"I steal, I don't keel"

I don't actually watch 'popular' movies that often, regardless of what ethnicities they portray, but I have been revisiting a lot of older popular films for the purposes of this class. One of the most compelling and problematic (a lovely combination for any critic or theoretician) that I recently caught was...yes...Friday. It had been a while since I had seen it, and my memories of it (I'm guessing I'm not alone here) was that it is firmly ensconced in the categories of weed comedy, hip-hop comedy and slapstick comedy. Watching it again didn't remove any of those designations from it from my mental catalogue (although its not actually TOO heavy on the slapstick, despite some parts) but it is a little more complex film than I think it gets credit for and, I think, worth looking at through the Guerrero/Gray lense. There is plenty of call to scream 'stereotype' here, but I guess that's what provokes my comments on complexity. There's too much. We get it ALL in this flick. Drug dealers, thiefs, murderers crack jokes. Those are easy targets. A little more subtle, the older post-war working class man a la August Wilson is presented, and also the ebulliant door-to-door preacher. But if you look a little closer you begin to see the middle ground that Guerrero is calling for too. Ice Cube's parents are married and both hold jobs, and neither is going to lend him money, and neither is going to scream at him or kick him out of the house when they can calmly instruct him what to do. Not the most progressive characters, but not quite stereotypes either. A working class nuclear family. There is a fairly subtly drawn homosexual character screaming about his grass *but not being openly molested or mocked* as well. To me what holds it all together is the portrayal of a quiet neighborhood. Most concessions towards action (a drive by and a fight) are arguably driven by the necessities of the three-act structure, because by and large the neighborhood is portrayed as a quiet place with a modicum of class diversity. The 'slice of life' plotting and the fairly realistically drawn leads seem to point towards a middle ground of characterization for black males that the broad comedy of the film can't quite reach.