Product Description

This critically acclaimed film from Spike Lee explores the provocative consequences of interracial relationships. Black architect Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) begins an affair with his working-class Italian secretary (Annabella Sciorra), which causes them to be scrutinized by their friends, cast out from their families and shunned by their neighbors in this moving view of inner-city life. Featuring an original soundtrack by Stevie Wonder, Jungle Fever stars a talented cast including Spike Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Samuel L. Jackson, Lonette McKee, John Turturro and two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn. Starring: Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, Spike Lee, Anthony Quinn, Samuel L. Jackson, John Turturro, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Lonette McKee, Frank Vincent, Halle Berry, Tim Robbins, Brad Dourif, Queen Latifah Directed by: Spike Lee

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34867 in DVD
• Brand: NBC Universal
• Released on: 1998-12-15
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Running time: 132 minutes

Amazon.com
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

From The New Yorker
The central event in Spike Lee's new movie is the love affair of Flipper (Wesley Snipes), a married African-American architect from Harlem, and Angie (Annabella Sciorra), an Italian-American office temp from Bensonhurst. Once Lee has set up the interracial relationship, he seems to lose interest in it; Flipper and Angie hold the stage only long enough to ignite the fears and hatreds of their communities, and when the fuse is lit their job is done. The movie's approach to its characters is stubbornly, and perversely, external; we never have the sense that we're getting inside anyone's skin (white or black). Everything in this picture is pitched at the level of public utterance. Lee's dialogue has the rhetorical tone of daytime-television talk shows; even in the most intense, emotionally charged domestic scenes, there's an alienating self-consciousness in the way the characters express themselves-they always look as if they had an ear cocked for audience response. This rhetorical barrage gives the picture a peculiar, halting rhythm; individual scenes have force and momentum, but the movie as a whole seems stalled, inert, uncertain where it's headed. And Lee's attitude toward interracial sex is shockingly puritanical; it's as if he were afraid that any hint of eroticism would constitute an endorsement of Flipper and Angie's affair. The scenes that deal with Flipper's crackhead brother, Gator (Samuel L. Jackson), have more energy than anything else in the picture; this subplot is tangential to the central theme, but it has some shape and dramatic coherence, and it actually builds to a climax. The interracial affair just dawdles to an underdramatized parting, and we feel nothing; emotionally, the movie has separated the lovers from each other-and from us, long before. Also with Lonette McKee, John Turturro, Anthony Quinn, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Frank Vincent. The inventive cinematography is by Ernest Dickerson. Some fine new songs by Stevie Wonder grace the soundtrack. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker