Why no discussion of [url=]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929632/?
I saw it after hearing a ton of buzz about it. It’s a disturbing story, similar to how American History X is both disturbing yet interesting, and I thought it was a good. Not great, but certainly better than 95% of the drivel out there now.
I haven’t seen the film, but according to people I know who have, it seems Lee Daniels’ direction is ham-handed enough to provoke a backlash ranging from questioning some of Daniels’ decisions to the histrionics of Armond White.
SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Perry and Winfrey naively treat Precious’ exhibition of ghetto tragedy and female disempowerment as if it were raw truth. It helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms—self-respect be damned.
[…]
Perry and Winfrey may think Precious is serious, but Daniels is hoisting his freak flag. He gets off on degradation. Flashbacks to Precious’ rape contain a curious montage of grease, sweat, bacon and Vaseline. Later, he intercuts a shot of pig’s feet cooking on a stove with Precious being humped while her mother watches from a corner. Another misjudged scene recreates De Sica’s B&W Two Women—a half-camp trashing of motherhood that compounds the problem of cultural alienation. So does the film’s Ebonics credit sequence and the scene of Precious rotating amidst a bombardment of success icons—Martina Arroyo, MLK, Shirley Chisholm—to which she either relates or is ignorant.This incoherence should not pass for sociology.
Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy.
[…]
Birth of a Nation glorified the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a panicky subculture’s solution to social change. Precious hyperbolizes the class misery of our nation’s left-behinds—not the post- Rapture reprobates of Christianity’s last-days theories, but the Obama-era unreachables—including Precious’ Benetton-esque assortment of remedial school classmates. One explanation is that Precious permits a cultural version of that 1960s political controversy “benign neglect”—its agreed-upon selection of the most pathetic racial images and social catastrophes helps to normalize the circumstances of poverty and abandon that will never change or be resolved.You can think: Precious is just how those people are (although Cops and the Jerry Springer and Maury Povich shows offer enough evidence that white folks live low, too).
[…]
Worse than Precious itself was the ordeal of watching it with an audience full of patronizing white folk at the New York Film Festival, then enduring its media hoodwink as a credible depiction of black American life. A scene such as the hippopotamus-like teenager climbing a K-2 incline of tenement stairs to present her newborn, incest-bred baby to her unhinged virago matriarch, might have been met howls of skeptical laughter at Harlem’s Magic Johnson theater. Black audiences would surely have seen the comedy in this ludicrous, overloaded situation, whereas too many white film habitués casually enjoy it for the sense of superiority—and relief—it allows them to feel. Some people like being conned.
Probably won’t see it…but the whole thing reminds of Percival Everett’s Erasure (itself becoming a movie).
Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken),
Well if that actually happened and was written in the book then what is the big deal? It aint racist or a stereotype if its true yo.
Also that Armond White guy is nuts. Why do they still publish the trash he writes? It really does read like a crazy person wrote it. I mean really the guy loved Transformers 2!
I am in awe of your “probably.” I would rather sit in a Port-A-Potty engulfed in a tire fire and pound on my genitals with a white-hot tack hammer than watch this film.
the film’s Ebonics credit sequence
Are you fucking serious?
R.I.P.
I dunno, I saw it in a theater with a mostly black audience (and mainly women) and they got into it. There was a lot of cheering for precious and the opposite for her mother. I don’t recall anything like skeptical laughter when she presented the baby to her mom, but there were definitely a lot of squeamish reactions around that scene (and others).
Anyway, I thought it was a good movie, great performances…very gritty and disturbing.
Over the course of the shoot the production lost an editor, a cinematographer, three continuity people, three locations managers, two producers, two assistant directors, two sound people, two video playback people, and two caterers.
OMG! Is anyone looking for them? We should send out a search party at once!
What do you mean, “actually happened”? Precious is based on a book, Push, that is a work of fiction. Here’s the author talking about the source of the story:
MM: Was Precious based on someone you knew then?
S: No. She was a composite. Although while I was teaching, I did meet a young woman who told me that she had a baby by her father when she was twelve. I thought, How do you get up from that? So that was something that just stayed with me. Then, later, she told me she had AIDS. I went into this whole thing of, “Many people have HIV, and da-da-da,” and then I realized she was trying to tell me she was gonna die. She just said, “I don’t have time for this. I’m not dropping out, but I don’t have time to take the G.E.D. and all that.” I asked her what she wanted to do. She was a brilliant poet and she said, “I wanna write.” And that’s when I realized she, like most of the women in that class, was never gonna be able to tell her story.
I’m in awe of your willingness to take White’s word as unequivocal truth. I mean, it is professional contrarian Armond White.
That being said, this film looks like a case where fantastic performances cover for incompetent direction.
So the whole thing is bullshit then got it.
Anyways she steals fried chicken that is almost enough right there to get me to go see it.
The problem for me is that this has been hyped for so long and is only now getting into theatrical wide release. Sundance was almost a year ago. There were apparently a whole bunch of legal disputes about who had the rights to distribute the film. It just comes across as too much hype for too long or an attempt to position the film for maximum Oscar consideration. When those things happen I become skeptical of the filmmakers real motivations.
No, this has better acting.
The lack of Sandra Bullock in this movie helps it immensely.
You know it has Mariah Carey in it, right?
You know it has Mariah Carey in it, right?
From what I’ve heard, she redeems herself here.
I would definitely rather watch you do that than watch this film.
You would never know it. I mean that as a compliment to the film.
Somebody had to explain who she played to me afterward because I couldn’t figure it out.
At least she is attractive.