Word: strike
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...streak endured the strike and baseball will too. Seeing the Iron Bird reach and pass the Iron Horse's record of 2,130 games played was as much a testimony to the dedication of a talented ball-player as it was a tribute to the sport that he played...
...confrontations between these people--among them, an angry mom and a tough housing cop--and Strike's clockers (so called because pushers work around the clock) are some of the film's most potent and haunting scenes. Indeed, it's almost as if the director has taken his cue from them instead of the other way around. For there is a force and focus in Lee's work, an absence of intellectual posturing and a willingness to let his material speak for itself that he has not achieved before...
...Strike (Mekhi Phifer) works long hours, enjoys the unswerving loyalty of his admiring employees and conducts his small, prospering business with ruthless efficiency. Aside from a persistent, insoluble public relations problem--certain elements in the community despise him--he is a model of the entrepreneurial spirit that we like to believe made America great, and at 19 he has the ulcer to prove it. Strike is a crack dealer monopolizing the trade in a Brooklyn, New York, housing project...
Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) is a homicide detective whose cynicism energizes rather than wearies him. He'll match his street smarts against any neighborhood punk's, and he's convinced that Strike must have murdered a rival drug dealer. The only other logical suspect is the kid's older brother Victor (Isaiah Washington), but that makes no sense; the man is working two jobs to support a wife and two kids, trying to engineer a respectable rise in the world...
They are wonderfully well-matched antagonists, Strike and Rocco. The former is wary, sullen and perhaps more ambivalent about his work than he dares to admit. The latter is bustling, voluble and perhaps more sympathetic toward Strike--with everyone trying to survive in this milieu--than he cares to admit. Clockers is careful not to overexplain these figures. Director Spike Lee, who shares screenplay credit with novelist Richard Price, lets Phifer (in his first film role) and Keitel (in his umpty-umpth) find the characters, which they do with unimprovable unpredictability...