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fame as Doughboy, a role specifically written for him. Released shortly after the Rodney King incident, Singleton’s powerful social commentary unfolds within a complex, realistic portrayal of family, community and coming-of-age featuring the exceptional talents of Laurence Fishburne and a cast of (then) newcomers including Cuba Gooding Jr., Regina King, Angela Bassett, and Ice Cube of N.W.A. Singleton became the first African American to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award (as well as a nomination in the Best Writing category). Screening at the prestigious Un Certain Regard category in Cannes, it not only enjoyed enormous critical success, but was also one of the most profitable films that year and remains a film with a lasting and singular impact on Hollywood and the nation. But more importantly, their self-containedness (characters and lives are not seen merely as relative to white people) allows the underlying message of their need to take responsibility for themselves to be perceived as able to offer a solution.John Singleton’s extraordinary film debut-at the age of twenty-three-was based on the director’s own experience of growing up in South Central Los Angeles. Singleton's portrait of local residents as exactly what you'd find in any other part of town, just less wealthy, affords a dignity and air of normality to black life. The scenes are a horribly damning indictment of the situation, but the film as whole goes further. When tension finally spills over into the inevitable pointless murder, attention is focussed not on the act but (rarely bothered with in comparable films) on the immediate effect on the family of the bloody death of a 17-year-old boy.
Ice cube boyz n the hood tv#
A girl's concentration on her homework is repeatedly broken by gun fire helicopter searchlights illuminate living rooms as families watch TV and unfamiliar cars prompt panic on porches. It's once you know the area's vibrant cross-section of personalities, attitudes and ambitions - very few of them gang affiliated - that the increasingly obvious background takes on genuinely shocking proportions.
Ice cube boyz n the hood series#
This well-worn coming of age theme is given no special treatment (the kids' extraeneous worries involve parents, girls, cars and having fun), and the series of minutely detailed everyday incidents opens participants' lives to the point at which you feel part of them. And the story, such as it is, observes their lives in two chunks, at age six and, mainly, 11 years later.
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The "Hood" (neighbourhood) is the gang-law killing fields of South Central LA. The "Boyz" are three kids looking for very different things as they pass out of their teens: university doing nothing yet not returning to jail and a career on the football field. The film not only lives up to its "Increase The Peace" subtitle but by refusing to overtly moralise puts its concerns across with astonishing impact. Happily such assumptions are without substance. Arriving to pre-publicity involving riots, looting sprees and a body count, it's easy to suppose Boyz N The Hood's appeal lies in an easily-accessed glamourisation of violence.