Spike Lee's follow-up to his unlikely hit She's Gotta Have It was this ambitious--some would say too ambitious--attempt at a musical about college life. But Lee, ever the provocateur, doesn't settle for a simple college comedy. Rather, he wants to make a point about the social divisions within all-black colleges: between the socializers and the socially conscious, and between light and dark-skinned blacks. Laurence Fishburne plays a politically aware student trying to bring his fellow students together; Giancarlo Esposito plays the fraternity boss who constantly seeks to insert a wedge between the haves and have-nots. Lee himself plays a pawn in the middle, a would-be frat boy undergoing a wicked Hell Week as a pledge. The story doesn't pull together and the musical numbers--more spoof than anything else--only serve to fragment it. While it offers interesting points, it never does so in a particularly cohesive way. --Marshall Fine
2.
With SCHOOL DAZE, writer-director Spike Lee examines the tensions, biases, and frustrations of middle-class black youth at a southern college campus. Lee combines musical and fantasy sequences with satirical scenes to tell this pointed story of two cousins who attend the same all-black university. Dap Dunlap (Laurence Fishburne) is the solemn and dedicated activist, while Half-Pint (Lee), his younger cousin, spends most of his time rushing the school's most popular fraternity while desperately trying to find romance. As the film follows the two young men attempting to achieve their disparate goals, it also examines intraracial conflict in a school divided into warring camps: the light-skinned Wannabees and the dark-skinned Jigaboos. Lee, using the college environment as a microcosm in which to further explore black intraracial conflicts--for example, the way different camps wear their hair--doesn’t forget that he’s an entertainer first and foremost. SCHOOL DAZE, taking its cue from ANIMAL HOUSE, pokes fun at fraternities and sororities, including a hysterical extended sequence on the rigors of hazing. Featuring a pulsating soundtrack and an appearance by go-go legends EU, Lee’s return to school is at once revealing and raucous.
3.
Legendary filmmaker Spike Lee's unforgettable look at black college life now in a new edition with all-new special features!
4.
Laurence Fishburne plays a serious, self-involved student who struggles with the tension that exists between light-skinned African-American students and dark-skinned African-American students on top of an insensitive administration and a social-climbing fraternity system.
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