Word: gangly
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...BOTTOM LINE: Children gun one another down for fancied slights to a gang's code of honor...
SUBTRACT DRUGS FROM THE bloody San Diego gang scene that reporter Bob Sipchen describes -- go ahead, wave a wand -- and the festering urban mess still would stink of hopelessness. Sipchen, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, uses an African proverb for an epigraph: "It takes a whole village to raise a child." If there is no village of strong adults, only warring teenage street gangs controlling a few blocks of city turf, then the gangs may do the child rearing. Kevin Glass was 10, a clever, skinny black kid already moving from mischief to larceny, when he began...
Kevin became Baby Insane, and a Crip. As such, his totem color was blue, and his mortal enemies, who wore red, were Bloods, and in particular a nearby Bloods subset called the Skyline Pirus. (Black Crips and Bloods gangs, now nationwide, got their start in Los Angeles in the early '70s.) The bonding ritual was a subadolescent mumbo jumbo of slogans and hand signs, like those used by adult fraternal groups. Car theft, drug selling and smash-and-grab robbery (smash a storefront with a car, wait for the glass to settle, and grab the goods) were agreeable moneymakers...
Danger is frequently part of the urban equation, and this assignment was no exception. To do his job, Suau had to bring thousands of dollars' worth of camera equipment into the most destitute sections of the cities he visited. "Sometimes you almost needed your own gang for protection," he says. In Zaire mourners in a funeral procession threw stones at the car in which Suau and his guide were riding. On one of the major drug-sale corners in the South Bronx, people in the buildings above heaved eggs and rotten food at Suau and the cortege of Guardian Angels...
...PAIR OF WHITE ARKANSAS FIREMEN (Bill Paxton and William Sadler) accidentally come upon a treasure map. Its X marks a spot in a creepy, abandoned factory. As they root in the floorboards for gold, a gang of black drug dealers, whose leaders are played by rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube, turn up to use the place for a murder. Race, greed and venality on all sides soon lead to deadly conflict. There's something bracing about the utter amorality of TRESPASS. Director Walter Hill has something like a genius for staging and editing action in jolting bursts. The movie...