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Tyler Perry has been led out to critical slaughter so many times, it might seem a wonder that he continues to make movies. Except that Mr. Perry addresses his movies to black audiences and, until recently, has shown relatively little interest in crossing over. His enormous commercial success with a mainly black audience and the often ferociously hostile reviews from mostly white critics might seem symptomatic of an insurmountable racial divide. Black people love him and white people don’t get him, and that sort of thing, which might be somewhat true but ignores that another important dividing line runs along taste and not color.
Serious question: Is it ok to describe someone as "colo(u)red" in America?
Over in the UK, it's generally known as pretty appalling and very uncool to use this term for a black person. I've not heard it used as by Americans before. I wondered if it might be an ironic use of the word by the Black community, similarly to how some describe themselves as "niggaz"..? Prince M&M people are as mad as a bag of sparrows. Fact. | |
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Where "the N-word" has been adopted into everyday vernacular by many in the African American community, it is never okay to refer to people as colored. I can't think of any one way where it wouldn't come across as offensive. It basically harkens back to days of segregation where things were "Whites only" or "Coloreds only (unless Caucasians decide they want to use it)" | |
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So how come they're using the term for the film then? Prince M&M people are as mad as a bag of sparrows. Fact. | |
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Actually no. "Colored" was a term used during the early 1900s through the early 60s, to define the race of Black/African-Americans. Some Black Americans born before the civil rights era, actually have that term "Colored" defining their race and their parents, written on their hospital birth certificates. That term is no longer used to define Black/African-Americans, although you will find that some White people, mainly the ones from that era, still using that term. Believe it or not, in the past few years, I havel run across a few White people that use the terms "Colored" or "Negro" to define Black/African-Americans. [Edited 11/8/10 6:48am] | |
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As defined by many of the actresses in the movie, who were interviewed, including Janet Jackson, each woman has a color "red, green, yellow, white, etc." that defines their lives. The movie is not so much about the race of these women in the movie, but more about what color their lives represent. Janet Jackson character represented the color "red", while actress Loretta DeVine's character represents the color "green". This is a ovie that all women can relate to, not just Black women, because the actresses happen to be Black
It was originally a play that happened to be written by someone of African-American descent, and was on broadway back in the 70s with black actresses playing the parts. The original name was "For Colored Girls who consider suicide when the Rainbow isn't enough". The rainbow defined the "color" of the lives of the women. [Edited 11/8/10 6:51am] | |
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It was the preferred term back in the fifties. "Negro" was considered more formal, but back then, it was not offensive. It was more offensive to call someone "black" back then. If you called someone black in the forties or fifties, you would likely be in a fight. It was the highest form of degradation to be called black before the mid 60's. | |
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Well yes, the term "Negro" was used during the slavery days, well into the 1960s. If you check the census from the early 1900s, you'll see that term "Negro" was used moreso than "Colored" to define American Blacks. Even those in the Caribbean. Somehow "Colored" was not that embracing to many Blacks, but there are many blacks, born in America, who have the term "Colored" on the hospital birth certificates to define their race and that of their parents. It wasn't until the mid 60s that many Blacks started accepting the term "Black American" and a took a while before many wanted to use the term "Black American". Many in the 60s had also preferred and used the term "Afro-American at the same time the term "Black American" was trying to make its way into the mix. I remember many Blacks confused around that time, about how they wanted to be defined with dignity. James Brown helped to make the term "Black American" more acceptable because he gave it some dignity.
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i agree with this, i also think it is a play on words, if you will, by calling the 'colored girls' colored girls, you know what i mean? kind of a double entendre, literary irony.
my mom saw it and said it was kind of a hot mess at any rate. i've only see one of perry's films, and i've tended to shy away since then. | |
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Very interesting, thanks for your opinions folks. And yes, I get the use of irony with the idea of colo(u)r within the film/play. A bit pretentious, in my opinion - as it's not exactly subtle irony! But I'm very grateful for the 4 of you spending the time to answer my questions. Prince M&M people are as mad as a bag of sparrows. Fact. | |
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No problem! I believe a lot of folks figured the story having black actresses, and the title being "Colored Girls", that it focused specifically on the race of the women on a "cultural" basis, but it turns out, that it was more about what "color" of the rainbow, the lives of those Black women reflected, and it just happened to be Black women that played the roles.
