For Colored Girls

Well...To maintain a sense of diplomacy with my feelings on this film, I will talk about the good in it first. First off, I genuinely wanted to like this film. I am a Tyler Perry fan. I respect his work and his tremendous brilliance in terms of his entrepeneurship in the industry. When I heard he was doing For Colored Girls, I was excited that he had this opportunity. I knew of the "heavy" nature of the material presented in the play, and I knew that Tyler Perry would certainly be majorly stepping out of his own genre with such a film. I felt that him directing this film would truly expose his ability to get gritty, to get real. That is what I was hoping to see from him with this one.

The turn out ended up being quite the contrary. The film featured a cast of African-American, A-list actresses, but unfortunately, not even they could save this cinematic debacle. As I mentioned above, the film deals with a lot of raw, difficult material. There is rape, there is abortion, there is trauma from years of forced incest masked through promiscuity, there is poverty, murder, and life-changing deceit. Every issue that the film deals with are issues that regular women face on a day-to-day basis. All women, not just those of color face these problems. That is the beauty within the storyline. This is also where Tyler Perry fails in his direction of the work. The film revolves around these issues but he never quite lets you come to terms with them. In the film, you see the murder of two children, but then immediately are cut away from it. It's shocking and appalling, but let me be shocked and appalled! Let me absorb what happened before you cut away to the next scene of the film before I can even come to grasp the horror that has just taken place on the screen. There is rape, and during the rape, the disgust of the act taking place in front of you is masked by interjected cuts to a different scene with an overlay of opera music. There is something just off about this. I know what Tyler Perry was trying to accomplish with such cuts, but he failed. When making a movie that is very real, and very raw, in order for the film to have the necessary effect on its audience, these disturbing scenes cannot be masked with attempted, but failed cinematic style choices. We need to see it. That's it. We need to see the acts and we need to see the reactions these acts have on the characters
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Because Tyler Perry is so caught up in this filmmaking style where everything has a happy ending and nothing is really that bad if we have faith, etc, etc, he never makes films that are real enough. In life, sometimes things are not okay. Some situations do not have happy endings. Life for some, does not always have a silver lining. Perry is doing the cinema a disservice by not showing the truth that lies in everyday life. Cinema is great in that things can be fantastical and can take us out of our everyday lives into a new world that is completely made up. However, when brought with a script like that of For Colored Girls, where the storyline revolves around the honesty, by not bringing out that nakedness within the script, you have brought cinematic detriment upon yourself as a director and your viewers.

Perry tends to make jokes at interviews and in his blogs about the fact that he will never win an Oscar for this reason or for that one. The fact is, he will never win an Oscar because he does cookie-cutter cinema. Give me something raw. Give me something real. For Colored Girls was his opportunity for that and he failed. He let what could have been one of the best, most talked about and acclaimed films of the year fall through his finger tips. I'm disappointed.