Product Description
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Spike Lee is one of the most accled 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.
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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 s 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 --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
, and political indifference), but Clockers is also
blessed with humor, in, 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