Spike Lee Joint Collection (Clockers/ Jungle Fever/ Do the Right Thing/ Mo` Better Blues/ Crooklyn)

Spike Lee is one of the most acclaimed and controversial
directors of all time. Now five of his most provocative, thought-provoking
films are available in one collection. From the breakout hit dramedy DO THE
RIGHT THING to the gritty, urban CLOCKERS, Lee peels away life’s layers,
exposing the ironies, brutalities, rhythms and prejudices of the naked city in
this powerful collector’s set. Clockers Based on the riveting
bestseller by Richard Price, this 1995 crime drama was directed by Spike Lee
with such authority and authenticity that it has the hyper-real quality of a
stylized documentary. Fully capturing the thoroughly researched detail of
Price’s novel, the film focuses on Strike (newcomer Mekhi Phifer), a young,
ambitious “clocker”–or drug dealer–who works the streets of his New York
housing project, selling drugs for a local supplier named Rodney (played with
ferocious charisma by Delroy Lindo). Just as Strike is struggling to get away
from his dead-end life of crime, another dealer is murdered in a fast-food
restaurant and local detectives (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro) consider Strike
the primary suspect. In cowriting the script with novelist Price, Lee uses
this murder mystery to explore the plague of guns and black-on-black crime in
America’s inner cities, in which drugs and death are familiar routines of
daily life. The film doesn’t pretend to offer solutions, nor does it dwell on
the problem with numbing insistence. Rather, this taut, well-acted film takes
the viewer into a world often hidden in plain sight–a world where options
seem nonexistent for youth conditioned to have little or no expectation beyond
a probable early death. Lee and Price are deadly serious in handling this
volatile subject (which incorporates racism, powerless law enforcement, and
political indifference), but Clockers is also blessed with humor, insight, and
humanity. It’s one of Lee’s most confidently directed films, signaling a
creative maturity that Lee continued to develop throughout the 1990s. –Jeff
Shannon Jungle Fever 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 Do the Right Thing Spike Lee’s incendiary look
at race relations in America, circa 1989, is so colorful and exuberant for its
first three-quarters that you can almost forget the terrible confrontation
that the movie inexorably builds toward. Do the Right Thing is a joyful,
tumultuous masterpiece–maybe the best film ever made about race in America,
revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their guises and
demonstrating how a deadly riot can erupt out of a series of small
misunderstandings. Set on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day
of the summer, the movie shows the whole spectrum of life in this neighborhood
and then leaves it up to us to decide if, in the end, anybody actually does
the “right thing.” Featuring Danny Aiello as Sal, the pizza parlor owner; Lee
himself as Mookie, the lazy pizza-delivery guy; John Turturro and Richard
Edson as Sal’s sons; Lee’s sister Joie as Mookie’s sister Jade; Rosie Perez as
Mookie’s girlfriend Tina; Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as the block elders, Da
Mayor and Mother Sister; Giancarlo Esposito as Mookie’s hot-headed friend
Buggin’ Out; Bill Nunn as the boom-box toting Radio Raheem; and Samuel L.
Jackson as deejay Mister Señor Love Daddy. A rich and nuanced film to watch,
treasure, and learn from–over and over again. –Jim Emerson Mo’ Better Blues
With Mo’ Better Blues, the story of a young trumpeter’s rise to jazz-world
stardom, Spike Lee set out to counter Clint Eastwood’s cliché-ridden biopic of
Charlie Parker in Bird. But the final product, a slick, glossy drama (with
hip-hop jazz provided by Gangstarr no less), is just as superficial as the
numerous Alger-esque stories of music stardom to which movie audiences are
accustomed. Denzel Washington gives a typically charismatic performance as the
trumpeter in question, as does Wesley Snipes as his sax-playing rival. And as
with most Spike Lee films, there are numerous solid performers in small roles
such as Bill Nunn, Latin-music star Rubén Blades, and comedian Robin Harris.
One character, however, attracted unwanted attention: John Turturro’s role as
an unscrupulous music-industry exec. Critics called the Turturro character,
who is at once money hungry, swarthy, and perpetually shrouded in darkness, a
classic anti-Semitic caricature. But the charge seems almost irrelevant in
Spike Lee’s cartoonish, overstylized world of impossibly hunky jazzmen,
curvaceous hangers-on, and incessant bebop. –Ethan Brown Crooklyn Spike Lee’s
semiautobiographical, 1994 film about the good and bad times for a Brooklyn
family in the ’70s has passion and nostalgic good feeling, but it is also a
mess of random reflections and arbitrary storytelling. The centerpiece of the
movie is a little girl (Zelda Harris) who views the ups and downs of her
parents’ experiences (mom and dad are played by Delroy Lindo and Alfre
Woodard), and who navigates the life of her neighborhood. Lee tosses in a lot
of ’70s detail (watching The Partridge Family) and other diversions (Harris’s
journey through suburbia), but he has no master sensibility controlling the
flow of it all. The film is more wearying than anything, although bright spots
include Lindo’s fine performance as a talented man suffering from irrelevance.
–Tom Keogh

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