Product Description

THE WIFE AND CHILDREN OF A JOBLESS JAZZ MUSICIAN DEAL WITHEVERYDAY LIFE IN 1970'S BROOKLYN.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8136 in DVD
• Brand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
• Released on: 1999-02-23
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 115 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Spike Lee's semiautobiographical, 1994 film about the good and bad times for a Brooklyn family in the '70s has passion and nostalgic good feeling, but it is also a mess of random reflections and arbitrary storytelling. The centerpiece of the movie is a little girl (Zelda Harris) who views the ups and downs of her parents' experiences (mom and dad are played by Delroy Lindo and Alfre Woodard), and who navigates the life of her neighborhood. Lee tosses in a lot of '70s detail (watching The Partridge Family) and other diversions (Harris's journey through suburbia), but he has no master sensibility controlling the flow of it all. The film is more wearying than anything, although bright spots include Lindo's fine performance as a talented man suffering from irrelevance. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
Spike Lee's movie, a nostalgia piece about growing up in Brooklyn in the early seventies, is slight in every respect but length. The picture runs well over two hours, and you feel every minute of it, because Lee can't seem to find a theme or a style to shape this amorphous memory stuff into something more compelling than a home movie. Without an explosive, talk-show-worthy subject, his filmmaking tends to go limp. This movie lurches forward in spurts, but keeps stalling, because all that's driving it is a sort of trivial, reflexive New York chauvinism. Instead of telling a story, Lee settles for delivering casual, off-the-cuff commentary on urban life: he's just a guy sitting on the stoop checking out what's happening on the block-not much, as it turns out. With Alfre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris, and Frances Foster. The screenplay is by the director and two of his siblings, Joie Susannah Lee and Cinqué Lee. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A truly unique & superior effort from Spike Lee
Being a huge Spike Lee fan, it means much when I say that "Crooklyn" ranks very high, just beneath "Do The Right Thing" and "Malcolm X". Naturally, this coming-of-age family comedy set in Brooklyn during the 70's obviously has a strong autobiographical slant to it (the screenplay was written by Spike and two of his siblings, the story itself was credited solely to his sister, Joie), but if you've read Spike's out-of-print diary of the making of his first film "She's Gotta Have It", then you get an even stronger idea of how personal this film is to Spike; the Clinton character is obviously molded after him. The acting, cinematography, cultural references, music and acting are all superior. Most creative was the debut of Spike's "slimmed-in" cinematography during the Virginia sequence, which would soon become a Spike Lee trademark. Fans of Delroy Lindo who haven't seen this film will be surprised with his gentle & sensitive performance.

I'll tell you why this film has such a profound impact on me. I, like many others, have seen hundreds of films set in different times, places, etc. But very few films have been able to transport me back to another time & place as effectively as "Crooklyn". For the duration of the film, I really feel as if I'm enjoying an intimate portrait of a working-class black family in Brooklyn during the 1970's, it's like I'm right there. The irony is, I'm a middle-class white boy from Chicago who was born in 1974. This film is a grand artistic & personal triumph for Spike Lee.

Quit Hatin!
I saw this movie for the first time 10 years ago with my family and fell in love with it. I was however like 9 so I decided to watch it again to see if I still liked it and I must say that this is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It reminds me so much of my own personal life it was scary. All these people who didnt like the movie are too focused on the unimportant facts of a movie and not looking at the movie itself. It has alot of truths in it and I think it is well worth th time and money to explore it and figure out where it parallels your life.

Another great film by Spike Lee
The first time I saw this film, I was at my aunt's house. Each character had their own uniqueness, especially Troy. I loved her. The film is one of those timeless classics. Growing up in Brooklyn, this has to be one of my favorite films. I was born in 1982, but the film still resonates with me, because it shows me how life was back in the 1970s. Spike Lee, when is Hollywood going to give you an Oscar?