Film Credits

Writted & Directed by: Spike Lee

Starring: Wesley Snipes. Annabella Sciorra, Spike Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Samuel L. Jackson, Lonette McKee, John Turturro, Frank Vincent, Anthony Quinn, Halle Berry, Tyra Ferrell, Veronica Webb, Tim Robbins, Brad Dourif, Debi Mazar, Nicholas Turturro

Review

With his latest film Jungle Fever, hotshot director Spike Lee attempts to tackle far too many subjects at once. This over-meshing of storylines at least makes for an interesting, if jumbled, experience.

Jungle Fever purportedly details the "shocking" consequences of the interracial relationship between black architect Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) and his Italian secretary Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra). The two get the hots for one another, and for the rest of the film they find themselves shunned by friends, family and neighbors alike. Also brought into play and having nothing whatsoever to do with the main interracial angle is an over-involved drug subplot involving Flipper's derelict brother. Another subplot details the personal life of Angie ex-boyfriend (John Turturro), and shows the characters he has to deal with in his day job at his store as well as overbearing father (Anthony Quinn). And that's not all, as other subplots detail: how Flipper's wife (Lonette McKee) throws him out of her life; how Angie's always-hateful family throwns her out into the street; how Flipper's brother throws his life away on drugs; and how Flipper's father has broken their family apart due to his overzealous religious fanaticism.

There's just too darn much stuff going on all at once, and director/writer Lee never takes the opportunity to clearly state what he's trying to declare with Jungle Fever. For that matter, now that I think about it, I'm not too sure I want to know what his opinions are - I've never been fond of his films, especially with the way they always seem to overly condone the racism and violence he's supposedly trying to condemn. I did think the cinematography and acting were fine, though. MCA/Universal's disc transfer of Jungle Fever handles most scenes without a problem, a fairly good thing considering that Lee likes to fill his films with the sort of lighting and color schemes that can play havoc with home video system. The image is fairly sharp and clear, but some video noise makes itself known on reds, oranges and browns. Side three is in CAV with perfect still frame. This disc is also a cropped/scanned edition of the 1.85:1 Spherical Panavision original. The CX-encoded digital Dolby surround stereo is fine, though there's nothing at all to get overly-excited about (unless you're a Stevie Wonder fan, of course, since he composed several songs for the film). This two-disc set comes in a single cover, was pressed at Pioneer, and has not been chapter encoded.