The L.A. Riot Spectacular

MOVIE DETAILS

Rating: 5.0 out of 10
Director: Marc Klasfeld
Writer: Marc Klasfeld
Star: Snoop Dogg, T.K. Carter, Charles S. Dutton
Genres: Comedy
Release Date: November 18, 2006 (Japan)

The L.A. Riot Spectacular

The movie starts on a day when nothing much happened in the city of angels, or anywhere else. Then somebody gets beat, somebody else tapes it and shows it to everybody. Things like that happen all over the world; The King beating was just one of the first ones caught on tape and released to the public.

To us it’s an outrage; to them its business as usual. Klasfeld illustrates this blasé attitude by having reporters bid for the tape like they were buying a car at auction. He characterizes beating up a suspect, any suspect, any ethnicity, as an accepted police rite of passage. Koon and Powell are even inducted into some sort of hall of fame.

What Klasfeld is really pointing out is that this press police lawyer politician opportunism always occurs directly after a social injustice has been committed. The public didn’t know who to hold accountable or how so they expressed their anger by looting stores and burning buildings down. It doesn’t make sense because its reactionary but then again neither do these events.

Comedy = Tragedy + Time

Klasfeld spent nearly a decade writing this film because he wanted to see if anything had really changed. This movie is funny but not “ha ha” funny like Crash was; it’s more “uh oh” funny because you don’t want to be laughing at an unflattering joke about yourself or your society.

Crash was a drama and L.A.R.S. is comic satire so maybe you won’t take this one as seriously as you should have taken that one? It’s that we think racism or riots are funny; humor just helps us deal with these ugly truths better than anything else does, possibly because nobody wants to be made fun of.

After the Crash

With Crash Haggis and Moresco showed us what racism looks like from both sides: Caucasian and ethnic-American (nice way of saying everybody else). This movie made everybody white person think twice about what they say to anyone who’s not and every non-white person think twice about what they say to anybody who is. The only thing it left out was the middle easterners but then again so did Crash. Were they too busy with their racism or were they just being racist?

If those examples in Crash didn’t reach you then maybe these ones will. Maybe the humor in this movie will allow you to drop your guard long enough to consider the issues and events behind it, not only as a Los Angeles microcosm but also on a national scale. Here’s a chance for us all to laugh at ourselves and grow up.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Remember Mel Gibson? He got drunk, ran at the cops and resisted arrest. It was just like Rodney King except instead of tasering him until he stopped moving law enforcement diffused him peaceably. Why didn’t they put the beatdown on Mad Max? After all he was drunk, disorderly, belligerent, abusive and tried to flee the scene.

According to optimists, different police agencies follow different procedures. On the other hand, cynics would say that treatment of individuals depended on their identity as suspects. The truth may be somewhere between the two.

All in all, only those who participated in these occurrences have first-hand information about what took place. Stressfulness characterized both scenarios; stress which could have affected how things were seen or determined. Despite this fact, I still think that law enforcers should adopt a deliberate and uniform approach towards tense field experiences. Consequently, it will remain impossible to answer the question “can’t we all just get along?” as long as there is prejudice among law enforcement agents however, this does not mean we should not continue thinking about it because problems do not solve themselves.

The L.A Riot Spectacular offers valuable insights into ongoing debates about race relations and deserves attention too.

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