Spike Lee knows enough camera tricks to keep you glued to the screen. Though not necessarily with pleasure. The sequence here that most nearly approaches outright pain, in fact crosses well over the threshold of it, is the one that employs an anamorphic lens to compress the players into funhouse-mirror beanpoles, for no discernible reason outside of the single line in which Auntie describes her visiting niece as "thinner than a blade of grass." (Auntie herself is thick as a flower stem.) This little experiment, allowing the uninformed customer ample opportunity to yell at the projectionist, goes on and on, for the full duration of a summer holiday in Maryland, fifteen minutes of screen time. (Martin Scorsese, Lee's unofficial mentor, never thought of this one! Or if he thought of it, he soon thought better of it.) Co-written by Lee in collaboration with two of his siblings, Joie Susannah and Cinqué, this is plainly a "personal" film, a discursive ramble down Memory Lane, back to the 1970s. It strikes its richest chords whenever it places a group of children in front of the TV and touches on matters about which the average viewer already will have memories and feelings of his own: Soul Train, The Partridge Family, the New York Knicks. The use of golden oldies for that purpose is a bit excessive, particularly so, in fact once again painfully so, in the several episodes in which Lee gets everybody on screen hollering at one another and then adds to the cacophony an overamplified pop song. Alfre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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