Spike Lee's vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school teacher, her stubborn jazz musician husband and their five kids living in Brooklyn in 1973.
An actor limited to stereotypical roles because of his ethnicity, dreams of making it big as a highly respected performer. As he makes his rounds, the film takes a satiric look at African American actors in Hollywood.
Director:
Robert Townsend
Stars:
Robert Townsend,
Craigus R. Johnson,
Helen Martin
A Chinese baby boy is adopted by a black couple in ATL. 17 years later he moves with his mom and bro to a black LA hood. A Chinese girl ends up in the same hood for the summer with a black family. Will they fit in?
As Carl Black gets the opportunity to move his family out of Chicago in hope of a better life, their arrival in Beverly Hills is timed with that city's annual purge, where all crime is legal for twelve hours.
On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone's hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence.
A middle-class boy from Atlanta finds his worldview changed as he spends the summer with his deeply religious grandfather in the housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Director:
Spike Lee
Stars:
Jules Brown,
Thomas Jefferson Byrd,
Toni Lysaith
Spike Lee's vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school teacher, her stubborn jazz musician husband and their five kids living in Brooklyn in 1973.
Having grown up in Queens in the 1970's, everything in this film hits home. I am sure anyone that grew up in any of the 5 boro's can appreciate it.
The music is what we listened to on AM radio, the TV shows, children's street games, sitting on the stoop steps, kids teasing their friends and neighbors are all something we did at that time.
The Carmichael kids in front of the TV singing along to the Partridge Family "I Woke up in Love this Morning", Walt Frazier being IT when it came to basketball. How many of us sat doing the same things? The kids fighting with each other are brother sister typical things.
But the film also shows the problems a family endures when financial strains hit. The father is a musician who wants to write and play classical music to audiences who can appreciate it. This becomes a burden when his wife is the one working as a teacher paying the bills. Domestic issues put a strain on their relationship as they get into who used to pay the bills and who's paying them now.
Mom getting the kids up in the middle of the night for not cleaning up, you can understand her frustration being the breadwinner, mom and everything else. When she complains later on that she is tired, you will have to watch the film to see why.
Sit back and enjoy a trip back in time when life was a lot simpler. Even Spike and his friend dabbling in glue sniffing isn't so bad compared to what is going on now.
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Having grown up in Queens in the 1970's, everything in this film hits home. I am sure anyone that grew up in any of the 5 boro's can appreciate it.
The music is what we listened to on AM radio, the TV shows, children's street games, sitting on the stoop steps, kids teasing their friends and neighbors are all something we did at that time.
The Carmichael kids in front of the TV singing along to the Partridge Family "I Woke up in Love this Morning", Walt Frazier being IT when it came to basketball. How many of us sat doing the same things? The kids fighting with each other are brother sister typical things.
But the film also shows the problems a family endures when financial strains hit. The father is a musician who wants to write and play classical music to audiences who can appreciate it. This becomes a burden when his wife is the one working as a teacher paying the bills. Domestic issues put a strain on their relationship as they get into who used to pay the bills and who's paying them now.
Mom getting the kids up in the middle of the night for not cleaning up, you can understand her frustration being the breadwinner, mom and everything else. When she complains later on that she is tired, you will have to watch the film to see why.
Sit back and enjoy a trip back in time when life was a lot simpler. Even Spike and his friend dabbling in glue sniffing isn't so bad compared to what is going on now.