The Fire This Time

"An all-out assault...refuses to play it safe; it lays everything on the table and allows the viewer to sort through the rubble," said the L.A. Weekly's Paul Malcolm of The Fire This Time, filmmaker Randy Holland's potshot approach to dissecting South Central Los Angeles's racial woes. Laying "everything on the table," however, is not quite accurate: the cast of interviewees is relatively small, and the testimony--though given equal treatment whether ridiculous or sublime--hardly offers all or even a representative sampling of available viewpoints. Opening with an account of the ghettoizing of blacks in Watts and South Central, the program lays the blame of the Watts riots at the feet of poverty and segregation--no revelations here--and then shifts to an examination of the rise of the Black Panther party, and its subsequent fall which, in turn, gave rise to the street gangs and the current milieu of daily violence in South Central. At its best, The Fire This Time constantly reminds us that racism sows the seeds of its own destruction--what goes round, comes round, as they say, and while it's not always easy to see the underlying cause and effect, sometimes--as in the case of the Rodney King verdict--the link becomes horrifically obvious. At its worst, the film is guilty of Oliver Stone-ism: there's talk of a mysterious train with boxcars full of guns and ammunitions left for the Bloods and Crips to continue their--according to the film--LAPD-supported rivalry. However, in its too easy answer of white oppression to all questions, the film does precisely what the L.A. Weekly reviewer claims it does not: the filmmakers "play it safe." After 89 minutes of this, the last two minutes of vague wishes for a rainbow coalition future feel exactly like what it is: an unconvincing tacked-on happy ending. Because The Fire Next Time, which aired on Showtime in February, offers some simple, if uncomfortable, unadorned truths, this is recommended with reservations for larger collections. However, a much more stimulating and coherent appraisal can be found in L.A. Is Burning: Five Reports From a Divided City (VL-9/93). (R. Pitman)