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A Masterpiece!

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Strike (Mekhi Phifer) is a street pusher or clocker working for drug-lord Rodney Little (Delroy Lindo). He drinks chocolate Moo and suffers from an ulcer. Rodney tells him that fast food worker Darryl Adams is dealing from behind the counter and needs to be taken care of by him. He has trouble doing it and tries to get his brother Victor Dunham (Isaiah Washington) to do it by telling him that Darryl beats his girlfriend. Then Darryl turns up dead. Homicide detectives Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) and Larry Mazilli (John Turturro) investigate. Victor confesses to killing in self defense. Rocco doesn't buy it but Larry would rather close the case.The movie is pretty good with great actors doing good work. Spike Lee is doing a drug movie but he is doing it his way. There is an unrealism to it. His cameos only add to it. This is more of a crime murder mystery than a gritty drug movie. The Spike Lee style, the dialog, and even Strike constant need for chocolate milk seems design to make this somewhat surreal. It is the main reason that this is pretty good rather than really good. It's not really surrealistic but it's also not gritty enough to be the scary real drug movie.

Good crime-drama, and even better social commentary. The crime aspect to the movie was very interesting. Even though you think you know what happened, nothing is revealed until the end, and there's a few surprises.However, it is the social side which is most impactful. It is a Spike Lee movie, so you expect an examination of race relations, and Lee does not disappoint. The dead-endedness of housing projects, the almost-inevitable turning to crime, the exploitation by the drug kingpins, the indifference (to a degree) by the (white) police. Yet, in spite of the bleakness that Lee paints, there is hope. It's not all doom-and-gloom.

An adaptation of Richard Price's novel of the same name, Spike Lee's "Clockers" opens with a series of gory crime-scene photographs. The intention is to shock and disturb, but Lee's photos are subject to incessant zoom-ins and close-ups of bullet wounds, all of which are distractingly manipulative. A better director would have let these photographs – which were all staged – speak for themselves. Lee, though, likes excess.Still, "Clockers" nevertheless finds Lee doing some of his best work. The cinematic equivalent of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" blasting from a loudspeaker in Opposite Land, the film stars Mekhi Phifer as Strike, a Brooklyn drug dealer who's having the worse damn week of his life. As the film progresses, Strike will find himself hounded by the police, his family, other families and various high and low-level drug dealers. Epitomizing the effect of outside forces on Strike is a painful stomach ulcer which worsens as Lee's film progresses. Eventually Strike begins to bleed from the mouth and is forced to drink only magnesium hydroxide "milk".Unsurprisingly, Lee sympathises dearly with Strike. His film, like its introductory photographs, is preoccupied with the physical and psychic effect of violence on black bodies. Strike is himself repeatedly hounded, symbolically raped (once by cops, once by a black gangster called Rodney), is battered by protective mothers, stomped on by housing cops and kicked-in by other street urchins until his ulcer bursts. For Lee, Strike is a criminal who is more sinned against than is sinning.Though a foul-mouthed, violent film, Lee's aesthetic exudes a certain warmth. He's in love with urban life, with Brooklyn brownstones, and his tone is often sentimental, warm and sepia-tinted, with homey interiors and loving shots of promenades and train sets. The film doesn't trivialise gang-life and the crack epidemic, but it shies away from harsher realities in favour for something more broad and melancholic. Strike is Lee's cocaine Christ, trapped in a seemingly inescapable whipping circle. The film ends with Strike on a train, curled up like an infant and hoping for rebirth.Since the release of HBO's "The Wire", most crime films have been rendered obsolete. "The Wire", the brainchild of David Simon, had an expansive, novelistic quality, and carefully juggled neo-realism with literary/theatrical attributes. "Clockers", in contrast, sports much unconvincing dialogue, and the photogenic Mekhi Phifer is at times out of his depth. The film was written by Richard Prince, who would work with Simon on "The Wire". Simon himself cites Prince's early novels as an influence on his own work. These criss-crossing influences make Lee's "Clockers" simultaneously ahead of its time and behind ours.7.9/10 – Worth two viewings. See "Freedomland".

In this complicated tale of the pressures on Mekhi Phifer in the Brooklyn projects, director Spike Lee captures the values and the iconography of the African-American community well, as he usually does. You get a genuine sense of the simmering anger, the shifting allegiances, and the small reward system of the social world these pathetic people live in.Pfifer is the central figure and he sweats a lot. No brighter or better than he should be, he's pressured from one side into dealing cocaine by local mogul Delroy Lindo. On the other side, he's pushed by the manipulative but well-intentioned detectives Harvey Keitel and Stanley Turturro. Pfifer's handsome and upright brother is under arrest for murder but Keitel believes that Pfifer is the culprit. Pfifer's brother is simply too good, too compliant, to have done the deed.Nice ambiguity. Lee convincingly nails the diversity and solidarity of the community. It's like John Ford in the ghetto. Pfifer may be innocent of the crime of which Keitel is convinced he's guilty but he also deals dope. Keitel, for all his ploying the system, is determined to bring the guilty party to justice, though he may play a little dirty in getting the job done. And when he finds out that he's been wrong about who committed the murder, he does what such a person would do in real life. He hides his guilt behind a tirade of threats.In a way, it's an improvement over Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing." It doesn't turn all the cops into heavies. And it doesn't end with an ominous quote from Malcolm X.The weakness of the film lies in Lee's allowing conversations to go on for too long. Pfifer gets a lot of screen time and when he's not chewing out his young brother (who will save his life) he's whining about his innocence. The exchanges, sometimes rising to shouts, go on too long and become tiring.It's a devalued life these people lead. They wear clothes and they groom themselves in ways that appeal only to those in their immediate and limited social worlds. I'm beginning to develop an idea. The more you resemble someone who is upper class and British, the more your social worth. The farther removed you are from this model, the lower your status. If you could take Pfifer, dress him in riding clothes and teach him to play polo, and have him say "eck-tually" instead of "aks," and have him grow some hair on his shaved and shiny skull, he might not be thought guilty of anything except being too polite.