Crips and Bloods: Made in America
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Actor: Forest Whitaker, Gerard Horne, Jim Brown, Todd Boyd, Tom HaydenBrand: New Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-05-19
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: NEW VIDEO GROUP
Product features:
- Acclaimed director Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys) helms this powerful history of two of America s deadliest gangs, offering insight into the ongoing tragedy of South Central, as well as hope for its future. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES Rating: NR Age: 767685154694 UPC: 767685154694 Manufacturer No: NNVG154691
DVD Reviews of Crips and Bloods: Made in America
DVD Review: Inadaquate, but Still of Some Interest
Summary: 3 Stars
This is an interesting movie, but I don't think it effectively addresses the history of the two gangs it professes to be about.
The first 30 minutes are a pretty interesting history of the African American community in L.A. that originally gave rise to the Crips and Bloods, how that community is basically a creation of the industrialization during WW II which drew so many rural families - of all racial backgrounds - to urban areas, where they were able to enter the lower middle class. In L.A., as in most places around the country, people were segregated by race and ethnicity. In L.A. this was accomplished by real estate developers by covenants that prohibited racial intermingling, rather than by formal Jim Crowe legislation by the state itself. Black families who were coming out of the far more pernicious formal legal systems of segregation prevalent throughout the South initially found L.A. to be somewhat liberating.
But as the first wave of post-war de-industrialization hit the country in the late fifties and early sixties, most of the decent paying industrial jobs dried up. This led to fragmentation of families, as men were put out of work. Social pathologies blossomed. Wealthier black families fled the ghetto, and the film says L.A. PD engaged in an ongoing campaign of harassment and profiling, especially when people left their segregated neighborhoods. The children growing up in this environment were very often left without fathers who very often abandoned their families, had mothers who were effectively absent due to work, and had no economic future since there were too few good jobs.
The film makes a lot of hay over the social upheavals and radicalization of the 60's and 70's, casting the Black Panthers and such as positive models of political action that somehow - the film doesn't really explain why or how - failed. There is a montage of all the leaders who where killed, Huey Newton and Malcom X, Martin Luther King.
Here the film makes a stark transition. We leave the well done, but rather stock history of racism and political radicalization, and immediately plunge into a world of anomie and utter amoral disorder. There is very little explanation or detail here, the film simply has a few older residents, men who had lived through the era and involved in the early formation of the gangs describe it. They had been forbidden to join the Boy Scouts, they were harassed when they left their neighborhoods. They formed groups for mutual support based on which playground or street they lived on. In the beginning, they would call each other out for fistfights.. The name of the Crips we are told comes from "baby cribs.." All very Jan and Dean, sunglasses and pompadours, apparently almost innocent. At some point in the 70's though, people started bringing guns and knives, and they started killing each other.
Things unraveled, and they started bearing grudges that have now become generational. In the early 80's crack cocaine enters the picture, and the communities of South Central L.A. are devastated even further. The neighborhoods are segregated by the gangs, it's no longer harassment by the police that is of primary concern. The gangs put up even more effective barriers: Enter the wrong neighborhood wearing the wrong color, and you risked being gunned down in the street.. People carry military grade weapons about, and they use them.
All very sad. The thing about this film is that it really doesn't cast much new light on any of it.
As I say, the first third of the movie isn't about the gangs at all. On one level it provides needed context, in that the economic history and racial tensions and discrimination are clearly part of the history, and worth pondering.
The later two-thirds is more or less a pastiche of interviews, but one that lacks narrative arc or cohesion. Individuals give their impressions, personal anecdotes and opinions, but a coherent narrative arc - a detailed time line and list significant individuals - is lacking.
I think the problem may be that the "real" story of what happened is far too sensitive and depressing for any of us to really take. There are too many "politically correct" (on all sides) oxes that would need to be gored, and nobody would walk away clean.
The white racism on the part of the developers and L.A. PD we can talk about - especially since most of the really egregious stuff happened decades ago. And the film does. But there are many things I think have been left substantially undiscussed here. Such as the decisions made by policy makers on all levels of government that have exacerbated the problems of the people living in Compton.. Those policies are sanitized. There is little rhetoric - and certainly very little raw, racially charged rhetoric - surrounding them. There's a lot of talk about "three strikes" and "zero tolerance," and occasionally we have these collective bits of theater we put on, where the subtexts are clear but rarely explicitly stated, and never by people at the top: Rodney King, O.J. Simpson..
Questions about national drug policy, abortion policy, prison policy, how and to what degree the Federal government has been involved in the drug trade.. Even (even especially) national trade and industrial policies that have resulted in industry and employment vanishing from our cities..
There are, to my mind, many question marks like these. And this film does not touch on any of them. Again, I guess for good reason. As soon as you do, you risk being attacked for "conspiracy theorizing," "sensationalism.." There are referees who control what is in bounds..
Then, there are is the complicity of the African American community in the misery. There are a slew of very depressing statistics that the film gives us: 70% of black children are born to single mothers. One in four black men will be incarcerated at some point in their lives. A large percentage of black children drop out of school. So on, so forth.
While it is true that the history of slavery, white segregation and ongoing racism is a obviously a major contributing aspect to all of this, it is also true that the buck stops with the African American community itself.
And this, apart from the larger policy issues that I've mentioned that the film doesn't really delve into at all, is this film's greatest flaw. It professes to be about the Bloods and the Crips, but it somehow skirts the nub of the reality. What about the de-facto matriarchal nature of most African American communities? Why are the men so often abdicating or absent? That seems to be the main question, and this film doesn't really address it. Why and how did crack become such a problem? Again, no real attempt to analyze that problem.
These last few days I've watched a series of films about gangs and organized crime - the Sicilian Mafia, MS 13, the Aryan Brotherhood, etc. - all of the other films I've seen were much more focused on describing the individuals, formal structure, specific acts and criminal activities of the organizations. This film gives a decent historical context for the inception of the Bloods and Crips in the 70's, but then hardly deals with the later details - the actual rise and history of the gangs - at all.
So, in summary, this film boils down to a history of South Central L.A. through the Civil Rights movement, and then a series of interviews with a dozen or so gang members past and present, some commentary by academics and others, but really no meaty details about the gangs at all. It is basically a puff piece on black activism in the 60's and 70's, then a piece of diffuse anti-gang propaganda, but without any real analysis or detail. Good, but not excellent, worth your time if you are interested in the subject, but not deeply informative, in other words.
Description of Crips and Bloods: Made in America
Studio: New Video Group Release Date: 05/26/2009Bestsellers in DVD
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