![]() ![]() Responsible enough to work as a numbers runner for a pool hall owner named Kirby (another striking performance by “Clockers’ ” Keith David), he has difficulty focusing on a direction for his life. Anthony himself is a high school senior with a serious girlfriend named Juanita (Rose Jackson) but no definite plans for the future. Though the northeast Bronx has become a symbol of urban wretchedness, when “Presidents” opens in 1968 (with a deliberately Andy Hardyesque scene of Anthony delivering milk) it was a multiracial area of tidy one-family houses. And though there is as much violence as viewers of “Menace II” would expect, the film’s strong comments on American society are made with restraint and noticeable lack of stereotyping, and are the more telling for it. ![]() But instead of the self-indulgence that usually results from this kind of free ticket, “Dead Presidents” is a film of unexpected heft and scope.īy focusing on just four or five years in the life of young Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate), “Dead Presidents” (written by Michael Henry Brown of HBO’s “Laurel Avenue”) echoes the experience of a generation of men whose lives were distorted by Vietnam. Given the critical and box-office success of their first effort, “Menace II Society,” made when they were but 20 years old, it was inevitable that the Hughes brothers would be given carte blanche for their next project. Set largely in a single neighborhood in the Bronx, this is an occasionally awkward film that still manages an epic feeling, one that has the ambition to tell a larger story through one individual’s experience. Made with fluid skill and a passion for storytelling, its tale of how the Vietnam War and American society affect a black Marine remains accessible while confounding expectations. “Dead Presidents” (a slang term for paper money) is a film that is both expected and surprising, familiar and yet somehow different. And though twins Allen and Albert Hughes are the youngest of the group, it is their film that is the most ambitious, the most unsettling and often the most powerful. Coming after Spike Lee’s “Clockers” and Carl Franklin’s “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the Hughes brothers’ “Dead Presidents” is the third significant work by an African American filmmaker to be released by a major studio within the last month. ![]()
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