Basically the "colors" the actresses represented, can reflect any woman's life. By the way, I'm one of those Black women (as well as my siblings) who has "Colored" defined as my race--as well as my parents on my original birth certificate. I'm sure I'm not the only one of course. About 3 years ago, I started referring to it as a "historical" birth certificate, solely because of the history behind the term "Colored" used back in the day. It's all good though, that term never defined my character or basically who I am as an individual, so all is well, and life goes on. [Edited 11/8/10 21:27pm] | |
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Lord knows I can watch House Party 1 and Five Heartbeats ALL DAY "We may deify or demonize them but not ignore them. And we call them genius, because they are the people who change the world." | |
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.......This is why black folk need to stop going to any Cinema or TV...
They have one Token and people rally around them for about 5-10 years.. Then, the token's ego is inflated..
("I'm the only black doing this or that..Syndrome" Yeah, your're popular because you are the only, or few of us that "The Gaytekeepers" allowed to do what you do!)
People just tired of black men killin', being closet homsexuals, or black women crying.
Tired.
Then, the producers and directors keep making black rappers and singers in actors..lol. Soundtracks don't sell anymore..So, why should they be lazy, and pick some rapper that their son or daughter likes to be in a film.
What are you going to miss?
The Summer Blockbusters and actors just began to seem become weaker year after year (no matter their nationality)... The Product that are not "black films are getting worse and worse".
Black people stop giving your money to The Movie Industry.
Hollywood (or Arts) is only liberal and charitable to homosexuals. Like most corporations they do enough just to "get by"..
YHWH is Elohim and Yahoshua is King
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More like a play on my damn wallet. | |
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Gray, did you see the movie? A friend of mine saw it and said it was good, as well as a tearjerker. she said she's going to see it again. I'm still debating if I should see this movie or just wait for it to come out on cable. | |
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That movie was NOT good imho. Predictable as a 3rd grade play. They tried.....they failed. | |
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I first read the book when I was 16. It blew my mind and affected me deeply. I've read it at least 10-15 times since. When I first heard that Tyler Perry was going to helm the movie version I was pissed.
After getting into a disagreement with some folks over the movie I decided to go see it. Can't really complain about something if I haven't seen it. Well, now that Mr. Perry has gotten my $16 he can kiss my ass. The disservice he did to this brilliant work? He should be ashamed. If that's the best he could do, he needs to find a new damn job stat.
If the story interests you, do yourself the favor and read the book instead. Amazon's got the paperback for $10. Ntozake Shange deserves your money more. Proud Succubi Bitch! | |
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Co-sign 2 the 6th power. | |
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I see it's gotten a Critic's Pick from the New York Times. Should be interesting to check out...I loved the book when I was younger and when I spent some time studying theatre at the historic Karamu House it was a signature piece there so I am interested. In any case I'm not going to sit here and whine about the state of black cinema being traced to one singular individual. I'll see the film and make up my mind for myself if Perry's growing as a writer and director.
MOVIE REVIEWFor Colored GirlsNYT Critics' Pick
From left, Kerry Washington, Phylicia Rashad and Anika Noni Rose in “For Colored Girls.” A Powerful Chorus Harmonizing ‘Dark Phrases of Womanhood’By MANOHLA DARGISPublished: November 4, 2010More About This Movie
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There are other lines separating audiences, and whether you like Mr. Perry’s work may depend on your color or sex or love of boiling melodrama, ribald comedy, abrupt tonal shifts, blunt social messages, unforced talk about God and flourishes of camp, sometimes whipped together in one scene. The orgiastic wedding that brings “Madea’s Family Reunion” to its dizzying finish features a muscleman blowing like Gabriel under a ceiling from which women dressed as angels hang like ornaments, some playing instruments — including a white piano — a display of outrageous imagination that is either a nod to Busby Berkeley or the product of a lunatic vision such as (some) fever dreams are made of. Mr. Perry is, it goes without saying, a maximalist, informed by theatrical traditions (from the church and his stage work on the chitlin’ circuit) and the golden age of Hollywood. He likes big moments, glamorous stars, swells of music and tears that fall like rain — and sometimes hail. For most of his career he has not been a good filmmaker, in terms of making beautiful pictures and putting those images into kinetic motion, though the same can be said of other name directors. He isn’t a visual stylist, certainly. His strengths lay elsewhere, including his work with performers, which over the course of his prolific career has only improved, as evidenced by his latest, “For Colored Girls,” a thunderous storm of a movie. The film is based on Ntozake Shange’s electric play, the self-described choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Inspired by “our mothers,” including Isis, Zora Neale Hurston, Anna May Wong and Calamity Jane, the work, first staged in 1974 as a