journal features

movie review - Boyz N The Hood

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2022.12.19

I watched this seminal flick from the '90s with The Boy, today. I was a bit surprised to see it on Netflix, but leapt at the chance to share the thing with him. It's about a group of friends who grow up together in a Black neighborhood that's in decline due to the prevalence of drugs. Only one of the lads escapes the worsening violence more-or-less unscathed (physically, anyway) as petty squabbles between teenage punks turn into gangland drive-by shootings. It's a tense little number with a superb cast and a spare story that drives home the sense of growing chaos and despair.

I noticed one small thing that I believe was a difference from the first time I saw it. It was just one line but when Ricky asks Tre what he's scared of when it comes to sex, I recalled that he originally said "AIDS" but in this version he says "pregnancy", which I thought was a better fit for the entire story. Ricky is, despite still being a high school student, already a married father. It was a different experience, seeing this again with my fifteen-year-old son, who already has a girlfriend.

This movie is now more than thirty years old. Seeing how much of North America now lives in the shadow of drug-fueled chaos, I can't help but wonder where we'd be if things had turned around at that point. I tend to believe the theory that this was originally done to the Black populace as a means of control, something that Tre's father touches on in the film. That anyone could do something like this to their own people isn't that hard to imagine, but one does have to wonder how racist policy can get to think that it wouldn't spread laterally through the rest of the population. It's sickening.

Recommended. It's an older code, but it checks out.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton