Superficially, the outstandingly attractive Morris Chestnut and the both attractive and talented Cuba Gooding, among others, have gone on to long careers in films and TV. I never got the appeal of Ice Cube. Cuba Gooding should have become a bigger star than he is. He should be Will Smith.
More tragically, when I first saw this film I had just moved to California. Being rather tribally East Coast prior to that, I had assumed that all the nastiness and self-destruction of ghetto life --Puerto Rican in New York, but mostly Black-- had something essentially to do with the environment: the vast blocks of tall concrete housing projects, cold, hard, impersonal, dehumanizing, in the alternately freezing and sweltering weather of New York or Chicago or Boston. I was really surprised by Boyz because you had all the same bad behaviors in a totally different and pretty friendly environment: sunshine all the time, and blocks of actual houses, separate one-story cottages... with lawns, on streets. Basically a working class suburb.
That's when I had the transgressive thought, it's not the hood that makes the boyz, it's the boyz that make the hood. No matter where you put them, they do the same thing.
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