FOR COLORED GIRLS

Written and Directed by Tyler Perry

Starring Kimberly Elise, Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad and Whoopi Goldberg

Crystal: Part of me knows this is happening but part of me thinks I’m dreaming. Am I awake?

Up until seeing FOR COLORED GIRLS, I had never seen a Tyler Perry film. I’m not a fan of men in fat suits dressed up as women and I’m not really the intended demographic either for that matter. Fortunately, despite the title’s suggestion that this film is for a very specific group of people, its emotional impact should translate to anyone capable of feeling period. For while the tapestry of tragedy that Perry weaves may be about “colored girls” and should also give any “colored girl” who watches it something to take away from it, it also invites everyone else who sees it to see the world in shades they maybe never have.

FOR COLORED GIRLS is based on a 1975 stage play by Ntosake Shange called “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf”. In it, a cast of seven African-American women each represent a different color and the qualities that go along with it. They also each bring a different emotional plight to the plot, from abuse to rape to abortion. No, this is not a lighthearted film and the talented cast bare the weight of the material with proud shoulders. My personal favorite would be Kimberly Elise, whose abusive relationship leaves her beautiful face looking like a hollow, heartbroken shell. Perry added an eighth woman to his ensemble (perhaps for good luck) but keeps a key poetic element of the play in place, having each character fall into soliloquy at different intervals. They may all be “colored girls” but there is still a vast range of individuality amongst them and, while grouping together builds bonds between them, it also robs them a little of the painstakingly earned place they’ve made as people. Plus nobody talks like that; it completely stops the action.

Like the lives of the women on the screen, FOR COLORED GIRLS, is far from perfect. Perry has taken on an ambitious project and bits and pieces do manage to get away from him at times. Still, there are several other times when the film’s pace takes on such momentum that it plays like a marathon of hardship, with each woman as a runner, passing a baton of pain from one to the next. Like any race though, the runners lose their stride at times and goes on to find strength they didn’t know they had to make it to the end. For Perry, all his “colored girls” and those watching from the stands, it is an exalting finish that will leave many in tears.

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Remembering the year 2005

CRASH
Written by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco
Directed by Paul Haggis

NOTE: This article has spoilers aplenty and should not be read by anyone who has not seen the movie.


I can still remember the feeling of my stomach dropping when Jack Nicholson announced that the 2005 Best Picture Oscar was being awarded to Paul Haggis’s CRASH, and not the frontrunner, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. I wasn’t the only one either who was floored; you could here the jarred pause in Nicholson’s voice when he announced it. The signs were pointing in that direction throughout the evening. First, CRASH took Best Editing, the only award it won that I genuinely feel it warranted, keeping all those simultaneously told stories in check and well balanced. Then it came along and took Best Original Screenplay. I say took but I really mean robbed considering there were three better screenplays that should have won (Woody Allen’s MATCH POINT, George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s GOODNIGHT AND GOOD LUCK and Josh Olsen's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE). After those two wins combined with the previous win for Best Ensemble Cast at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, taking it all became a serious possibility. After it happened, the guests at my Oscar party could seriously see I was disappointed, distraught even. I popped Gustavo Santaolalla’s BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN score and began picking up after the mess.



It’s not that I don’t care for CRASH. I was just as mortified when Matt Dillon had his hands up Thandie Newton’s dress and just as gripped when he had to rescue her from her burning vehicle the next day. I was just as devastated when that adorable little girl was shot and just as exalted to witness the man-made miracle that allowed for her to survive. CRASH is not without its merits. Incredibly powerful scenes made all the more poignant by often surprising turns by Dillon, Newton, Terrence Howard and Michael Pena. To call it Best Picture though meant ignoring its condescending and manipulative storytelling techniques in favor of the ignorance it so aggressively draws to the surface. Of course race, prejudice and hatred are just as relevant now as they always have been despite the advances made, but Haggis, and I doubt he did it intentionally, preys on his viewer by using the inherent ignorance in each of us to make the film seem superior and revelatory.


CRASH takes place in a rough 24-hour period. In that period, a handful of Los Angeles inhabitants from all walks of life experience so much suffering that you would think the end of the world had arrived. Now, all that transpires is certainly possible but too darn convenient for me to swallow. Newton and Howard are seriously abused by a racist police officer (Dillon) one night and the next day, she ends up in a massive car accident and he ends up in a carjacking that turns into a run-in with the law. I bet the “Honey, how was your day?” conversation between those two had to be impressive after that. And imagine when Newton reveals that Dillon had to save her from the car and Howard is flabbergasted because Dillon’s partner (Ryan Phillippe) from the night before ended up saving his ass earlier that day. The scene between Newton and Dillon in the car cannot work as effectively if the previous scene they share doesn’t happen first but the odds are too overwhelming for me to accept. If this storyline stood on its own then perhaps it would be easier but taken with everything else, it all just feels as though Haggis is moving the pieces on the board one at a time to make the game play out as he needs instead of how it might.


The other writing technique that infuriates me more and more with further viewings of CRASH is the way Haggis delights in playing with his viewer’s ignorance. Larenz Tate and Ludacris walk down a trendy L.A. street at night and debate racial complacency and prevalence in modern society. They look like thugs but everything they’re saying about contemporary attitudes toward race make so much sense to me and must naturally appeal to my white liberal sensibility. It is so obvious that Haggis wants us to sympathize with these poor black guys who can’t get a break. Consequently, we are also supposed to feel disdain for Sandra Bullock and Brandan Fraser as they walk past in their fancy outfits toward their expensive car. Not because their combined acting performances cannot amount to anything more than embarrassment (which might explain why they are the least featured characters in the ensemble) but rather because they judged these fine, young gentlemen by the colour of their skin as they walked past them. They assumed that they look like thugs and therefore must be. Imagine the audience’s shock and disgust with themselves when the thugs actually are thugs and they steal the white people’s cars. Haggis spends all this time exposing the audience’s ignorance in hopes of opening their eyes to it but he finishes by simply reinforcing the stereotypes and insulting my intelligence.



I am aware that I am gay and I am siding with the gay-themed film but BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN had won nearly every major award leading up to the Oscars and was considered a near-lock. The win for CRASH only shows me that the mainstream Academy was not ready to bestow accolades so publicly on a gay-themed film. Not to mention, that as a gay man, I am still a minority, just an invisible one. This can get pretty ugly sometimes when people don’t censor themselves because they don’t realize that we are among them. I suffer prejudice; I am still fighting for some basic human rights because I am still seen as less than human. It is exactly this kind of hatred that makes it impossible for the characters in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN to experience the love they are so obviously meant to. It is also the exact kind of hatred that CRASH tries so hard to bring to light but yet shines no light on the plight of the gays because theirs is not a racial issue. It still sure feels that way sometimes. As for the love that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN fights so hard to foster, troubled or not, the characters in CRASH still get to have that and don’t even see for a second how fortunate they are for that opportunity. Despite this, they choose to live in their misery and all any of them can seem to do is blame everything bad in their lives on race.



Black Sheep’s 2005 Top 10

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, Directed by Ang Lee
CAPOTE, Bennett Miller
THE CONSTANT GARDENER, Fernando Meirelles
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, Grant Heslov
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, David Cronenberg
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS, Luc Jacquet
MATCH POINT, Woody Allen
MUNICH, Steven Spielberg
MYSTERIOUS SKIN, Gregg Araki
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, Noah Baumbach
WALK THE LINE, James Mangold

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