DVD NOTES.(The Spike Lee Joint Collection)(Video recording review)

NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- Spike Lee's most vital films reveal an extraordinary variety of tones in his deliberately narrow geographical range and social settings. Packaged in "The Spike Lee Joint Collection" (Universal), they serve as a powerful reminder of Lee's importance, alongside Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, as a modern urban folklorist.

The set contains five films: "Do the Right Thing" (from 1989), "Mo' Better Blues" (1990), "Jungle Fever" (1991), "Crooklyn" (1994), and "Clockers" (1995). "Do the Right Thing," the film that first made Lee a star director, has lost none of its strength. He confines his characters to a few blocks in Bedford-Stuyvesant during a sweltering summer that is made even hotter by a burst of racial conflict. The burly, angry Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) provokes a confrontation by bringing his rap-blaring boom box into Sal's Pizzeria, the neighborhood's only white-owned business. If "Do the Right Thing," a febrile record of raw moods in the Ed Koch era, exposes Lee's limitations as a director--his lack of perspective resulting from his attachment to, and advocacy for, the community that he films--it also reflects the unique sensibility that, to this day, gives his films the immediacy of a news report from the front lines of the city. Lee's originality, as well as his modernism, ...