i guess this movie was supposed to be pretty fresh and revealing at the time of its release, but maybe i’ve just seen one too many films about the “ghetto” by now. what i did like about menace ii society was the fact that it didn’t try to espouse a discernable moral or lesson to the story. the hughes brothers bring the audience to where caine lives, lets them experience the ambivalence many feel towards what’s right and wrong, and whether or not you can be right by doing the wrong thing.

i watched this movie mostly because my professor for my american history class recommended it to me. we live in this society where we’re led to believe that everyone is equal now and that we don’t have to worry about the past enslavement of african americans (and, to a smaller degree, african canadians), but there are millions of people suffering from its repercussions centuries later. we can see this in the difficulty of getting good education, the cyclic life of the ghetto, the constant racism faced by youth… it hasn’t stopped for many people, and we keep deluding ourselves to believe that everyone has an equal chance to prosper in his or her lifetime. bill clinton believed that in order to stop racism, everyone should “make a black friend”; not everything has such a pat solution.

well, i’m going off on a tangent here. menace ii society was a good film, but it didn’t provide much insight into the characters. i couldn’t sympathize with them as much as i wanted to. what drives movies like these isn’t the setting or the plot; they are driven by powerfully portrayed characters, which was lacking in this particular one.