Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Do the Right Thing..Watch It !!!, 25 April 2007
Spike Lee made "Jungle Fever" in the era when he also made masterpieces like "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X". I will admit that the subject matter here is nothing that we haven't seen many times (an interracial love story), but Lee knows how to do without getting idiotic or manipulating emotions. In this case, African-American Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) has an affair with Italian-American co-worker Angela Tucci (Annabella Sciorra), thereby setting off a racially charged chain reaction.
A previous reviewer said that Lee throws in so many subplots that the movie gets too confusing. I agree that the various subplots do this to an extent, but I think that Lee mainly wanted to show how people's lives were getting affected by the series of events portrayed. There were some clichés, namely the bigoted Bensonhurst residents, but this is certainly a well done movie. Watch for a young Halle Berry as a crack addict, and I believe that Queen Latifah appears as a waitress.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Open up your eyes, and you will be surprised to see what the world is truly like, 23 Jun 2007
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.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
A Poor Man's "Do The Right Thing"?, 24 Feb 2008
Coming two years after the classic "Do The Right Thing", "Jungle Fever" again deals with tensions between African American's and Italian-American's. This time it is based around an interracial love story.
Wesley Snipes is happily married with a lovely daughter and then ruins everything by beginning an affair with an Italian-American. Most of the film deals with attitudes towards this and similar relationships.
Samuel L. Jackson is Snipes' crack addicted brother and drug issues are also dealt with.
I can't help feeling in some ways that this film is a poor man's "Do The Right Thing". Spike Lee's movies for me are either brilliant or average and this leans towards the latter.
5/10
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