YMMV / Jungle Fever

• Award Snub: Samuel L. Jackson not being nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards, despite having been nominated at the Cannes Film Festival. Hell, the category was introduced specifically because of his performance.
• Awesome Music: The one and only Stevie Wonder wrote, composed, and performed virtually the entire soundtrack himself, the only exceptions being "If She Breaks Your Heart", written by Wonder and performed by Kimberly Brewer, and "Chemical Love", written by Stephanie Andrews.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Gator with his hellish crack addiction and Paulie with his genuine attraction to Orin and desire to educate himself on race. Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film that Lee himself seemed far more invested in Gator and Paulie than in Flipper and Angie.
• Narm: The film is abroad with this trope.
  • For starters, the protagonist's name is Flipper Purify, with his eldest brother similarly named Gator. Angie lampshades this when Flipper states his name and handwaves it by saying that his reverend father named them that way.
  • Drew's Defenestrate and Berate moment, consisting of pelting Flipper with numerous Cluster F-Bomb-ing, and her send-off towards him: "Flipper Purify, there will be no penis between us."
  • When she later goes into a tirade with Purify over his infidelity with Angie, which includes her telling him about all the racist names that she was called in school—including a couple of redundant names such as "white nigger" and "nigger white".
  • Paulie's father Lou puts Laurence Olivier in the remake of The Jazz Singer to shame, what with his overacting towards Paulie going on a date with his black friend Vera.
  • Angie's father's outrage towards her when he finds out about her time with Flipper. His abuse towards her consists of nothing but fake-looking slapping and practically destroying the entire living room with her body as he repeatedly throws her around while she calls out for her brothers to stop him—he ends up fending them off as they attempt to intervene. This is capped off by the father whipping her with his belt until his sons finally restrain him.
  • The ending scene where when Flipper walks the streets, a crack-addicted prostitute tries to proposition him for oral sex. His response is to throw his arms around her and let out a Big "NO!" in an overdramatic, tormented fashion. While the prostitute is meant to represent a possible future for his daughter, what he does comes completely out of nowhere and makes him look crazy. The film even freezes on his face, ending it.
• Retroactive Recognition: Angie's father and brother are Phil Leotardo and Christopher Moltisanti (or, if you want to be specific, Frank Vincent and Michael Imperioli).
• Values Dissonance:
  • Back in 1991, viewers in countries that didn't suffer from America's level of racial prejudice and bitterness found the film more puzzling than anything else; it was seen as a film about a guy who inexplicably cheated on his very attractive wife.
  • Ideally, and thankfully reality for most in 21st century USA, Flipper's friends and family would probably now be more upset about him cheating on his wife than having sex with a white woman.

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