Word: boyz
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John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood is another slice of fictionalized autobiography: a life story that could have been a death warrant. The boys in the neighborhood must wonder if they have any choice but dying poor from drugs or dying rich selling them. Lame as moviemaking craft, the picture is nonetheless a harrowing document true to the director's south-central Los Angeles milieu; he paints it black. Boyz N the Hood functions both as a condemnation of the world outside any big-city movie house and as an inspiration to those aspiring outsiders who would change history...
What remains of Jungle Fever is controversial enough. Some people have urged a boycott because, they allege, the film puts down black women. Lee is hardly unique among black directors (or, notoriously, black rap artists) in viewing woman as something between an enemy and an enigma. In Boyz N the Hood, most of the women are shown as doped-up, career-obsessed or irrelevant to the man's work of raising a son in an American war zone...
...this season, you'd need Marty McFly coming back from the future with, say, the Sept. 9 issue of Variety. So let's say The Rocketeer, Disney's no-star action fantasy, will ring the register. And Mike Nichols' Regarding Henry, with Harrison Ford as a lovelorn amnesiac. And Boyz N the Hood, a promising young director's first feature about gang bonding. And -- no, stop! This could take all summer...