Word: hoods
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gangland wisdom came from a life of movie watching (he worked for five years in a video store). "I've seen what I've seen, and I've met the people I've met," he says flirtatiously. "I've been in weird situations. I'm not a hood, but I've seen fringe things here and there." And what he sees, he translates into sharp words, telling gestures, explosive images...
...Poor Black people see Black middle-class people as one, apathetic to who they are, and two, apathetic to what they are," he said. "Black folks who haven't been in the 'hood look at the people in the academy and say, 'You're not doing enough...
...They want to come to Harvard, Yale, Princeton so they can get out of the 'hood, not so they can make avenues that lead back into the 'hood," he said. "Do they owe anything to the hood or is it every person for himself...
With its forays into Manhattan's Washington Square Park for lessons in chess from a sympathetic father figure (here it's the always authoritative Samuel L. Jackson), the movie might aim to be a Searching for Bobby Fischer in the Hood. But Fresh is so much more: a really good film, for a start, made with a subtle precision that suggests a Vermeer landscape of the ninth circle of hell. Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry. A guarantee: the film's last shot -- just a boy's face, in ruins -- will break your heart...
...joke will apologize for itself by sprouting an ear of corn (Get it? Corny!). A character will pluck a vagrant "hair" from the film-projector lamp, or abruptly go monochrome because he passed a reading technicolor ends here. "Ain't we in the wrong picture?" asks Red Riding Hood of the wolf in Swing Shift Cinderella. By keying the insane pace, wild exaggeration, mock-cheerful tone and inside references that today define so much of movie and TV entertainment, Avery practically invented pop culture's Postmodernism...