SOURCE: "Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket," in Sight and Sound, Vol. 4, No. 8, August, 1994, pp. 10-14.

In the following essay, hooks asserts that Lee's Crooklyn presents an "anti-woman, anti-feminist vision of black family life."

Hollywood is not into plain old sorrowful death. The death that captures the public imagination in movies, the death that sells, is passionate, sexualised, glamorised and violent. Films like One False Move, True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Menace II Society, A Perfect World bring us the sensational heat of relentless dying. It's fierce—intense—and there is no time to mourn. Dying that makes audiences contemplative, sad, mindful of the transitory nature of human life has little appeal. When portrayed in the contemporary Hollywood film, such deaths are swift, romanticised by soft lighting and elegiac soundtracks. The sights and sounds of death do not linger long enough to disturb the senses, to remind...