User:Emjwatson/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Do the Right Thing

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the article on Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing because I wanted to practice evaluations using a topic that I had significant prior knowledge about, enabling me to approach it with a properly analytical eye. While I chose a movie so that I might intentionally narrow my scope of analysis, I chose Do the Right Thing because I knew there were controversies surrounding its creation and reception, so I figured there would still be ample opportunity to think critically about how the information in the article is being presented. While this film doesn’t particularly relate to War and the Environment, it does engage with questions of determinism, a course topic present in the past few weeks.

Evaluate the article
Overall, this article does a decent job providing a basic overview of a complicated movie. The writing is generally concise, though a few sentences in the summary could be tightened (e.g. “Twenty-five-year-old Mookie lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant with his sister Jade, has a toddler son named Hector with his girlfriend Tina, and works as a delivery man at a local pizzeria that has been owned and operated for 25 years by Sal, an Italian-American who lives in Bensonhurst.” - This information could be divided into multiple sentences). The summary also neglects to mention the opening credits music video-like sequence that features Rosie Perez dancing to Fight the Power.

There is an instance in which I believe the information is presented with a bias: In describing the confrontation between Pino and Mookie in the film’s summary, the article states: “Mookie confronts Pino about his contempt towards African-Americans, although Pino's favourite celebrities are Black.” This sentence appears to present Pino’s hatred of Black people and his admiration of Black celebrities as if they are truly comparable notions, showing a bias towards white supremacist thinking rather than presenting a neutral recollection of the film’s events.

The summary is also missing a key detail about the film's ending, which is that the image Smiley puts on the wall at the end is of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr.

In the “In popular culture” section, there is a point about “The Night of the Hunter” that lacks a citation. It could also be noted that Lin-Manuel Miranda cited Do the Right Thing as an inspiration in the creation of his 2008 musical In the Heights.

The controversies section is well-developed. Given Rosie Perez’ non-consensual nudity scene, I feel this article could benefit from a section on patriarchy and gender relations, in both the production and canon of the film.