Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jungle Fever or simply Spike V. Sciorra, 21 Nov 2001
By A Customer
Jungle Fever is now 10 years old. However, the film still provides some of the finest onscreen moments not only for its "stars", Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra, but supporting cast, especially Samuel L. Jackson (in his breakthrough role)and John Turturro and obviously, the director/screenwriter Spike Lee. Anyone who's a fan of the aforementioned will find this video indispensable. Regarding, the film's controversial Love v. Colour theme, it is still relevant not just in terms of negro/italian but in terms of romances between any different colours or creeds. With regard to the performances, situations and music, many moments from this film have been immitated but never bettered. Whether or not Spike or Annabella disagreed on dialogue/motives reamins to be seen, but nevertheless "Jungle Fever" remains one of the most powerful, yet entertaining films of the 1990's.
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1 of 2 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., 27 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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