Review of Rosewood (1997) by Senthil M — 04 Jan 2008

Highly, highly under rated & HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

The movie recounts the Rosewood Massacre, a massively violent racial conflict that occured in early 1920s Florida.

The movie is really well done; it really got me angry at how stupid some people were back in the day. Notably, the film spends a great deal of time following the "philosophy" and actions of a Lynch mob and director John Singleton exposes much of the inherent hypocrisies and plain logical stupidity that lynching practitioners maintained.

How somebody back in the day could claim to be a "god fearing" Christain yet fully and willingly repeatedly engage and revel in violent racial actions such as lynching is something that makes absolutely no sense to me. I am not Christain, but last I heard Jesus never endorsed violence against innocents. Though sad and stupid, this hypocrisy has occurred in the past and this movie depicts it unflinchingly.

Movies like these run the risk of painting all the white characters as one-dimensional and evil racists; "Rosewood" wisely avoids this. Wise becauses the movie depicts the hypocrisy, ignorance and stupidity that is capable of manifesting in any human in general. It does not matter what color the chemicals in your skin take when it absorbs the suns radiation - the capability to be ignorant and stupid is a trait shared by every human on earth.

Jon Voight does an excellent job playing the compassionate store owner that does his best to protect the innocents of the town. Michael Rooker does a really good job playing the utterly incompetant but compassionate town sheriff who does his best to quell the racial violence of the lynch mob but cant simply because he really just sucks at his job.

The rest of the cast is really good to. Bruce McGill does an excellent job as the utterly asshole racist who leads the lynch mob. Don Cheadle and Ving Rhames are really good to.

This is John Singleton's best film, second best being a tie between "Boyz in the Hood" and "Higher Learning". How the director later went on to go make dogshit like "Shaft" and "Two Fast, Too Furious" is beyond me. I just wished that the music was better, since John William's score sucks and almost kill the energy of some scenes.

Some people claim that this movie made them hate white people - well those people are fucking idiots since then that means that they are also racist who missed the whole point of the fucking film. To those assholes I may have just offended - the word "racist" works both ways, dipshit.