Menace II Society Is A Landmark Film

This is a landmark film. Unless you were there, no once can know how controverial this film was upon release, especially in the scene (taken from life) where the gang is sitting around watching the surveillance tape of Odog killing the convenience store clerk. With all we've been through over the ensuing 20 years this film has, unfortunately, stopped being controversial and ended up being prophetic. The only thing that has really changed is that we, as a society, have been desensitized to this kind of violence, poverty, addiction and hopelessness. And it's not that what Menace II Society depicts was not there, it was, it's just that the Hughes Brothers and others were the first to hustle it up to be able to make a small film that chronicled what was going in the neighborhoods that white people never went to except by accident or to buy drugs.

But not to just to mention the shocking nature of the film, it's great filmmaking. It's brilliant. It's edgy. It's raw. It's timelessly Shakespearean in the character of Caine, "to be or not to be." It is another classic that should be in the national registry. It grips you from first moment to last; it is quite simply one of the most influential films of it's generation on par with the kind of work Scorecese did in Mean Streets and that's not hyperbole. I hate to compare this film to others, and Boys In the Hood and other films of that time forward are compelling, none captures the rawness of America's Inner City in the fearless way Menace does. In my opinion it is the The Thin Red Line to Saving Private Ryan, when one compares it to Boys In The Hood.

The Hughes Brothers never topped this film, but as it stands, for me, as far as first films go it is on par with Citizen Kane. Menace 2 Society is that raw, that compelling, that great.