Boyz n the Hood (1991)
Directed by John Singleton
Three friends growing up in South Central Los Angeles navigate a neighborhood plagued by violence, unemployment, and crime, each responding differently to the harsh realities of street life. As tragedy strikes close to home, their friendship, choices, and hopes for a better future are put to the ultimate test.
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Meanwhile, Singleton paints the individual characters of the neighborhood with the same attention to detail that Spike Lee used in “ Do the Right Thing .”
The impossibility of Tre's choice at the end of Boyz, whether to help avenge his closest comrade or to honor his family and his own beckoning future by recusing himself, strikes equally at our heads and our hearts, positing an ethical dilemma that is all the more gruesome for its very rootedness in everything Boyz has recounted and reflected up to that point (as opposed to abstracting a moral paradox and erecting a thin, beatific scaffolding of Movie around it, as in Sophie's Choice or The Green Mile ).
Singleton emphasizes both the colorblind commonalities and the color-specific differences in his opening flashback, an obvious quote from the white, rural memoir "Stand by Me." Like the kids in that Rob Reiner film, a gang of curious 10-year-old playmates sets out to see a body -- only this will be the first of many forgotten corpses, an omen of things to come.