple

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Several prominent critics predicted the film would provoke violence among Black audiences. It did not, and Lee spent the next decade being asked about the prediction rather than the film.

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The Cannes jury under Wim Wenders gave the Palme d'Or to sex, lies, and videotape. Lee said afterwards he had made a bat with Wenders's name on it.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097216/
Do the Right Thing on IMDb: full cast and crew