Jungle Fever
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Movie Reviews of Jungle Fever
Movie Review: Interesting, from start to finish!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a film that looks at interracial dating from all walks of life. I think that this is one of Spike Lee's best films to date. Spike Lee literally makes your conscience alert and aware with all of his films. He is a genius, and this film makes his point. Great acting by all, especially Lonette Mc Kee, and definitely Tyra Ferrell. I love this film, one of my favorites of all time!!!!Movie Review: I LOVE
Summary: 5 Stars
I LOVE THE MOVIE. IT'S THE TRUTH BUT I DON'T JUDGE BASED ON RACE, LOOKS, ETC. WELL, I TRY NOT TO JUDGE BASED ON LOOKS. I ENJOYED IT.Movie Review: NEVER HAD JUNGLE FEVER, OKAY MAYBE ONCE.
Summary: 5 Stars
ANOTHER OLD SCHOOL FAVE. GREAT MOVIE. REALLY WE ARE ALL THE SAME AND SOMETIMES YOU CAN'T HELP WHO YOU LOVE OR LUST. HA,HA!Movie Review: Open up your eyes, and you will be surprised to see what the world is truly like.
Summary: 4 Stars
Ever since "Romeo and Juliet" people have been fascinated by love that crosses cultural barriers. Romeo and Juliet a la Spike Lee is the story of Flipper, a middle-class black architect from Harlem and Angie, a working-class Italian-American from Brooklyn. In Jungle Fever, Lee returns to the theme of racial tensions that marked his breakthrough film, "Do the Right Thing." The result is big, bold, vibrant and more than a little sprawling. By the end of it you feel run over by a truck. Everyone in the film has been somehow touched by Flip and Angie's affair. Drew throws Flip out of the house (and some people may wonder why Lee finds the affair's interracial nature more of a sin than its being a marital infidelity). Fathers on both sides disown their children. And a lot of people become self-conscious about their own ethnicity - dark-skinned Italians just as much as light-skinned blacks.
Lee's forte is scenes of confrontation, and Jungle Fever is a series of them, scorchingly written, extremely well acted and utterly riveting. (Sensitive souls should note that, along with "Goodfellas," this film held the Hollywood record for profanity, though it's long since been surpassed.) What he isn't able to do - at this stage of his career at least - is to organize them into a shapely narrative. The film doesn't really build, but stays pretty much on one pitch throughout. And, towards the end, Lee loses the love story in favor of a subplot featuring Flip's crack-addict older brother Gator (Samuel L. Jackson). The scene where Flip has to go to a crack den called the Taj Mahal to find Gator, scored to Stevie Wonder's "Livin' for the City", is terrific, and one of the best-sustained sequences Lee has ever filmed. But it's in the wrong film. Gator's story has no relevance to the central story of interracial love, apart from his addiction being a parallel sin of the flesh to Flip's adultery in the eyes of their father, played with painful dignity and restraint by Ossie Davis. Samuel L. Jackson broke out from a series of minor roles as hoodlums with this performance, which won him a specially-created Supporting Actor Award at Cannes. But by this time in the film, Flip and Angie's story has almost been forgotten. That's Halle Berry, by the way, as Gator's equally addicted girlfriend.
You could say that Lee is less interested in the love story than in examining its effects. He's also far less interested in Angie (though Sciorra does her best with the part) than he is in Flip: the film ends with him with her all but written out. Lee had faced accusations of sexism from his first feature (She's Gotta Have It) onwards. He certainly tries to answer them here: there's a long sequence where Drew and her friends pour out their grievances about the men in their lives. It's a brave attempt, though it fails Joanna Russ's test for fully-dimensional female characters: do two women have a conversation at any time in the story that isn't about men? Not here they don't: the conversation is entirely about men, their ways, and their......parts.
Other pluses are Ernest Dickerson's camerawork, the visual stylization toned down somewhat since Do the Right Thing - though Lee has developed a signature shot, where characters seem to glide rather than walk. The film also benefits from several newly-written songs from Stevie Wonder, though the best-used example is a pre-existing one, "Livin' in the City" cited above.
Movie Review: "When's the future?"
Summary: 4 Stars
Spike Lee has said, in hindsight, that he'd lost his abilities as a filmmaker between Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X. If that's true, you won't be able to tell during Jungle Fever - at least not in a way you'd expect. Jungle Fever is a lot of things - daring, empassioned, extreme, overarching, undeniably and intentionally "heavy" - but amateurish it is not. Watching Jungle Fever now made me realize all the power Lee movies entail - which is, especially at this point in his career, a real voice. Two scenes of extremes are rendered in equal precision - a group of African American women discussing the problems of keeping their men, contrasting with an equally long and empassioned scene of pugnacious racism between a group of Bensonhurst Italians. In each scene the experience of its characters is given vividness by the authenticity of the dialogue, by the conviction of its cast. And of the cast, let me add what a treasure of an ensemble it is: 15 years later, virtually every supporting role (some on screen for just minutes) has become a recognizable performer (it's a game in itself to count how many Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy wins/ nominations, not to mention plush Sopranos roles, these actors share). In its leading roles, Wesley Snipes has a seething immediacy, John Turturro burns with conscience, and Samuel L. Jackson, in the most fearless performances of his career, unfolds so many gripping layers at once, the Cannes jury created a special acting prize to honor him. All that helps make Jungle Fever provocative in the right ways - sparking conversations, as well as personal speculations, about the modern state of racism, of the way that we're never free of our own cultural expectations, and how they effect who and how we love. The movie's first giant, nagging flaw is its attempt to handle too much - the plot that follows the path of crack addiction belongs to a (terrific) different movie. Its second, and this is tougher, is that the notion of this "fever," of Flipper (Snipes) and Angie (Annabella Sciorra) being blinded by each others' race, is an unfulfilled idea in the movie - the characters, I'm afraid, work better as catalysts for thier environments than they do as lovers, as their affair is remote, and Sciorra, a gifted actress elsewhere, seems far too cold for fevers of any kind. Yet even these flaws are the product of a force already at work on the film industry - the movie suffers only from an ambition to reach all aspects of the urban race experience, and succeeds as well as can be expected; you'll rarely recall a film who fails its goals this intriguingly.