BEFORE: Diversity week continues, and I almost didn't get to watch this one, as I had problems with another Academy screener - I tried it in both of my DVD players, and the disk could not be read - one DVD player gave me an error message that said the disc was dirty. I cleaned the disc with a tissue and then tried to blow off the resulting lint, but the disc still read as dirty, which doesn't make any sense since the screener was in a sealed package. Perhaps my DVD player is racist?
Then I had to debate what to do - the film's available on PPV for $5.99, but I just spent that much earlier in the week to watch "The Lego Movie 2", and I've got to stick to some kind of budget. Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, GooglePlay, they all want $5.99 - which seriously made me consider tabling this film for now, and rescheduling it for later, even though that could throw off my count for the year.
But I brought the DVD upstairs, and turned on my old computer, which has a DVD drive. The drive made a couple groaning sounds, but it did play the disc. But if I had skipped this one, the chain would have closed up around it (lots of appearances by Common this week).
Regina Hall carries over from "Girls Trip", and so does Common.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fruitvale Station" (Movie #2,989)
THE PLOT: Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Now, facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and stand up for what's right.
AFTER: I'm glad I stuck with it and figured out a way to watch the screener, because this did turn out to be a gripping and important-feeling film. Again, I'm personally very removed from the African-American experience - I think about the lyrics of the song "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits - "And we have just one world, but we live in different ones..." I struggled for a long time to make sense out of those words, how can you live in different worlds if there is only one? But over time I've come to more fully understand the poetic nature of this contradiction.
Starr Carter is a character who is aware of her ability to live in two worlds - there's her home life in the black neighborhood of Garden Heights, and there's the (mostly) white private school she attends, Williamson Prep. And she finds herself acting differently, depending on where she is. She's very careful not to use slang or "talk street" while she's at school, and she even finds it offensive if any of her white friends try to use current black slang, even if that's to show off how woke they are. And she's got a white boyfriend at school, but at a party, she finds herself attracted to Khalil, a black teen that she's known since she was a small child. Hey, why not have a boyfriend in each world?
Her home life is quite complicated, I had trouble just following who were the parents of which child - there's Starr's half-brother Seven, who lives with her parents, and his half-sister Kenya is also friends with Starr. (I get that Starr and Seven have the same mother, therefore Seven and Kenya must share the same father - wait, is that right? No, wait, Starr and Seven might have the same father, so Seven and Kenya must have the same mother - so who is Seven's father?) And then to make matters more complicated, Starr's father Maverick is also an ex-gang member and friends with King, the local drug lord, and King must be somebody's father, only I couldn't figure out whose - Kenya's, I guess. This age of blended families and baby mamas is often too much for me to handle.
Then it's one of those situations that we've seen over and over again in the news in the last few years - a routine traffic stop escalates when Khalil doesn't immediately comply, and then the policeman gets more and more confrontational, ordering him to step out of his car. The film takes a reasonably understandable tack here, by showing how police training is confrontational by nature, and at the same time, African-Americans understandably don't react well to being racially profiled, and are therefore less likely to comply with the officer's requests, which sound like unreasonable demands. (Starr's uncle, who is also a cop, explains later in the film that problems result from the way that officers have been trained to assess certain situations as dangerous, and that assessment alone affects the way the police address black people, and also tends to escalate the tension.)
Starr is in the car during the traffic stop, and her father had trained her to comply with police, to the point where she's got both hands flat on the dashboard as a matter of course. She even stops recording the situation with her phone when the officer requests it. But when Khalil doesn't keep his hands on the outside of the car, and casually reaches into the car for a hairbrush, the officer mistakes it for a gun, and the situation turns deadly. Starr is a witness to the shooting, and in the days that follow, puts herself in danger to testify to a grand jury, and is also interviewed on TV about the drug culture in the neighborhood that created the racially-fueled tensions in the first place. Her family is also at risk, because the local drug dealers don't appreciate being called out in a TV interview, and it just so happens that the personal connection between Starr's father and the gang enables them to quickly figure out who the key witness is.
If I've got any problem with the plot here, it's the fact that there are all these swirling motivations from all the different parties - the police, the King Lords, the protestors - and it's a bit hard to keep it all straight - Starr wants the TV news to focus on the actions of the cops, but then SHE'S the one who brings Khalil's background and the gang activity into the conversation, so who's the one who really needs to focus? And the gangs DON'T want her to testify against the cop? Why not? This wasn't really explained very well, I would imagine that the gangs wouldn't mind seeing action taken against a white cop for shooting a black teen, or were they just upset about their activity being mentioned on TV?
It all comes to a head during a "peaceful" protest after the grand jury fails to indict (not exactly a shocker, given what we've seen in the news) and riot cops are called in to disperse the crowd. By this point Starr has transitioned into an activist herself, we can see this because now she uses her phone to record police activity, and she WILL NOT stop recording, which is her right as a citizen. And the other activists convince her to put on the t-shirt and pick up the megaphone and start telling her truth.
But then there's gang activity during the protest, and again, I think this really muddied the waters. There's the police shooting incident and the protests it created, and then there's the gang activity in the neighborhood, and these two things are only related because the movie tells us that they are. My gut feeling is that the gangs would lie low during any night where the streets are filled with riot police who are dealing with the protestors, but maybe that's just me. Clearly somebody wanted to create a situation that represented a convergence with all the interested parties to create the maximum amount of drama, so the climax here, although filled with tension, also felt rather forced to me.
I'm going to consider it a NITPICK POINT that "Thug Life" is called an acronym here (based on a Tupac Shakur song, apparently) for the phrase "The Hate U Give Little Infants F's Everybody". I'm fairly sure that the phrase "thug life" has been around a lot longer than the acronym, so really, this should be referred to as a "backronym". That's when a phrase is created to fit the word, instead of true acronyms like "scuba" (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) and "laser" (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). We all know these acronyms BECAUSE of what they stand for, but nobody was going around saying "Hey, did you know that the hate you give little infants..." and anyway, that would spell "Thyg life", not "Thug life", we're stretching things if we allow the letter "U" to represent the word "You" in an acronym. But this sounds like one of Gary Busey's famous motivational "Busey-isms", like pointing out that "FEAR" is just "False Evidence Appearing Real", except that's not where the word "fear" really comes from. Or it's like when your boss wants to tell the whole sales TEAM that "Together, Everyone Achieves More". Give me a break.
Also starring Amandla Stenberg (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Russell Hornsby (last seen in "Fences"), K.J. Apa, Common (also carrying over from "Girls Trip"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Algee Smith, Lamar Johnson, Issa Rae, Sabrina Carpenter, TJ Wright, Dominique Fishback, Drew Starkey, Karan Kendrick, Joe Hardy Jr. (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Megan Lawless (last seen in "Table 19"), Tony Vaughn (last seen in "42"), Al Mitchell (last seen in "Tag").
RATING: 6 out of 10 gallons of milk
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