Customer Reviews

Sucker Free City

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As someone who lived in San Francisco for ten years and spent time in the Mission, Chinatown, and Hunters Point, this movie is not only entertaining, it's also an extremely accurate portrayal of life in these particular neighborhoods.

If you're a San Franciscan, you've got to see it. If you're not from SF, but are curious about what's beyond the tourist brochures, this movie is it.

The only thing missing is documentation of the insanely corrupt political culture of the city, but hey, the film maker covered a lot of ground.

I'm sorry to say it, but as a "realistic" portrayal of life in San Francisco, Spike Lee's film falls totally flat.

Nobody in San Francisco dresses like that. Nobody in San Francisco talks like that. The characters all look and act like they grew up in Brooklyn (which I guess is not surprising, considering the source).

There are no white families of four living in Victorian mansions in the Mission District. Those houses all got carved up into flats decades ago, and they currently rent for about $900 a room. And I question Lee's decision to base the "white" portion of his story out of the Mission in the first place; the Mission has always been a Latino neighborhood. It's not yuppie or middle-class at all, either. There's been a lot of gentrification, to be sure, but by totally ignoring the Mission's true character, Lee wastes one of the best settings in the City.

As the story opens, our family of four is being evicted from their rented house. But what makes this family poor? Mom and dad seem well-kept, articulate, college educated. They seem to have every material possession they'd ever want. The son works in finance and so presumably went to college himself (but somehow never left home). The sister does -- something? So where did all the money go? Did they just look at their bank statement one morning and say, "Whoops"? Again, it's just not realistic, which detracts from Lee's premise.

Furthermore, if a middle class white family of four could no longer afford to rent a house in San Francisco, they wouldn't move to Hunter's Point -- a predominantly African-American neighborhood with the highest crime rate in the City, which even the opening credits describe as having one of the highest cancer rates in the nation. Apparently this family doesn't have any friends, because if they did, their friends would all tell them they're crazy. For a guy seemingly obsessed with race, it seems strange that Spike Lee can ignore the fact that this family would never make this decision. They would have picked up and moved to the East Bay or south to the Peninsula long ago, because they have those options. There are reasons why ghettos perpetuate and why people can't escape bad neighborhoods like Hunter's Point that have to do with a lot more than the price of real estate, and by ignoring this fact, Lee undermines his story.

And that brings us to the real problem with this "film": There is no story. As the pilot to a TV series, maybe there might have been some direction to take these characters, but there was never any series. So what we have is just a few ideas having to do with races clashing in a city Spike Lee knows little about, and it all ends in midair, roll credits. With stronger acting and a better script, it might have been more compelling. As it is, I think it's one for hardcore Spike Lee fans only.

This movie is great! Gritty underbelly sort of story. Typical Spike Lee "real life" story played by guys you believe. Not a happy ending kind of movie but well worth the watch!

I'll keep it short and sweet: This movie is a must see. I'm not really a Spike Lee fan but he really nails the social/racial conflicts that exist in America today, as the three main characters(a White, Black and an Asian guy) cross paths.

A must have for any dvd collection!

If you catch the DVD of Sucker Free City, it comes subtitled in English already, so if your first language is English, don't turn on the subtitles. If you catch the movie Sucker Free City on Showtime TV, you probably should turn on the subs.

Of the maybe five or six movies directed by Spike Lee I've watched, this is miles-away my fave; although, I have to admit this favoritism is partly due to the movie's main location being Hunters Point in 1974, and I've lived in and around the San Francisco Bay Area since 1963. And, it's partly due to the fact I could understand almost 100% of the movie's dialog. But, mainly it's due to the fact that this is a very very good movie.

I remember reading L.B.T.E.S. (Long Before the End Started - on 9/11) that countries with just two cultures (supposedly like the U.S., having white and African-American cultures) and countries with many cultures (supposedly like the U.S.S.R.) were intrinsically less stable than countries with an "in-between" numbers of cultures (supposedly like many if not most modern European nations). And I remember thinking how American whites have in fact completely destroyed the African component of black Americans' culture over the last 450 years, so America hasn't had the postulated two cultures over that period of time; and, however true the thesis about instability and multiple cultures may be, you can't use America as an example of an unstable two-culture country. America, basically, has always been a one-culture country.

Then after realizing that, I got to thinking about how the least assimilated post-Reagan African-Americans ("street" black people) had developed a language that was basically unintelligible to American whites, just as unintelligible as Spanish or any other non-English language, and I decided this development followed not unnaturally from the fact African culture has been effectively destroyed in America.

