2014 Muriel Awards: 25th Anniversary Award for the Best Film of 1989

Once again, our anniversary award voting yields a runaway winner. In fact, this category's champion actually got more points than its 1964 counterpart, believe it or not. Still, a wide-ranging batch of nominated movies. I never imagined our #4 would place so high, and I love that both Haroun Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War and Road House got multiple votes.

Third place:

The Killer [directed by John Woo] (112 points / 20 votes)

Second place:

Crimes and Misdemeanors [directed by Woody Allen] (140.5 points / 22 votes)

And the Muriel Award goes to...

Do the Right Thing [directed by Spike Lee] (277 points / 38 votes)

"'Nineteen eighty-NINE! The number — another summer / Sound of the Funky Drummer!'

"BAM — Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing exploded like a maximum-volume needle-drop into the lead-in groove of the summer of 1989, and 25 years later it's both unmistakably of its time (check those hi-top fade designs and Radio Raheem's mammoth ghetto blaster) and a timeless slice of pizza. Sal's Pizza, that is — the place that made the food that all the kids on the block grew up eating, run by proud Italian-American Sal Fragione (Danny Aiello) and sons, the naïve Vito (Richard Edson) and the hothead Pino (John Turturro). Meanwhile, their delivery boy Mookie (Spike Lee) is an amoral small-time capitalist who just wants to get paid and get laid.

"From the pugilistic choreography of Rosie Perez, set to Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' (see above), to the devastating mob scene at Sal's where tempers and temperatures boil over on the hottest day of the year, Do the Right Thing keeps one eye/ear on the past (James Brown's heavily sampled Funky Drummer, Sinatra's black-and-white blue eyes peering down from the wall, MLK and Malcolm X, Elvis and Love Daddy's African-American musical history roll call) and another on the present (Prince, Mike Tyson, Tawana Brawley). The future? Always a big unknown. But we can see from the vantage of 2015 (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner…) that certain tensions sure haven't abated much.

"The most amazing thing about Do the Right Thing is how exuberant it is, from the soundtrack (mixing reggae, Afro-Cuban jazz, a cappella, hip-hop, go-go, slow jams and Bill Lee's melancholy mainstream jazz) to Ernest Dickerson's zippy, Looney Tunes camerawork and Wynn Morris's brightly Afro-centric Bed-Stuy paint jobs. I always forget where it's going — that punch in the gut that leaves you stunned — because it's so much FUN getting there.

"The energy and the edge, comes from Lee's incendiary dialectical dynamics, with attitudes and resentments and stereotypes and misconceptions bouncing off one another all up and down the block. Back in 1989, some who weren't paying attention thought the title was saying that Mookie 'did the right thing' when he threw the trash can through the window, because 1) Spike Lee played the character, and 2) Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) tells him earlier in the movie to 'always do the right thing.' As if it's so easy to tell what that is.

"Do the Right Thing doesn't preach (no Danny Aiello music video pun intended), it jabs and teases and provokes. In so doing it undermines the kind of complacency encouraged by 2014's soporific Selma — an ineptly made movie that presents an Oprah-fied (infantilized) vision of history, fumbles its key dramatic scenes by reducing them to clichés, trivializes the contributions of MLK's collaborators in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and irresponsibly neglects to connect the struggle for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the dismantling of that very law by the Supreme Court in 2013 and Congress thereafter.

"Fight the powers that be." ~ Jim Emerson

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