Boys In The Hood

It actually took me until a couple of months ago to see the movie Boys In The Hood. I had seen the spoof of it, Don’t Be A Menace, before I saw the actual movie it was majority based off of. The movie had a lot of recognizable actors that I didn’t know were in the movie such as Morris Chestnut, Cuba Gooding Jr., Nia Long, Regina King, Ice Cube, Laurence Fishburne, and Angela Bassett with director John Singleton. I’ve seen a lot of positive black movies with Morris Chestnut that I think had a lot to do with his role in the movie. Ice Cube made a successful transition from the music industry as a rapper/ gangster into film as a respected actor. Angela Bassett became a highly respected actress in her own right.
The reference to the similarities in Boys In the Hood and Cooley High is actually interesting. I haven’t seen Cooley High in a while but it does have the same characters, the typical athlete and boy that comes out of the hood. I appreciate the plot of the story and how Chestnut’s character was struggling to get out of the hood and get into college. When he was shot and killed I think a lot of the audience watching identified with the character. Some people cried and others became enraged at the fact that he was killed when he deserved to leave the hood the most. The delivery of the movie was such a powerful one from all of the actors. As a spectator you could feel the pain Cuba Gooding Jr. went through and you wanted to get up and punch a wall as well. It made you upset that the protagonist couldn’t reach his goal of making it to college. As a underlying goal of the movie it was the goal that couldn’t be reached and maybe that was the point of the film. I enjoyed the blog because it depicted each character and the message in ways that I wouldn’t have noticed by myself.