Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Forest Whitaker (Voice)
Directed By:
Stacy Peralta
Street gangs are a very useful boogeyman for politicians and various public figures. Remember action movies before the Reagan years? Urban criminality was represented as soulless youth, interested in sex, violence and narcotics abuse only. That would be the Crips and the Bloods, in the mind of your friendly-neighborhood-white-picket-fence. Once a localized menace in Los Angeles, they have expanded and created a series of franchises over the years. Today, most big cities in north america have their red and blue rivalry or their wannabee equivalent. CRIPS AND BLOOD: MADE IN AMERICA is Stacy Peralta's attempt to understand how we have come to this. About how street gangs were first created and why it's almost an African-American phenomenon exclusively. While his intentions are very pure, Peralta's stance on street gangs is sometimes a little too respectful to be objective and despite starting with a bang, fades by the end and doesn't quite live up to its promises.
It's really disturbing in 2011, to see how we treated black people, less then fifty years ago. The Los Angeles ghetto of South Central has been created with the exodus of the black folk from the south. For the first generation, Los Angeles, where they could be together and work towards a better living, was a huge improvement from the life they had in the south. They were together and relatively happy, but they were segregated to a very specific neighborhood and heavily coerced by the police. When those exiled had kids, shit hit the fan. The younger generation didn't know anything but the Los Angeles ghetto and it became their own private hell, where they wanted to bust out from. Police became their nemeses and the aggressively racist law enforcement gradually became symbols of oppression. CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA ties gang culture as a child of the L.A riots in the sixties, highlighting the shortcomings of the civil rights movement.
Historically, it's a fascinating portrait and Stacy Peralta interviews some of the founding members of the first L.A gangs (back when they weren't concealing AK47s in their pants) and those guys can talk. They are well-spoken, smart and they have an output on what they lived and why young, black males have such pent up aggression towards society. The first thirty minutes of CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA is riveting. When the focus moves from the historical background to the Crips and the Blood themselves, it's the mood of the documentary as a whole that changes. Very little time is spent explaining what the gangs are and what they have done, it's more of an emotional investigation with gang members about life in the ghetto. Gang members are far wiser and more well-spoken than the ghoulish youth that Hollywood makes them out to be, but they're not the problem here. Stacy Peralta is. Instead of mixing up some footage about the historical landmarks of the gang war, he just interviews the kids. A lot. I don't doubt that every life of poverty has its particular hardships, but geeze, I get the point.
What's missing from CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA is focus. This feels like Stacy Peralta got bored with his own movie half-way through, so he edited together a bunch of footage as filler and released his movie. It's too bad, because the man has a gift for striking images, dynamite-strong editing and for exposing a point effectively. After viewing, I know a lot more about how the two gangs came to exist, but I know very little about the Crips and the Bloods still. I know that it's not a choice kids do, that they join their neighborhood gang to survive, first and foremost, but that's it. That's the only point CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA made during the last hour. Anyway, I still learned a lot from it and I think Stacy Peralta is an AMAZING director. Beautiful, hard and yet fades away and become substanceless after a while. Puzzling viewing that's still worth your time.
SCORE: 73%