work in progress and performed ever since, including on Broadway. It is a classic of its unapologetic feminist era, consisting of some 20 poems accompanied by choreographed movement and music, including a blast of Martha and the Vandellas. The characters are seven chromatically differentiated women (brown, yellow, purple, red, green, blue and orange) from points across the country, who recite “dark phrases of womanhood” (the first words in the play) involving infanticide, incest and other horrors. (Mr. Perry adds two more women.) That might sound unbearable, but done right it’s thrilling — specific in its pain, universal in its reach — and Mr. Perry works very hard and gets it mostly right. He succeeds even when art seems to have taken a back seat to commercial choices, as in the casting of Janet Jackson, who plays Jo, a magazine editor cut along the same cool lines of Meryl Streep in“The Devil Wears Prada.” Ms. Jackson is, to put it gently, an actress of limited expression. But her quiet presence has force, partly because of her eerie resemblance to her brother Michael, though also because her character’s brittle hauteur, self-involved privilege and artificiality has — like the martyrs in ermine played by the likes of Lana Turner — its own weird truth. Ms. Jackson’s marquee value, like that of Thandie Newton andWhoopi Goldberg, who play a warring mother and daughter, is doubtless its own justification. But the real draws in this version of “For Colored Girls” are the less familiar names, like Kimberly Elise, who plays Crystal, Jo’s beleaguered assistant. Ms. Elise appeared inJonathan Demme’s “Beloved” in 1998 (alongside Ms. Newton) and starred in the 2005 breakout hit, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,”written by Mr. Tyler. She returns memorably in his new film as a woman who, in surrendering to her abuse (Michael Ealy plays her desperate lover-tormentor), pays a price so harrowing it’s almost impossible to watch. Ms. Elise enrages you with Crystal’s acquiescence and then, as she should, she rips into your heart. Though amended and amplified in Mr. Perry’s screenplay, Crystal’s story comes straight from the play. Mr. Perry has scrambled around the order of the poems, added his own connective tissue and characters, and shifted the time to the present, even while leaving resonant lines and swathes of passages intact. (“I usedta live in the world/now i live in harlem & my universe is six blocks.”) The film opens with three performers in a dance studio, one of a number of nods to the play’s themes, including an illegal abortion that is not the anachronism some might hope or believe. But there are changes, including Mr. Perry’s love of melodramatic excess, that initially seem antithetical to Ms. Shange’s ferociously unsentimental original. Throughout the film the characters move among realisms (kitchen sink, sudsy soap, exaggerated theatricality), connecting and separating, initially alone, though increasingly in synchronous harmony. In one scene played for broad laughs and loud outrage, a nurse, Juanita (the buoyant Loretta Devine), solicits money from Jo for her new health clinic for poor women. Jo icily rebuffs the request: “I give to Africa. I give to AIDS.” Later, after her heart has been broken yet again, Juanita picks up the pieces and with dry eyes and musicality recites some of Ms. Shange’s signature lines (“somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff”) to a room of women chiming in with sisterhood — woman to woman — that is the play’s heart. There are roughly managed patches, including a rape that Mr. Perry crosscuts with an opera performance being watched by another character. The editing muddles his intentions, yet the assault, however awkwardly framed, contains an astonishing detail of the flailing victim fixing her eyes on a clock, waiting for an eternity to end. It’s a brilliant encapsulation of how life sometimes freezes in time. As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise,Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it — with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity. “For Colored Girls” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains scenes of child murder, rape, domestic abuse and an illegal abortion.
[Edited 11/9/10 7:33am] | |
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I was going to reply...but to save myself some pain & aggravation I decided to shove toothpicks under my fingernails instead. By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of Purgatory! |
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Note 2 self: Never EVER listen 2 critics. | |
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well i liked it and would see it again man, he has such an amazing body of music that it's sad to see him constrict it down to the basics. he's too talented for the lineup he's doing. estelle 81 | |
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Fast food, people fast food! Tyler Pery is like fast food!!! | |
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For black men who have considered homicide after watching another Tyler Perry movie
http://www.washingtonpost...04428.html
Here is another side of his movie...... Read on
Can anyone name a movie that came out recently starring a black man who wasn't a sociopath? Someone who had a terrific screen presence, like a young Paul Robeson? And he portrayed a character who was complex and fully drawn? Did he respect black women, too? Anybody see that movie? I didn't. But surely it's out there somewhere, right? An alternative to those Tyler Perry films portraying black men as Satan's gift to black women? But where is it? Maybe I didn't hear about it because of all the buzz over Perry's "For Colored Girls," which opened Friday and is based on Ntozake Shange's 1975 stage play, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf."
