The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

While I was at home battling a case of the stomach flu on Saturday night, I had no idea what I was about to get myself into when I decided to order the film The Hate U Give On-Demand. The film may be based on a novel, but given the increasingly strong relevance it has in our society and the seemingly personal nature of the picture, it felt more real than other such films, as real as a documentary. THUG (The Hate U Give) centers around a young black man being pulled over, pulling out a hairbrush from the backseat of his car and getting shot and killed by a white officer, with a friend of his in the passenger seat. The young woman is understandably shaken by the event. While she lives in a black neighborhood, she gets educated at a predominantly white school and tries to separate those two lives the best she can. Having to regularly split her identity into two, she soon starts losing herself. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement start protesting the incident, especially after a...