santiagocosme
Black kids in their neighborhood, having absolutely no purpose in life except for hanging out and getting in all sorts of trouble. The movie isn't necessarily bad even though it feels a little cliché. But you don't get too many surprises. Shootings to starts proceedings, more deaths and fights in the middle, and as you can imagine, a few killings at the end. Menace to society doesn't manage to be a great movie because it does not bring anything in addition to flicks likes boys in the hood, or movies of the sort. It is interesting that I saw "Menace to Society" a few days before "Notorious". It certainly helped to build things up and to feel more connected to the theme of the movie: the lives of teenagers that suffer the social inequalities of the country they live in. But apart from the good intention of the director, the movie fails to be anything memorable.
zetes
I have seen the other really famous movie about gangs in South Central L.A., Boyz n the Hood, a few times before, but I had never given this one a chance. One reason is that I always found Boyz a tad corny. Menace II Society has a few corny moments, too, but, in general, it's a lot better than Boyz. The film follows Tyrin Turner as a young man who is being drawn further and further into gang life, especially by his best friend Larenz Tate, a true psychopath who thinks nothing of murder. Jada Pinkett (before she married Will Smith) plays a responsible woman who tries to save Turner by taking him to Atlanta with her to start a new life. The violence in this picture is truly shocking - just absolutely nasty and brutal. I was surprised by just how powerful this one was. Tate and Pinkett are the stand-outs in the cast. Samuel L. Jackson has a small role, as does Charles S. Dutton.
tieman64
"We are being asked to take even larger doses of a medicine that has proved to be deadly and to undertake commitments that do not solve the problem, but only temporarily postpone the foretold death of our economy." - Hieronymos II (head of Greece's Orthodox Church) "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." - Martin Luther King, Jr "Austerity is difficult, absolutely, but it's necessary, for rich and poor alike, black and white." - Frank Campbell"The more things change, the more they stay the same." - Jean Baptiste Karr Albert and Allen Hughes direct "Dead Presidents" and "Menace 2 Society". Both films purport to be "serious" examinations of the trials and tribulations of post-Vietnam African Americans, but in reality function more as giant exploitation films. The influence here is Scorsese's "Goodfellas", which the young Hughes brothers – the perfect age to be seduced by Scorsese's pyrotechnics - attempt to mimic blow for blow. And like Scorsese's film, though absent of his considerable style, the Hughes' work here is thin, melodramatic and sensationalistic, with deaths, screams, headshots, bombast, snorting, swearing and fury schematically rolled out to shock, bludgeon and titillate rather than edify. An entire resurgence in African American film-making would be corrupted in the early 1990s with such films."This is how it really was," the brothers would claim in interviews, positing their early films as a response to John Singleton's (underrated) "Boyz n the Hood". Their films, the brothers claimed, portrayed the reality behind Singleton's supposedly "rosy" portrayal of the African American experience. But time has been unkind to their pictures. And as the baseline for what constitutes "realism" constantly moves, today "Dead Presidents" and "Menace to Society", once touted as being a form of "black neorealism" or "black naturalism", seem hilariously overcooked and gratuitous. And as with all these films, there is little understanding of why our cast of African Americans do what they do, behave how they behave or examination of the power structures and psycho-socio-economic forces at work. (Both films essentially boil down to blacks killing for money; but "economics" is itself the cause of "the problem", stretching all the way from Vietnam to the Slave Trade to the Roman Empire) Still, there are good moments scattered about. "Menace to Society" opens with its best scene, an impromptu robbery/massacre in which a couple of black kids shockingly gun down the Asian shop-workers who insulted them. If disrespect is the root of all violence, we see that here, the larger marginalization of, or systemic disrespect toward, African Americans breeding both feelings of unworthiness and its opposite, a kind of manic need to protect, sometimes violently, brutalized egos. Black culture may have been mocked in the 90s for its "bling", its hysterical materialism, but this, as well as the numerous riots which rocketed across the US in the early 90s, was an understandable "response" to both widespread feelings of neglect and a culture with conflates wealth and worth. One should not have to prove one's humanity, one's worthiness, and when one is constantly forced to do so, pressure builds and one sometimes snaps. What's pertinent about "Menace's" "snaps" is that the victim's of such black aggression are always minorities or other blacks. Meanwhile, white faces are absent from the picture. Society functions in a similar way, Power deflecting hate away from itself – "down" the "social hierarchy" - and onto others. Unfortunately the rest of the picture degenerates into gratuitous gore and violence.Better than "Menace" is "Dead Presidents", which opens in 1968 and attempts to charter the lives of three friends (played by Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and Freddy Rodriguez) from the Bronx. They fight in Vietnam, are abandoned by the state, struggle to make a living, battle addiction and are then drawn to a life of crime.Like "Menance", "Presidents" at time shows traces of political savvy – one of the guards killed during the robbery is himself a Vietnam vet - but sensationalism, cynically employed shocks and thriller set pieces eventually undermine claims to earnestness. Blame Scorsese for this. Singleton's "Boyz n the Hood" was released before "Goodfellas" and so is stylistically somewhat different from most "African American" films of the period.5/10 – Worth one viewing.
bob the moo
I can't remember the details but there was a period where, in the wake of Reservoir Dogs, Menace II Society was prevented from getting a certificate in the UK and was essentially banned amid a storm of hand-wringing and worry over violence in films. It was the mid-90's where I finally got to see the film on a really bad VHS with the tracking all over the place – but since then I don't think I had watched it till this weekend. It is quite hard to believe that the film was once subject to controversy; not only is it reasonably tame compared to modern standards, but it is also pretty "realistic" and doesn't fetishize or glamorize the violence (as opposed to the modern torture porn genre for example). It is additionally confusing when one looks back onto a film that is about as morally-sound and positive as you could hope – pretty much to a fault actually.The plot sees Caine getting drawn into violence and ultimately we all know where this is heading from the start because the film is from a certain period and a certain genre. Watching it again it is disappointing that so much of the film seems clichéd and rather obvious in terms of the dialogue, but maybe this is because it has been done so often since, it is hard to say in retrospect, but for sure the film does feel very "obvious" across the telling. This doesn't make it a bad film though – just perhaps a little clumsier than I would have liked. The delivery is still impacting though and the film does well to create a sense of characters with no future but death or jail; there are moments of relaxing and family, moments of joking around and moments of violence – the film does well to make them all just seem like part of life here. Yes the plot goes where you expect but it is still hard to watch and hard to stomach.The cast are better than the names would suggest. In particular Turner does better than I expected – he cannot make the overly earnest narration work, but he does deliver a good character. Tate has things simpler and is only OK; I found him a bit too slick to be the character he was playing. The support cast features some faces (Jackson, Duke, Smith and a few rappers of note) but generally the cast are unknown and pretty natural – it is only when they have to deliver some clunky lines that they struggle ("man enough to take a live but not to raise one" being an example).Menace II Society stuck in my mind because of the controversy surrounding it in the UK, but watching it now it just seems tame and fairly "normal". Part of this is the film convincing the viewer of this world but it is also down to the fact that the film is actually quite morally simple and obvious. It does still have an impact and it is a culturally important film, but for sure it has its flaws and there are better films from the period tackling the same issues but better.
