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Whistle Stopper - Jungle Fever
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List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $4.74
Your Save: $ 15.24 ( 76% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Michael Badalucco, Halle Berry, Joe D'Onofrio, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780783230382
Format: Anamorphic
ISBN: 0783230389
Label: Universal Studios
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Number Of Items: 1
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen
Publisher: Universal Studios
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 1998-12-15
Running Time: 132
Studio: Universal Studios
Theatrical Release Date: 1991-06-07
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Spike's Racial Fever
Comment: Spike has said in an interview that when he sees an interracial couple that he wants to throws darts at them. After seeing part of this terrible, cluttered film on cable--I can see where he's coming from. I particularly felt sorry for the 2 main actors in the film, Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra, their parts were terribly written resulting in caricatures. The only saving grace of this movie was Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal as Gator, Snipes drug addict brother. That's the only reason I gave this film an extra star because if he wasn't in it, this film would be totally unwatchable!! Lee has a tin ear for dialogue maybe he should study David Mamet or Elmore Leonard on that aspect. There was an opportunity in the film also to comment positively on the inter-racial aspect of romance with the subplot involving John Turturro's infatuation with a Black female in the neighborhood but again Spike blew that aspect to bits on that. And as far a director of actors, he allowed the great Anthony Quinn to over-act!! So along with "Mo Better Blues", I've been unable to watch a Spike Lee film in its entirety with the exception of perhaps "Malcolm X", "Clockers" & "The 25th Hour" (Edward Norton) but those films weren't written by Spike!! So if you really serious about cinema, check out better directors like Bill Duke (Hoodlum), John Singleton (4Brothers, Shaft) or Carl Franklin (One False Move, Devil in Blue Dress, One True Thing). These brothers have it, Spike, no way Jose!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Spike Lee Film With Interesting Episodes
Comment: This film is good and I recommend it but there is too much and the film is too cluttered to be a great film. Spike Lee puts everything including the kitchen sink in the film. There is a crack head brother who gets killed like Marvin Gaye. An educated son who is married to a woman who is half black, half white and identifies herself as black and has an affair with a white woman whose Italian working class relatives harass her for it. The reaction to the black/white affair is very harsh. While it may have been true for working class Italians and blacks in NYC, I still wonder. Seems that people are a lot more comfortable with it than they used to be. The plight of black people are also a strong basis for the film. Spike had several movies in this one movie and several good/great ones could have been made. He has a lot to say and is a great filmmaker.
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Summary: Film #5 Interracial Relationships
Comment: I am going through all of Spike's films chronologically. This is Spike Lee's fifth film and follows along the lines of "Do the Right Thing". So far this is my second favorite (of five) Spike Lee films.
It is an excellent film because of the intensity of numerous scenes throughout it. In fact anyone out there who has not yet seen this film must see it for the following scene in particular. Here is a brief description.
The scene I am referring to is the one in which Wesley Snipes scopes out his brother. It begins with a woman preaching in the name of Jesus over a great soul song (the film was scored by Stevie Wonder) with heavy bass lines. Snipes walks through the city asking for his brother's whereabouts and is finally led to the Taj Mahal, a place swarming with people using and abusing crack. We finally find Samuel L. Jackson, Snipes' brother in the film, with Halle Berry (in her very first performance).
Other notable scenes are when Annabella Sciorra's, Snipe's girlfriend in the scene, father finds out she has been dating a black man or when Samuel L. Jackson's character, Gator, goes home one last time demanding money, from his mother, for his addiction.
As for the acting, the film is packed with incredible performances. Ossie Davis, John Turturro, Anthony Quinn, Samuel L. Jackson, Ruby Dee, Annabella Sciorra and Wesley Snipes are all superb actors in this film.
I agree with other reviewers, mentioning how over-the-top some of the people's reactions are to the interracial relationship central to the story. However, I refuse to say that they are unrealistic. I believe Spike Lee has merely acted out many of the thoughts of the racist person to show how dangerous such thoughts can be.
Customer Rating:
Summary: way to scary and crazy!
Comment: Look I have seen some people diapprove of interracial relationships but not like this. I mean in this film the way Spike lee show's people being against these two people being together is as if's the End of the world or someting. And I remember the first time I saw this movie it was on TV But I sure as Hell didn'd buy it so I decided to bowor it from the library and there was some seens that was to strong for me to watch. Please Take my advice if you want to see a movie about interracial relationships then please don't buy this garbage. Instead get the movie called Far from heaven now that movie makes more sense. And let me tell I am so aganist Racism as a matter of fact I'm a member of an Organization that fights hard against racism and that Organization is called the Communist Party of the USA yes that's right I'm a Communist and I'd rather be one than be a Racist and I'm black. Please don't get the misconception that were evil and against religion we just help people that are oppressed and we fight peace for proof go CPUSA.org
Customer Rating:
Summary: Open up your eyes, and you will be surprised to see what the world is truly like.
Comment: 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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Editorial Reviews:
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Spike Lee's 1991 story about an interracial relationship and its consequences on the lives and communities of the lovers (Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra) is one of his most captivating and focused films. Snipes and Sciorra are very good as individuals trying to reach beyond the limits imposed upon them for reasons of race, tradition, sexism, and such. Lee makes an interesting and subtle case that they are driven to one another out of frustration with social obstacles as well as pure attraction--but is that enough for love to survive? John Turturro is featured in a subplot as an Italian American who grows attracted to a black woman and takes heat from his numbskull buddies. --Tom Keogh
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