friday (1995)

 STIMULATE YOUR MIND, MAN: IT'S FRIDAY.

awesome. amazing performances; visceral, even kubrick-like. the very few self-reflexive moments of connecting the disconnected character's gaze directly into the camera lens is a nice pseudo-shakespearean touch. the sound design is rich and vivid, giving the subconscious impression of a community in flux around a static porch. the rhythm is based, like most (but made explicit in the introductory voice-over), on the foundation of a normative ("For most people, Friday is just a day before the weekend...") and its variation  ("But after this Friday, the neighborhood will never be the same..."), creating a perfectly succinct, unified, classical-dramatic narrative experience that even the most refined of elizabethan sonneteers struggle to maintain ("But more I cry, less grace she doth impart..."). the element i found most immediately intriguing, and which stuck with me after the principle viewing, was the character of Deebo, of Big Worm, and the tone of the drive-by shooting (even the faux drive-by anticipated some sequences before). Deebo is like a ghost... in a narrative who's world-view and tone is one dominantly optimistic and bordering the obviously comedic, yet staged in an environment of ambiguous social and ethical problems, the elements of this repressed Violence do not disappear. instead of being weaved into the fabric of the film, causing a shift in tone and ultimately forcing the film to become something altogether different [for example, Menace II Society (1993)], — this repression is concentrated and manifested into a form, and reveals itself as a spectre of the Real. this is what makes the fight, and Deebo's defeat, at the end so satisfying: the fragmented archetypal psyche of the collective (each character being a fragment of a whole consciousness) is able to subdue and even become victorious (albeit fictionally and momentarily) over daily uncontrollable social forces.