A not so popular young man wants to pledge to a popular fraternity at his historically black college.
Writer/Director: Spike Lee
Stars: Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Tisha Campbell, Branford Marsalis, Kadeem Hardison, Spike Lee, Jasmine Guy, Samuel L. Jackson.
Dyane Harvey ... assistant choreographer
Otis Sallid ... choreographer
14 songs in the Soundtracks; at least half are musical numbers. Unfortunately, the Region 2 disc I bought has no scene menu at all. Waiting for the disc is why I'm watching this late.
I think I've only seen 2 SL movies before this: Do the Right Thing ('89) and Bamboozled ('00), and I was impressed with both. This will not break that pattern.
Rated 5.9 by 5.3k+ IMDb voters. Too bad the demographic breakdown is only by age and gender. I'd be curious how the racial categories add up.
This was jaw-dropping for me. Even more: some of the reviews that I read after seeing it. One said there was no racism in the film because where were no white actors. Um, then what were all the good-hair/bad-hair, wannabe/jigaboo (terminology in the film), light-skin/dark-skin scenes/fights about?
I never wanted to go near Greek organizations, and when I attended college at the "normal" age, my campus had none. So my only images of hazing/pledging is from film/tv, and somehow I was surprised that the black version of this was basically identical, although I don't remember the girls (they're not mature enough to call women) being so involved with the fraternal initiation.
This is set in the 80's, so 20+ years after The Pill, and the sexual expectations are high. Appropriately, the leader (GE) of the GPG frat, who's really rather rotten to the pledges, especially SL, is also rotten to his gf (TC).
The musical numbers are interesting, as are the frat drill events.
I don't remember the issue of HBCU's needing to divest their investment portfolios of companies doing business with still-apartheid South Africa, but that's what LF & his group are protesting. And I easily found info on the idea. In the film, LF, speaking at a campus protest, says most other prominent schools have divest already.
This film doesn't cover all aspects of college life. Notably (almost) absent: classes and school work. I remember only 1 scene where a character doesn't want to attend some event because she wanted to study. I also don't remember any drinking or drugging, which was nice.
SL begins and ends the film with a graphic "Uplift the Race". At the beginning it looks like the motto of Mission College, but it appears after the end credits with a red/black/green color bar.
The last scene makes complete sense to me. I'm surprised any reviewers found it out of place or confusing. But I found a review that said someone decided to go to a HBCU because of the fun people were having in this film. Yikes.
I didn't find SJ. Per the end credits, he was a local yokel. Yet another black-on-black conflict: townies denigrating college students for "taking jobs" and "being better than".
This was SL's first big-budget film, and he had final cut (per IMDb trivia).
This film is 30 yo, but it's fresh to me.
SL's c.track is very disappointing; he's watching the film for the first time in years, sometimes laughing at the jokes, and speaks infrequently. I only heard the beginning and the last part of the c.track by the actors, and it was chaotic and opinionated. The featurettes are good.
Columbia & more, dir. Lee; 8
