When I watch movies, I usually feel like an outsider. I’m not the girl shooting spells from a wand, or the girl sneaking out the window to go to a party, or the girl trying to find romance in the big city. Instead, I’m the bored girl sitting in front of the TV screen to pass some time away. When I saw “Mad Hot Ballroom”, I didn’t feel this way at all. Instead, I felt like an insider. I saw my city in the movie and I got excited. I saw the schools and they reminded me of my old elementary school. I saw the streets and even though I didn’t know what streets they were, they were undeniably the streets of New York. Seeing all this in one movie made me feel happy and childlike again.
By contrast, “Do the Right Thing” left me feeling enraged. I ended this movie as a furious girl who really wanted to punch something. The sad thing is, the racism in the movie didn’t even surprise me that much. It saddened me and angered me, but it didn’t surprise me. When the policeman killed Radio Raheem for example, I wondered if Spike Lee had gazed into a crystal ball and seen all the different times that the police would brutally overreact and kill black males. This violence is what made watching this movie such a different, more difficult experience for me from watching “Mad Hot Ballroom”.
“Mad Hot Ballroom” made me fall in love with the kids preparing for the ballroom dance competition. As I followed these kids on their journey to the finals, I saw their lives in New York City. I saw them walking past vendors in the street, hanging out at the park, and walking to school. This all seemed so familiar to me; it took me back to my elementary school days when I would walk to the library with my neighbors and siblings, chatting incessantly. The cheerful, merry music that accompanied these scenes added to my enjoyment of the movie.
When “Do the Right Thing” began, I was irritated by the loud, headache-inducing music. “How much longer will this continue?” I thought when the music went on for several minutes. The music finally stopped and the movie began, but rather than ending my irritation, my irritation only grew as I continued to watch the film.
The film showed a hot, oppressing day playing out in the Bronx. As I watched this film, I grew increasingly upset with how awful some of the characters were. Everyone seemed to have a stereotype of a person of another race and ethnicity and to me, it seemed that everyone was just making things harder for themselves. For example, when the man with the fancy car was driving through the street, the kids playing with the fire hydrant hosed his car, even though he had yelled at them not to. This man could have asked A LOT nicer, but I don’t think he deserved to get his car hosed. In the end, the kids only reinforced the racist attitude this man had about blacks, and what good is that? The only thing such actions could accomplish is increased tensions between people.
This view of New York was more serious and more foreign to me than “Mad Hot Ballroom”. Even though I felt that I recognized the Bronx neighborhood, where there is the pizzeria and the grocery store everyone goes to, I didn’t recognize the racist actions of people. I couldn’t make connections, as I could with “Mad Hot Ballroom”.
It’s interesting because both movies explore ethnicities and races so differently. “Do the Right Thing” shows how people in a neighborhood- the Koreans, blacks, whites, and Hispanics, grow increasingly frustrated with one another. They all have problems with each other, such as Buggin Out freaking out about the fact that Sal did not have any pictures of black people on his wall. “Mad Hot Ballroom” shows how ballroom dancing changed the behavior of minority kids who were underprivileged and may not ever have had the chance to get dance lessons. As one of the teachers mentions, the Hispanic kids also came from low-income families and did not always have the opportunity to be around their parents all the time. This could have led them down bad roads, if it were not for the ballroom dancing. It was inspiring to see how far the kids came in the competition and made me want to become a teacher just so I could change people’s lives that way.
