For Colored Girls: Grade B

B

For Colored Girls (2010)

Kimberly Elise, Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Tessa Thompson; Writer and Director Tyler Perry.

These are vignettes from the lives of nine black women living in New York. Some of the lives intersect as the movie develops. There is not much dramatic tension, either in each life-story, or overall in the movie; it is strictly a “slice of life” approach. The stories are loose representations of Ntozake Shange’s 1975 set of poems and dances, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf. The original had only seven characters, whereas this movie has nine, making the movie confusing and hard to keep track of. Passages of Shange’s work are read by actors in several scenes and their lyrical beauty leaps out at you. It is a harsh transition back to Perry’s mundane script after those segments.

Overall, the message of the movie is simple: Men (black men anyway) are immature, lying, cheating, disease-ridden, alcoholic, thieving rapists who want only one thing. They smile and sweet talk women while betraying them, murdering their children, ruining their lives. Black women, on the other hand, are gentle, sensitive, caring souls who seek love and understanding, and tragically, that need is so great it causes them to spread their legs when they shouldn’t, and blindly trust their lives to the aforementioned male ratbastards. The thematic content of the movie is so exaggerated that it verges on tragicomedy despite all the maudlin tears. And at well over two hours, repetition soon becomes boring.

But you should watch the movie anyway. Why? For the stunning acting. Most of these women give performances of Shakespearean proportions. Thandi Newton, Kerry Washington, and Kimberly Elise – wow! It’s acting like you haven’t seen in one place before. Janet Jackson acquits herself, but she’s had so much bizarre cosmetic surgery that she looks like Michael, and that’s all I could think about. Whoopi is the weakest character but she had to be included because of her role in The Color Purple. Kudos go to Perry’s directing and writing. I did not know he had this kind of thing in him, judging from his other broad, farcical, slapstick movies. This was a revelation in that regard. Good cinematography, good music, tight editing. Despite the melodrama, it’s worth seeing.

Good Hair: Grade A

A
Good Hair (2009)
Chris Rock. Director Jeff Stilson.

In this documentary, Rock explores the world of hair styling for African-American women. He interviews numerous prominent figures, from Kerry Washington to Maya Angelou (and even Al Sharpton), about why they use hair relaxer (sodium hydroxide, a nasty and toxic chemical) to straighten their hair, when they first started doing it, and how they feel about it.

There is also a section showing a huge chemical factory in Atlanta that produces such hair products and runs a beauty school for women to work with African-American hair. There is a brief trip to Chennai (Madras), India to investigate where human hair comes from for “weaves,” the hairpieces many women wear. There were a couple of interviews of black men who discussed what it was like to be with a woman whose hair you were never allowed to touch. The film ends with an annual, national black hair stylists convention, competition and trade fair, which is actually mostly theatrical spectacle and wholesale product promotion, and not much about hair styling, but it allows the film to end on a high note of color, music, and dancing.

I found the documentary completely fascinating, at times horrifying, and often funny. I felt a strong sense of racial divide, since white people are only vaguely aware of the black hair industry and what goes on. Of course it is obvious that movie stars and other entertainers straighten their hair and wear hairpieces. Anyone who was alive in the “afro ‘70s” remembers the original look. But for most of us, especially males, hair products and hair styling, are simply not topics worthy of much attention. Rock’s contribution is to focus attention on the magnitude of the black hair industry (billions of dollars annually), its exploitative nature (nearly all the black hair product companies are white-owned), the widespread extent of black hair straightening treatment, its high cost to individuals, its effect on children and on interpersonal relationships, and its health and safety risks.

These are all important topics that have remained outside the mainstream consciousness. Quite a few of the interviewees were visibly embarrassed to talk about hair treatments in the black culture, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, but suggest some kind of racial tension.