But this understanding made me no more receptive to the new language that post-Reagan, street African-Americans used, and the Spike Lee movies I saw prior to Sucker Free City all required more familiarity with the street African-American language than I'd had time to acquire. However, Sucker Free City is approximately one-third "white" and the DVD's subtitles are excellent, so at last I've been able to experience a Spike Lee movie almost completely like it should be experienced - with full comprehension.

To repeat: this is a very good movie.

To quote from Wikipedia's synopsis of Sucker Free City: "The film follows three young men as they are drawn into lives of crime. Nick {a white, Ben Crowley} uses his entry-level corporate job to commit credit card fraud and deals drugs on the side. K-Luv {Anthony Mackie} is a member of the "V-Dubs" ("Visitation Valley Mafia"), an African-American street gang. Lincoln {Ken Leung} is a rising figure in the Chinese Mafia. Gentrification forces Nick's family to move out of their home in the Mission District into Hunter's Point where they are harassed by the V-Dubs. K-Luv's side business of selling bootleg compact discs leads him to enlist Nick's help to bootleg CDs and to negotiate a truce with Lincoln. Lincoln conducts an affair with his boss' daughter Angela {T.V. Carpio}, a Stanford student engaged to a medical student classmate."

The DVD-movie is a shortening of a series planned for TV, and it really moves. Still and all, it holds together extremely well. The high-point of the threatened violence for me was a confrontation between the V-Dubs and the Chinese Mafia on a basketball court in Chinatown in San Francisco.

In this scene on a basketball court, Anthony Mackey explains the facts of life to Ken Leung, to wit, that any gang war fought between the Chinese Mafia and the V-Dubs will be fought in Chinatown, not in Hunters Point; or impliedly, H.P. is already a waste land, whereas Chinatown depends on tourists and "business as usual" and would be enormously adversely impacted by a gang war while H.P. would be essentially unaffected. Leung gets the point: compared to street African-Americans, Chinatown Chinese are, like, liquor-running, Italian-businessmen during Prohibition, if racism historically had confined them to small geographical areas within large American cities.

The high point of the movie's actual violence, for me, was the fatal confrontation between Ben Crowley and Darris Love in a public bathroom; although a previous, surprise execution of an African-American child was also extremely chilling.

Do see this movie. It's very good and it's available at Netflix. It does not disappoint.

Not too short and not too long. detailed and specific. it makes sense, informative, and entertaining.

Great movie about three guys, black, white and asian growing up in the streets of San Francisco and how their paths cross. This was supposed to be an ongoing series comparible to The Wire but Showtime dropped it. The story is therefore unresolved and leaves you waiting for the next episode. Hopefully someone at HBO reads this and they pick it up.

This movie tries to show the 'real' life of San Francisco's communities, white, black and Chinese and the 'gangs' within them. The idea here is to do a sort of 'Snatch' where three sub-plots are interwoven. However the great failing here is the terrible acting of the white and asian 'gangs'. It turns out that the only portion of the film that is portrayed in all its grit and tragedy is the black community. For some reason it is as if the director was out of touch with the white and asian communities, which was probably the case and couldnt write for those actors or direct them. Thus the movie get sby on being a 'Spike Lee Joint' but fails in two out of three story lines. Despite attempts to get away from stereotypes regarding the Chinese in fact the film reinforces them and the characters are bland. The only truly honest character in the film is the father of the white family whose liberal pacifist 'the bars on our windows offend our african-American neighbors and force them to break into our house' truly mirrors what takes place among a certain class of people in America. However it doesnt ring true that such a person would end up living in a 99% Black ghetto, just another unrealistic twist. Also unrealisitc is why the white protagonist is working at an investment bank and living with his family. His sister is described as a 'hippie' but isn't one. There are virtually no female characters portrayed in the film and the three that are only seem to fulfill the roles of being promiscous. There is only one line in the entire film devoted to a young black female actress.

Basicaly a film that only gets half way there. It supposedly portrays attempts at 'coexistence' and the trouble people have breaking out of their community and stereotypes but fails in many respects to depict reality. There is no racism portrayed among the Asian 'mafia' and yet this is obviously another terrible fallacy. At least the film depicts in brutal honesty the racism among Blacks towards whites entering 'their' community.

Also it leaves one wondering where the hispanic-latino community is in all this. Hispanics now make up 50% of California and there are many Latino gangs and yet they dont seem to have a role in this film apparently, again, because no one knew how to write their part into it. The only hispanic role in the film is of the police investigator, which is better than nothing one supposes.

Seth J. Frantzman