Tom Shone welcomes--nay, cherishes--the opportunity to not-see For Colored Girls, fortified by Magnolia Darkness's rich, nougaty review in the Times, from which he quotes:
"Throughout the film the characters move among realisms (kitchen sink, sudsy soap, exaggerated theatricality), connecting and separating, initially alone, though increasingly in synchronous harmony... 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."
Shone:
Moving between realisms? A room of women chiming in with sisterhood? A rape cross-cut to an opera? Any one of these things, on their own, would be enough for me not to see this movie, but all together like this, condensed into one non-ticket? I'm tempted to make this my proudest miss off the year. Yes, Dinner with Schmucks and Book of Eli snuck through my defenses (one I had to review for Slate, one I saw on a plane, so they don't really count), and The Last Airbender, Jonah Hex, The Bounty Hunter and Killers all delighted me by staying resolutely unseen. The trouble is that most of those movies were consensually bad, thereby robbing the process of ducking them any real tactical skill. What makes For Colored Girls such an intensely pleasurable near-miss is the respectful raves it is drawing, thus bringing one's highest counter-critical faculties into play. It is the film I am most grateful, on a daily basis, for not being forced to watch this year.
It isn't only the critical raves serving as deterrence.
Thank God for You Tube, where I've just found the trailer, which features the line "brown, braided woman, become yourself", some sawing cellos and a shot of someone vomiting into a trash can. Do they want anyone to see this film? Oh Joy Unbounded that there is no law to make me.
If Tom thinks that's daunting, just wait until he gets wind of the gruesome scene in Black Swan in which Natalie Portman, crushed backstage beneath a collapsed set for 127 hours, saws off her own leg and triumphs as the first peg-leg Odette/Odile, accepting an Academy Award at the curtain call. At least that's what I hear happens, though my source may not have been the most reliable, given his or her record of narcotics.
For those of us "around" in the 70s, this movie is even more of a sigh-inducer, given that we had to put up with all the hoo-ha over Ntzoke Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" back then and hoped that we had seen and heard the last of it as the decades domino'd over. Some things are so much of their time and place that that's where they belong, where they can't bother us any more.
That said, I'm a Tyler Perry fan and had he brought Madea into the ensemble to bulldoze her way in at the end and sort everybody's asses out, I would have risked a couple hours of choreopoetry and the grim ungivingness of Janet Jackson's expression. But no Madea, no me.
I'm sorry, but sometimes one must draw a stern line in the sandbox.
(source:vanityfair.com)
