Released 1988
Stars Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Tisha Campbell, Joe Seneca
Directed by Spike Lee

Spike Lee's "School Daze" is the first movie in a long time where the black characters seem to be relating to one another, instead of to a hypothetical white audience. What's surprising is that its revolutionary approach is found in a daffy story about undergraduates at an all-black university. The movie is basically a comedy, with some serious scenes that don't always quite seem to fit. (It begins with a demonstration against the school's investments in South Africa, but doesn't remember to resolve that subject.) It deals with divisions within the student body - between Greeks and independents, and between political activists and kids who just want to get good grades.

And with utter frankness it addresses two subjects that are taboo in most "black movies": complexion and hair. Lee divides the women on his campus into two groups, the lighter-skinned girls of the Gamma Ray sorority, with their straightened and longer hair, and the darker-skinned independents, with shorter hair or Afros. These two groups call each other the "Wannabes" and the "Jigaboos," and in a brilliant and startling song-and-dance sequence called "Straight and Nappy," they express their feelings for each other. Lee's choice of a musical production number to consider these emotionally charged subjects is an inspiration; there is possibly no way the same feelings could be expressed in spoken dialogue without great awkwardness and pain.

Although there was a brief age of "black exploitation movies" in the 1970s, there have never been very many good American movies about the varieties of the black experience. Black superstars like Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor are essentially playing to (and with) white audiences, and serious dramas about blacks, even strong ones like "The Color Purple," are so loaded with nobility and message that they feel like secular sermons. Now here is Spike Lee with a slight, disorganized comedy named "School Daze," and he just sort of assumes a completely black orientation for his film. There is not a single white person in it. All of the characters, good and bad, are black, and all of the character's references are to each other.

Summary by Roger Ebert