Or maybe I didn't hear about it because I was retching too loudly after seeing "For Colored Girls" - and reading so many inexplicably glowing reviews. "This movie is powerful," Demetria L. Lucas wrote recently in Essence, the nation's premier magazine for black women. "It is incredible. The performances in it are astonishing, but most of all, this film will leave you lifted."
Me, I thought the movie should have been renamed: "For Black Men Who Have Considered Homicide After Watching Another Perry Movie." "Oscar buzz, breaking news," read the Hollywood Reporter on Friday. "Will 'For Colored Girls' blindside Tyler Perry's critics?"
Too late. I was blindsided while watching the movie, especially when superstar Janet Jackson appeared onscreen looking like Michael Jackson with breast implants. "Don't laugh," says Shadow and Act, an online publication about black films and filmmakers. " 'For Colored Girls,' an Oscar contender?"
Oscar for what?
In the category for best infection of a black woman with a sexually transmitted disease that renders her infertile. . . . And the winner is: black man. For best down-low, double-dealing husband who has sex with wife while sneaking around having sex with men on the streets. . . . And the winner is: black man.
For best portrayal of a guy who at first seems nice but turns out to be a rapist. . . . And the winner is - OMG, his third of the night - black man! "You may need some time alone after viewing 'For Colored Girls,' " wrote Tonya Pendleton for BlackAmericaWeb.com. "Whatever you may think of the fact that it was Tyler Perry who finally brought the award-winning 1974 Ntozake Shange stage production to the big screen, it will move you." So will ex-lax.
"You will want to know that two kids get thrown out the window by their father," wrote Jane Nosonchuk for Hamptonroads.com. "The scene is well done." Do I hear another Oscar nomination? "The men in the movie are all bad guys except for the cop," Nosonchuk wrote. "They are a means to an end rather than any lead characters. Also, a back-room abortion may disturb some."
You think?
What an awful year for movies featuring black actors. Samuel L. Jackson in "Unthinkable." Thoughtless would be more like it. "Brooklyn's Finest" had a nice cast, with Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes. But Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke got top billing. "Our Family Wedding" with Forrest Whitaker was okay. But how many black wedding comedies can you watch? Even preacher T.D. Jakes is coming out with his own copycat wedding movie next year. Surely Spike Lee and Denzel Washington could team up for a sweeping historical drama - say, a black sharecropper's son, educated in a one-room schoolhouse built by slaves in Alabama, who grows up to become one of Wall Street's most powerful CEOs. Smarter than Gordon Gekko and more complex. With a cameo appearance by former Merrill Lynch chief executive Stanley O'Neal. Maybe you saw the kind of movie I'm talking about. If not, maybe it's time to make one. milloyc@washpost.com
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I'll actually try to be fair....
Here is a blogger perspective.
Here's a little bit:
Sergio and I have already screened it and shared our thoughts, which were somewhat similar in conclusion – essentially, in short, it’s not a great film, but it’s certainly not bad either. I think most will put it somewhere about average, which, frankly, as we both also agree, is good for Tyler Perry, considering his past works. Don’t expect to be overwhelmed (whether positively or negatively); as I said, don’t go looking for God or the devil, because you’ll find neither. It is what it is, if I may be so cliched
http://www.shadowandact.com/?p=33816
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" />last time i checked it was 34% positive on rottentomatoes.com
so yeah, it's probably shit. | |
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like i said, my mom said it was a hot mess. she read the book a long time ago, and apparently the book is a little different than the play which she didn't see, but she said he took 'great liberties'. i really don't think she understands the source material in the first place, to be somewhat fair to perry.
i was surprised she went to see it; i'm going up to san fran at thanksgiving and i thought i was going to have to talk her into it. i was going to suggest we go for 'shits and giggles' because i know better to expect anything from perry.
For black men who have considered homicide after watching another Tyler Perry movie - funnny, but can a sista get in on that, too. | |
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really? i was going to read the book first anyway, but maybe i should netflix it, huh? hell, even at a matinee, i would still be paying $7 here in l.a. - imma take you guys word for it and wait for netflix. | |
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Maybe I'm a bit biased but Perry's work comes off as 3rd grade 2 me. | |
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