08-04-2019, 03:32 PM
Jungle Fever (1991)
Again Director Spike Lee casts himself in his 5th film but thankfully it's just in a minor role this time. Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra are fantastic as the interracial couple at the center of the film but they are out-shined by John Turturro, as a meek, thoughtful Italian guy who works in a corner store but his subplot is annoying not properly resolved. The first half is on a par with 'Do the Right Thing' but then Lee seems to get bored and meanders of into a subplot about a crack addict (Samuel L. Jackson) that is only tangentially related to the main characters and has no bearing on the interracial theme of the piece. It's very powerfully acted by Jackson but I don't know why it's a part of this movie, it could be trimmed right out with no narrative effect. We randomly end with a fast zoom in on Snipes face shouting "No!" because I guess Lee didn't know how to end the story. Another frustratingly inconsistent Spike Lee film. As always, Ernest Dickerson's golden Cinematography and Terence Blanchard's Jazz score are gorgeous.
Idiocracy (2006)
I'd heard this was kinda ahead of it's time, pre-satirising the inanity of recent years by imagining an America 500 years into the future, where the people have devolved into idiots barely able to function. It's too surface level and the premise doesn't hold together, there are far too few really clever dystopian concepts and far, far too much of the idiots just snickering and saying "f*g" and "ret***ed". The premise doesn't stand up to any scrutiny, for example the people are shown plugged into mind-numbing hi-tech entertainment equipment but also shown to be so stupid that they could never have designed, maintained, or operated any of the same devices. The only idea that really gelled was them watering their dying crops with Gatorade because commercials have told them to. Still, I chuckled all the way through the tight 84-minute run time and the FX are a curious mix of CGI, traditional mattes and hand animation.
This military briefing scene from the prologue really had me laughing out loud:
Again Director Spike Lee casts himself in his 5th film but thankfully it's just in a minor role this time. Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra are fantastic as the interracial couple at the center of the film but they are out-shined by John Turturro, as a meek, thoughtful Italian guy who works in a corner store but his subplot is annoying not properly resolved. The first half is on a par with 'Do the Right Thing' but then Lee seems to get bored and meanders of into a subplot about a crack addict (Samuel L. Jackson) that is only tangentially related to the main characters and has no bearing on the interracial theme of the piece. It's very powerfully acted by Jackson but I don't know why it's a part of this movie, it could be trimmed right out with no narrative effect. We randomly end with a fast zoom in on Snipes face shouting "No!" because I guess Lee didn't know how to end the story. Another frustratingly inconsistent Spike Lee film. As always, Ernest Dickerson's golden Cinematography and Terence Blanchard's Jazz score are gorgeous.
Idiocracy (2006)
I'd heard this was kinda ahead of it's time, pre-satirising the inanity of recent years by imagining an America 500 years into the future, where the people have devolved into idiots barely able to function. It's too surface level and the premise doesn't hold together, there are far too few really clever dystopian concepts and far, far too much of the idiots just snickering and saying "f*g" and "ret***ed". The premise doesn't stand up to any scrutiny, for example the people are shown plugged into mind-numbing hi-tech entertainment equipment but also shown to be so stupid that they could never have designed, maintained, or operated any of the same devices. The only idea that really gelled was them watering their dying crops with Gatorade because commercials have told them to. Still, I chuckled all the way through the tight 84-minute run time and the FX are a curious mix of CGI, traditional mattes and hand animation.
This military briefing scene from the prologue really had me laughing out loud:
![[+]](https://forums.fanedit.org/images/focus/collapse_collapsed.png)