Word: sal
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...takes place on one very hot day at Sal's Famous Pizzaria in Bedford Stuyvesant, a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn where the general undercurrent of class and race resentment is kept under pressure by the heat until it explodes in violence...
...starts calmly enough, as if the people on Lee's Stuyvesant Avenue are the cheerful graduating class of Sesame Street. Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) spreads inebriated wisdom, Uncle Remus-style. Sal (Danny Aiello), the Italian American who runs the corner pizzeria, brags that the locals "grew up on my food." His delivery boy, Mookie (Lee), doles out advice while dodging duties to his girlfriend and their child. Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) keeps the block pulsing to the rap song, Fight the Power, that bleats from his boom box. By day's end, though, the neighborhood has erupted. Sal and Raheem...
...proclaiming TAWANA ((Brawley)) TOLD THE TRUTH -- but no coherent clues. Lee cagily provides a litmus test for racial attitudes in 1989, but he does so by destroying the integrity of his characters, black and white. They vault from sympathetic to venomous in the wink of a whim. One minute, Sal delivers a moony monologue about how much he loves his black neighbors; the next, he is wielding a baseball bat, bound to crack skulls. One minute, Mookie urges caution; the next, he trashes the one store the brothers can call home...
...morning after igniting the riot, Mookie slinks back to demand that Sal pay him his week's wages. Behind the camera, Lee wants the same thing: to create a riot of opinion, then blame viewers for not getting the message he hasn't bothered to articulate. Though the strategy may lure moviegoers this long hot summer, it is ultimately false and pernicious. Faced with it, even Mister Senor Love Daddy might say, "Take a hike, Spike...
...then, might Bush blow it? One reason is personality. Decisive though the Vice President has appeared since the Republican Convention, Bush backers fear a relapse into the reedy-voiced, diffident aristocrat who thoroughly turned off Californians not long ago. Says Sal Russo, a Sacramento-based Republican consultant: "This state is not hospitable to a patrician candidate, and it's a potential problem having two blue bloods on the ticket." Adds a prominent Republican in the Central Valley: "The preppie image doesn't sell very well around here. Unfortunately, the reason Bush has a preppie image is that...