For Colored Girls: Attention all you Tyler Perry
haters out there: our clownish, self-taught playwright/filmmaker/drag artist
has produced a mini-masterpiece that includes a glimpse of the down-low, child
murder, back alley abortions and the sight of an all-star female ensemble
finding the perfect way to get inside the skin of poet Ntozake Shange’s 1974
play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow
Is Enuf.
Not unlike an earlier autodidact,
the late Preston Sturges, Tyler Perry has amassed a small fortune and fervent
fan base by essentially conjuring his own special hybrid of genres: in his case
gritty urban dramas about the travails of African-American women at the hands
of good for nothing African-American boyfriends and husbands, with the stew
flavored with heavy dollops of camp, drag – his signature terrorist black diva
ghetto matriarch, the pistol packing, jive talking Madea – and just about any
rambunctious theatrical device he can pull out of his ass and folk humor
engorged imagination.
With influences as eclectic as
Oprah and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Perry
might not seem the ideal choice to adopt a 70’s feminist classic stage work
that was both a product of and wildly ahead of its time. Perry has thoroughly
revised, expanded and updated the playwright’s self-proclaimed work-in-progress
while not undermining its multiple messages or cheapening its unique poetic
style with coarse melodrama.
Working with a brilliant
female cast – his film regulars Janet Jackson and Kimberly Elise joined by suchy
well proven talent as Kerry Washington, Thandie Newton, The Cosby Show’s Phylicia
Rashad, and the astonishing Whoopi Goldberg as a playing it perfectly straight
scary religious fanatic – Perry gives us a complicated poetic urban musical
drama directed at the soul while not insulting one’s other faculties. Not for
the faint of heart the “R” rating: “contains scenes of child murder, rape,
domestic abuse and an illegal abortion” should be carefully considered before
choosing one’s film companion.
P.S. If you want to sample the
wildly improbably path Tyler Perry took to pulling off For Colored Girls, get
a DVD of his triple threat screen debut: Diary of a Mad Black Woman.
127 Hours: As a child when I began taking myself to
movies that were, perhaps, a tad too much for my super squeamish soul –
Christopher Lee’s riveting Count in the Hammer Films’ super saturated blood red
Horror of Dracula comes to mind – I would carefully calculate when the
icky, too scary stuff was about to the hit the screen and duck down below the
seat in front of me or even prance out into the lobby until I figured it was
safe to watch again. Those childish, self-protecting instincts took hold during
a Mill Valley Festival screening of Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. Based on Aron
Ralston’s memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, the film essentially
expands on the fable of the coyote who, when caught in a trap, chews off his
leg in order to escape. In this case the coyote is a red blooded American grown
up kid who recklessly throws himself up against nature’s most pitiless scenery
and bets that he’ll just bounce out of trouble much like the cartoon character
Wiley E. Coyote. In the book the author loses the bet, performs an agonizing
act of self-mutilation and becomes the man he always needed to be. For
audiences the trick is daring oneself to sit through, eyes wide open, that
awful obligatory moment – in the film an almost unbearable four minutes – so as
to experience the epiphany one critic describes that “pins you down, shakes you
up and leaves you glad to be alive.”
That’s one way of looking at it – I
have long nurtured a serious grudge against those hormonal daredevils who
expect the rest of us to save their reckless asses when they get themselves
into Oliver Hardy’s proverbial fine mess. But if you have to go there who
better to save than James Franco’s jittery jumping jack. Director Boyle – who’s
a past master at sticking us inside of thrilling if cringe inducing messes (Trainspotting,
28 Days Later) – has with his screenwriting partner, Simon Beaufoy, figured
out some ingenious devices for opening up and lending a poignant gravitas to
the story: the best trick, a mesmerizing internal narrative device, is having Aron
keep a video diary of his ordeal to provide his parents with a dignified
keepsake of his final hours. Just as effective is Franco’s hallucinations where
Aron leaves his boulder trapped body and re-imagines all his young life’s peak
moments and the folks he’ll never see again.
A first act highlight allows us to
glimpse what the character had intended his trip to be before disaster strikes:
playfully diving into a deep canyon pool with two female hikers who invite him
to a college kegger later that night.
Despite our appreciation of his
versatility in Milk and Howl, this is a James Franco we’ve never
glimpsed before: the gorgeous, reckless, stoned out fool duking it out with the
closet intellectual, evolving grownup. This exhilarating film that brutally
conjures many of my worst fears and phobias: dismemberment, tight places and
dying alone, will probably make my top list while never tempting me to sit
through it again without looking away.
Fair Game: While this nimbly performed political spy
thriller will have many reaching for their Bush bashing software, for those who
remember post-Watergate efforts to reform the CIA, it’s a little annoying to
find ourselves rooting for a CIA operative as the hero of a tangled story about
the hotly contested Iraq invasion. That said, English born, Aussie raised Naomi
Watts hits all the right American accented notes as veteran spy, Valerie Plame,
who finds herself caught between the Chaney/Bush disinformation machine and her
excitable ex-diplomat hubby, Joe Wilson’s (Sean Penn), penchant for turning the
battle over Saddam’s WMD’s into a personal pissing contest with Bush bloggers. Watts
and Penn nimbly get to that excruciating moment when a private marriage goes
toxic in the full glare of our 24/7 age news cycle.