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Title: For Colored Girls
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents, there is a substantial amount of lanuage and sex. Recommended for ages 17 and up. |
I give Tyler Perry complete credit: The guy has got it made. He somehow managed to make himself his own brand in Hollywood and stars, produces, writes, and directs his movies. They are made on small budgets with reasonable returns. I suspect he makes a killing in the DVD market. Eventually someone with his success would eventually want to branch out into other ventures. Last year decided to team up with Oprah to get “Precious” out to the world, a film I greatly admired and walked away with a couple more Oscars then most people were expecting. That was a movie about a teenage girl who lived the lowest of lowest life yet found a reason to live. No wonder everyone loved it. Now Perry has decided he wants to make his own version of this story and has made “For Colored Girls.”
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For the first time he has adapted someone elses work (a hit play called “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf”...thank God he chose to abbreviate this title). How does he succeed? Not very well I’m afraid. In fact, halfway through the movie I started to get annoyed by the film. Like “Precious” this is a movie that is extremely bleak and a bit of a downer...but ten times more since there are many different characters that are suffering here as opposed to one. There are so many characters I can’t even begin to summerize them all or what they go through, but there is a great deal of rape, death, abuse, and prostitution...to name a few of the problems. So yes, this is one of those movies where multiple people go through every problem imaginable.
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Here though there are lots of bloated speeches that just sort of make these characters annoying. You’ve never heard women talk so much about their problems and yet do so little to solve them. They invite strangers into their house. They have glorious sex and are surprised when they get pregnant. They put up with abusive boyfriends. One of them puts up with one to the point where he kills their kids. It’s a horrible situation to be sure, but one woman says “my heart breaks for you...but you should have fixed this problem long before it got to this point.” It’s a small moment but it’s effective because there’s a stinging truth behind it. There’s also just SO much going on that you eventually become frustrated with it. There is a scene where a woman is talking to her husband in the bedroom.
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She asks him if he’s gay. He denies this but she presses on. Eventually he admits he is and she kicks him out before reveling she contracted AID’s from him. At this point the movie has been going on for two hours and there has been almost no moments of happiness. Does this really need to be introduced NOW?! So late in the film? With TWO big speeches following it?! Boy had I had it with this film at that point. I’m not sure who to blame for this movie getting as bad as it did. It started out good but it does nothing but pile problem on top of problem with no suggestion any of this will get better. It’s not even that realistic because everyone has a big speech to tell and they tell it theatrically and loudly.
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Since this was based on a play that was done in 1975 I’m wondering if the source material just doesn’t work for the big screen. The film is way too theatrical and the speeches even feel forced. When I heard messages that men were pigs and that black women gave up their rights I just lost it. We have a black man as a president. Oprah controls the best seller list for books. Princess Tiana is the biggest toy success Disney has had since “Cars” was released. Are we REALLY still falling back on this claim?! Now of all times? Unbelievable. Now I don’t want to get on Tyler Perry’s case too much. Growing up he suffered from sexual abuse and even lived on the streets for many years.
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Ask him about these times and he’ll admit he’d had better. Through the grace of God though (as he so put it) he somehow managed to pull himself out of these situations and do pretty good for himself. So it’s easy to see why a movie like this might attract him to break away from what he usually does. He relates to these women. The fact that he does little to change the material proves this. He’s also working with a group of actors (most female) that are very good and help make the movie more bearable than it is. But the film jumps all over the place and eventually becomes a headache. I’ll tell a story to prove how close people have gotten since this was a play. After this movie was over I walked into the lobby. A black woman in her forties asked me what I thought of this. I just shrugged with indifference. She chuckled and said “yeah, I didn’t get it either.”
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