This type of thing, passing your girl from one frat brother to another, is more common than one might think. He also takes a few digs at his alma mater, which threw him off campus during the shooting of this film and who objected to Joe Seneca as the dean because he “looked too sambo-ish.” Lee also addresses the treatment of the Jane character in this film, whose act of love for her frat and her man is portrayed as a cruel, sexist trick on her by Julian. The track is also very informative and well worth listening to for tales of Lee’s own collegiate experience and the evil frat brothers he encountered. He says he hasn’t seen the film in years, and his surprise at some of the things he forgot the film contained sounds real. School Daze’s DVD comes with a commentary track by Spike Lee, who is genuinely amused by some of the things he lensed in this picture. It’s fun to see Samuel Yell Jackson in the movie (especially since his role in Do The Right Thing begins with the words that tie these two films together), but the scene is too verbally preachy and overdone. But it’s awkward, and the dialogue is cringe-worthy, yet Lee has three shots that tell a great visual story in that scene. Lee says he based the scene on a real life experience, and the intent behind the scene is powerful. There are several scenes like that in School Daze, including one in a KFC that could have easily been shortened by half its dialogue. Several times in Lee’s joints, including this one, he does something with his camera that says it all, then bogs things down further with all this lousy dialogue. There’s music in Lee’s camera movements in general, and I wish he trusted his superb visuals more than he does. I wish he and Dickerson would reunite and tackle something like Bring In Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk. In musicals, people sing and dance their emotions, and Lee is a master craftsman of musical numbers. School Daze needed more scenes like this. Some of the Gammas even wear blue contact lenses, a feature that got Spike Lee in an argument with Whoopi Goldberg back in the day. Rachel and her galpals tend to be darker skinned, and have the natural, kinky, and-yeah I’ma say it-NAPPY hair that came with their (and my) original packaging. Rachel has her own problems with the Gammas-they’re snobbish and think they’re better because they are lighter skinned and have processed hair and/or our sponsor, Weave(TM). Dap’s girlfriend, Rachel (Kyme), accurately thinks his dislike of the Gammas is due to its preponderance of light-skinned Blacks over dark skinned ones. Dap hates the fraternity lifestyle, though one wonders if the genesis of that hatred lay in a throwaway line about how he dropped out of Gamma’s pledging during his freshman year. School Daze splits its time between an activist named Vaughn “Dap” Dunlop (Ike Turner himself, Laurence Fishburne) out to protest until the college stops dealing with apartheid era South Africa, and his cousin Darryl “Half-Pint” Dunlop (Spike Lee) who is pledging Gamma Phi Gamma. Lee presents two sides of the college experience. School Daze proves that point more than once. But its mistakes are a harbinger I’ve said before that director Spike Lee’s biggest enemy is often a writer named Spike Lee. Watching School Daze again today, I realized it’s not as overtaxed as I remembered-for Lee’s first stab at a “big” movie it does numerous things quite well. School Daze tries to cram two vast storylines and a musical into 2 hours, and things get beyond the director’s control. Coincidentally, Higher Learning is John Singleton’s third feature which, like School Daze, takes place on a college campus, is a Columbia picture and an even bigger hot mess. Lee, like several of his collaborators in front of and behind the camera, went to a historically Black institute of Higher Learning. I was educated by the Jesuits, who are far more boring than anything you’d find at Tuskegee University, so I defer to Lee’s knowledge of this environment. School Daze takes place during homecoming weekend at a historically Black college.
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