Rock does not attempt to provide any answers. He does not ask, nor do interviewees say, why they feel it is necessary to straighten black hair, except “to be beautiful,” which of course begs the question, why is straight hair more “beautiful” than curly hair? I think we all know that answer to that question anyway. It is media (commercial) manipulation of the country’s norms and values and the failure of the education system to instill critical thinking skill. It’s the same manipulation that makes hemlines go up and down, cars to go in an out of fashion, and people believe that “fast food” is really food. That would be a different documentary, maybe one presented by Noam Chomsky. Rock found a compromise between the need to raise important issues of personal values and the need to entertain an audience with lightweight media fluff. In that regard, the documentary is a masterpiece.

American Violet: Grade C

C
American Violet (2008)
Nicole Beharie, Alfre Woodard, Will Patton; Director Tim Disney.

A young African-American single mother (Beharie) with four kids is wrongfully arrested on drug charges in a small town in Texas. The police “drug task force” had her name on a list of pushers provided by a mentally incompetent informant under duress. She is offered 6 years as a plea bargain, against 25 years if adjudicated guilty. The local DA is the stereotypical racist “lock ‘em up” bastard. The ACLU intervenes and persuades the mother to sue the DA for racism, an almost impossible charge to prove.

Based on a true story, the movie highlights many legal problems, not just in Texas but all over the country: racial profiling, disproportionate numbers of blacks in prison, use of dubious police informants, the problems inherent in the plea bargaining system, and of course, racist DA’s. These are all important issues, so the movie gets points for didacticism. Acting is strong, particularly by newcomer Beharie and by a sensitively played ACLU local counsel, Patton. Directing is undistinguished, cinematography is television cliché, and so is the writing. The pace is far too slow to sustain what little legal tension there is in the script. It will do fine on TV.

The Family That Preys: Grade C

C
The Family that Preys (2008)
Alfre Woodard, Sanaa Lathan, Rockmond Dunbar, Cole Hauser, Kathy Bates, Tyler Perry. Writer-Director Tyler Perry.

I tried this one because I really like Alfre Woodard, and she gives a good performance here as a contemporary woman who inexplicably lives in a house far beyond the means of the owner of a small diner grossing $200 a week. She has daughter (Lathan) married to a construction worker (Dunbar). Bates is head of a wealthy family and CEO of a large construction firm. Her ambitious but inept son (Hauser) schemes to get her job. In a confusing opening, we are to understand that these two families and the two matriarchs especially are longtime friends. How that friendship came about or what sustains it is not revealed but we must accept the premise. The story is classic soap, as Woodard’s ambitious daughter has an affair with the rich and married son of Bates. The middle act is a pointless Thelma and Louise - style road trip for the two older women that allows some moments of acting. In the end, the wayward children get their comeuppance, morality is preserved, and everything is rosy. It’s just dreadful writing, perhaps designed to appeal to afternoon couch potatoes. However, the acting and directing are respectable, production values are high, and sets are very detailed and convincing. It is a visually attractive film, tightly edited and well-paced. It just seems to be content-free.

The Great Debaters: Grade D

D
The Great Debaters (2007)
Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker. Writer-Director Robert Eisele

Stand And Deliver meets Dead Poet’s Society? Washington is a Debate coach at an all-Negro college in the south in 1935. Can his team of young, enthusiastic students, including the first female to ever make the team, win the regional championship? Of course they can, with Washington’s incessant harangues. Whitaker is the stern, conservative father of the youngest debater, and he wants to be sure his son is studying, not fooling around with that girl. The son, for his part, is ashamed of his father for having been humiliated by some white rednecks (who, actually, did nothing more than make him pay for a pig he accidentally killed with his car). Washington stupidly barks his lines without a trace of understanding or subtlety, preventing us from forming any sort of connection with him. Whitaker shows a much higher level of acting but his character is such a stereotype, we never really understand him. I have been a judge for high school debate competitions, and they are highly ritualized procedures that look and sound nothing like what this movie shows. Maybe it was different back then, but these melodramatic and “precious” speeches I’m quite sure would have won no contests even in 1935. Overall, the movie is trite, stereotyped, derivative, badly written and badly directed. Its main virtues are some acting by Whitaker and the fact that it displays intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working black people in the 1930’s.