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Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, and Whoopi Goldberg head up an all-star cast in a vibrant world where friends and strangers dream, fear, cry, love, and laugh out loud in an attempt to find their true selves. Adapted by writer/director Tyler Perry from Ntozake Shange's acclaimed choreopoem, this gripping film paints an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a woman of color in the modern world.Tyler Perry breaks through to a new level of achievement as a writer and director in his remake of
For Colored Girls (based on the groundbreaking 1970s play
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange). The cast is superb, especially Kimberly Elise and Phylicia Rashad. And the rest of the cast is just as compellin! g, including a low-key Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, singer Macy Gray, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Kerry Washington, and Anika Noni Rose.
For Colored Girls follows each actress/character as she faces prejudice, economic challenges, male abandonment, role upheaval--and all the emotions that go along with them. The original play was performed as poetry, and while the editing of
For Colored Girls is a little uneven, Perry lets Shange's poetry truly shine through. Any person of color, any woman, and anyone who cares about them, will be drawn in to the deepest dramas a woman of color can experience--in the '70s or today. Viewers will get goose bumps when Newton's character, Tangie, says, "Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet." And Elise as Crystal is utterly heartbreaking, with a performance reminiscent of her unforgettable turn in
Beloved. The soundtrack of
For Colored Girls! is as unforgettable as the film, with performances by Gra! y, Sharo n Jones, and others, including Estelle, in a showstopping version of "All Day Long (Blue Skies)." The blues may be wrenching--but in
For Colored Girls, they make up the poetry of life. --
A.T. HurleyJanet Jackson, Thandie Newton, and Whoopi Goldberg head up an all-star cast in a vibrant world where friends and strangers dream, fear, cry, love, and laugh out loud in an attempt to find their true selves. Adapted by writer/director Tyler Perry from Ntozake Shange's acclaimed choreopoem, this gripping film paints an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a woman of color in the modern world.Tyler Perry breaks through to a new level of achievement as a writer and director in his remake of
For Colored Girls (based on the groundbreaking 1970s play
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange). The cast is superb, especially Kimberly Elise and Phylicia Rashad. And the rest of the cast is just as compell! ing, including a low-key Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, singer Macy Gray, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Kerry Washington, and Anika Noni Rose.
For Colored Girls follows each actress/character as she faces prejudice, economic challenges, male abandonment, role upheaval--and all the emotions that go along with them. The original play was performed as poetry, and while the editing of
For Colored Girls is a little uneven, Perry lets Shange's poetry truly shine through. Any person of color, any woman, and anyone who cares about them, will be drawn in to the deepest dramas a woman of color can experience--in the '70s or today. Viewers will get goose bumps when Newton's character, Tangie, says, "Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet." And Elise as Crystal is utterly heartbreaking, with a performance reminiscent of her unforgettable turn in
Beloved. The soundtrack of
For Colored Gir! ls is as unforgettable as the film, with performances by G! ray, Sha ron Jones, and others, including Estelle, in a showstopping version of "All Day Long (Blue Skies)." The blues may be wrenching--but in
For Colored Girls, they make up the poetry of life. --
A.T. HurleyThe history of black women in America: having emigrated on a purely involuntary basis, they became slaves to white America and nurturers to white America's offspring. They were rewarded by being the last Americans given the right to vote. This explosive, vivid "choreopoem" illuminates the story of black women in America as they celebrate in song, poetry and dance their strength, beauty and enormous capacity for love. The seven women comprising the cast, including author Ntozake Shange, share with the viewer their exuberance for life and their ability to begin again, no matter how ridiculous the odds. "A play that should be seen, savored and treasured."
--The New York Times. With Alfre Woodard, Ntozake Shange, and Lynn Whitfield. This video, from the Broadwa! y Theater Archive of PBS's New York affiliate, WNET, offers an imaginative, if occasionally heavy-handed, television adaptation of Ntozake Shange's poetic theater piece. Originally staged at the Public Theater in New York, this 1982 production is directed by Oz Scott, who transforms what were a series of feminine monologues about the black woman's struggle to find her place in a man's world. What Shange's language conjures by itself onstage, Scott helps visualize on video, a proposition that misses as often as it hits. Language about boyfriends isn't made clearer or more vital by showing us who's being talked about. But the overproduction can't strip Shange's language of its juicy richness--and it is offered with power and humor by a cast that includes then-fledgling actresses Lynn Whitfield and Alfre Woodard as well as Shange herself.
--Marshall FineFrom its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public! Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Awardâ€"winning
for colo! red girl s who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by
The New Yorker for “encomÂpassing . . . every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,â€
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.PaperbackJanet Jackson, Thandie Newton, and Whoopi Goldberg head up an all-star cast in a vibrant world where friends and strangers dream, fear, cry, love, and laugh out loud in an attempt to find their true selves. Adapted by writer/director Tyler Perry from Nto! zake Shange's acclaimed choreopoem, this gripping film paints an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a woman of color in the modern world.Precious Jones, an inner-city high school girl, is illiterate, overweight, and pregnant…again. Naïve and abused, Precious responds to a glimmer of hope when a door is opened by an alternative-school teacher. She is faced with the choice to follow opportunity and test her own boundaries. Prepare for shock, revelation and celebration.Not every movie can survive the kind of hype--multiple awards at Sundance and other festivals, rapturous reviews, nominated for six Academy Awards and winner of two, for Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay--that greeted the release of
Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, but this extraordinary piece of work is more than up to the task. What's particularly notable about the film's success and acclaim is that in the beginning, at least, it presents one of the grimmest sce! narios imaginable. The scene is Harlem, New York, in 1987. Tee! nager Cl arisse Precious Jones (played by newcomer Gabourey Sibide in an absolutely fearless performance) is dirt poor, morbidly obese, semiliterate, and pregnant for the second time--both courtesy of her own father (the first baby was born with Down syndrome). Her home life is several levels below Hell, as her bitter, vengeful welfare mother, Mary (Mo'Nique, in a role that has generated legitimate Oscar® buzz), abuses her both physically and otherwise (telling Precious she should have aborted her is only the worst of a relentless flood of insults and vitriol). Yet somehow, the young woman still has hopes and dreams (depicted in a series of delightful fantasy sequences). She enrolls in an alternative school, where a young teacher (Paula Patton) takes her under her wing and even into her home, and visits a social worker (an excellent Mariah Carey; fellow pop star Lenny Kravitz is also effective as a male nurse) who further helps bring Precious out of the darkness. Incredibly, Preciou! s's circumstances deteriorate even more before showing the slightest sign of improvement, and a climactic confrontation with her mother is one of the more wrenching scenes in recent memory. But against all odds, director Lee Daniels, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (working from Sapphire's novel), and especially the wondrously affecting Sibide have managed to make
Precious a film that will lift the viewer far higher up that one might ever have thought possible.
--Sam Graham
