Clockers

Felt like a documentary without the interviews. Spike Lee is a masterful director/writer that adds gritty great subject matter! I've seen all of The Wire which felt similar to this which is cool & the drama in this was done so well; excellent intense 90's at it's finest.

When Spike Lee applies his formidable talents to a genre piece like Richard Price's best selling drug noir novel, "Clockers," you might wonder what kind of hybrid you'll get. Lee is justly famous for his incendiary agitprop films of ideas which dissect race relations and urban living, sometimes at the expense of cohesive storytelling; but working with source material as thought provoking a novel as "Clockers," which is set in Lee's home base of "Crooklyn," er, i mean Brooklyn, Spike finds the right mix of action, angst, and intellectualism for his strengths to shine. "Clockers" are petty drug dealers who work around the clock pushing their wares. When one turns up dead and a stand up citizen steps up to take the fall, a homicide detective begins unraveling the complex dynamics of life and dealing in the 'hood. Lee gets his usual gritty street landscape to work with and Price gets a director with a cinematic eye (thanks to standard Lee lens-er, Malik Hassan Sayeed)and a playwright's heart. Central character brothers Isaiah Washington and Mekhi Phifer (in his star making role) turn in complex credible performances but are easily outshone by the astonishingly strong acting out of Harvey Keitel, Delroy Lindo, Regina Taylor (who won awards for her work here), Keith David, and Lee regulars John Turturro and Thomas Byrd. Lindo is particularly impressive. This film may have been too gritty for general audiences with its brutal depiction of urban violence and emotional brutality. And it may have been a bit too stylized for the Saturday night drive-in set wanting a brainless shoot 'em up; but for those interested in quality film making on a hugely important issue that also functions as an engaging who done it, Spike Lee does it up royal in this, perhaps Lee's most, accessible film.

This is a decent enough drama although the talents of an impressive set of actors is under used in my opinion. The story could've been tighter too. The denouement is a letdown. The worst part of the movie is the atrocious use of music that neither fits the scene and often takes away from the dialogue. Amateur hour for that.

In 1995 I considered Spike Lee's gritty CLOCKERS one of the year's best films; recently I spotted its video in a clearance bin and picked it up. Upon re-viewing, I am struck again by its complexity. It is the first urban drama to depict inner-city race relations with the intricacy such a pervasive cultural issue demands. On the surface it resembles a whodunit, but its main concern is how drugs and violence contaminate entire communities, dramatized in the collapse of one African-American youth's life. (He chokes up blood the way some of us sweat.) This process is observed by a predominantly white police force that makes hollow attempts to keep order, and refuses to intervene with the community's gradual decline.

Instead of characters with overt prejudices and plain racial allegiances-characters that are sterile symbols of bigotry rather than credible humans guilty of it-Lee gives us characters of casual racism. Most representative of this is Harvey Keitel's Rocco Klein, a white detective who cannot understand the culture surrounding him, which is a culture of narcotics, violence, and black-on-black crime. On his beat, drugs are less a problem than a lifestyle, murder resolves the tiniest of disagreements, and young mothers valiantly but vainly battle the influence young dealers have on their sons. Klein views the inner-city with contempt, but deep down he knows all the whores and dealers are human beings, too.

Klein is introduced at the scene of a homicide, where the police handle the gruesome death with a clinical sense of detachment, cracking bad jokes and asking the bloodied corpse questions. Is it just a job, or is it racism? For Klein, it's both: he needs the gallows humor to psychologically deal with this culture of depravity. What's fascinating about CLOCKERS is Lee's willingness-and guts-to present Klein, despite his prejudice, as the film's hero. Lee understands that casual racism is simply endemic and inescapable in American culture. What he appreciates is Klein's ability to transcend his own prejudice and finally do the right thing.

It angers me how overlooked this film is.

It is not an easy film. It is bleak and at times very off-putting. Actually, if you are a thinking, caring person, this is movie is overall heart-breaking.

But it is brilliant and, for the person who truly tries to understand it, a compelling, insightful look at the problems killing black America today. The only reason for the film's lack of recognition I can imagine is that its subject matter had been examined a number of times before. But the inescapable fact is that this one of the best examinations of the subject matter there has been on screen - on par with "Boyz N The Hood".

And it is FAR from uncreative. In fact, on one level, it is not a "hood" movie, but a whodunit. The mystery aspect of the plot is very interesting. But there are other, more important layers. It is the story of the confusion and crisis of a young man's life. Most importantly, it is a brutal look at drugs, guns, and life in the projects. It is a movie asking why so many young black men are dying in the streets.

The lead character Strike has a stomach problem. It might be an ulcer or something like that. I believe it is a metaphor. Just as heat represented racial tension in Lee's masterpiece "Do The Right Thing", Strike's sickness represents the illnesses plaguing the ghetto: drugs, guns, liquor.

Like DTRT, this film looks at community. The mothers, the cops, the young people, the kids, the men trying to make a living - there is eloquent commentary in "Clockers" on the situations of all. In Spike's movies, paying a little attention is rewarding. A good essay could be written on what I call the Spike Summarization technique. This is when Spike compresses a serious debate or concern in the black community into a few expressive moments of action or dialogue. There are better examples in other movies, but it manifests in "Clockers" a few times. A bunch of kids are sitting in front of Rodney's (Delroy Lindo) shop; one of the kids is rapping while the others pay attention. The two sides to the coin: we feel the artistry and skill of the moment, the continuation of a rich tradition of oral art; we're also struck by the cruelty and coldness in the kid's violent lyrics, and we think about where that comes from.

Stylistically, this movie is a huge success. The cinematography is amazing, and I wonder what must be wrong with my tastes when I'm floored by a film like this and find visually bland a more oft-praised classic. The projects become blinding panoramas, landscapes which add tons of meaning to the poignant ending (I won't reveal it here). The sound is great; many films of this nature use hip hop in the soundtrack to produce certain effects, but "Clockers" does it in a more methodical way which jars some people, but contributes to the film's meaning.

I could say more about the film, but I encourage you to just see it, along with the rest of Spike's oeuvre. He's not a perfect filmmaker, and some of his best films are marred by elements that don't work, but I feel his consistency in terms of delivering brilliance is not below most of the cinema's most celebrated auteurs.