Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.
- Awards
- 14 wins & 17 nominations
- Tangie
- (as Thandie Newton)
- …
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe first film directed by Tyler Perry to be rated R by the MPAA.
- GoofsWhen the "Lady in Green", Loretta Devine, does her solo of "Someone took my stuff" because her boyfriend walked out on her; she has on two different green earrings.
- Quotes
Yasmine: A rapist doesn't have to be a stranger to be legitimate. Someone you never saw. A man with obvious problems. But if you been public with him, danced one dance, kissed him goodbye lightly with a closed mouth, pressing charges will be as hard as keeping your legs closed while five fools try and run a train on you. These men friends of ours, who smile nicely, take you out to dinner, then lock the door behind you...
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: Episode #19.26 (2010)
- SoundtracksWhat More Can They Do
Written and Performed by Laura Izibor
Published by Imagem (IMRO) and Universal Music Z Songs (BMI)
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corporation
An artful, gutsy, moving experience.
You could easily see this movie and say that it's overly artful, overtly gutsy, and an overwhelmingly moving experience. You would have to like this kind of high drama to get into this at all. Very high drama. I do, and so I loved this movie.
If you've seen "Crash" you know how this movie is put together--a series of high powered characters in tough situations are followed separately in an interwoven and increasingly connected urban universe. This is a work about women, African-American women, and about their ultimately horrible plight in a world of greed, horror, and men, who don't come off very well. So they turn increasingly inward, and to each other, to survive.
Director Tyler Perry has great material here--the Ntozake Shange play that wowed Broadway in 1975. One of the strengths here is one of the things people find irritating--the characters speak at times in long lines of poetic monologue. It isn't realistic, but it's beautiful, and in fact it really is poetry, and is part of the overall style. This helps form the overall aura of the movie, as well, of highbrow seriousness in a gutsy, often low income narrative. The story gets tweaked for 2010, though some of the themes don't make sense for our times, most glaring the backstreet abortion.
The acting is fabulous, and uniformly so. Everyone is able to really pour it on, which is difficult when they are sometimes speaking through actual poetry. And so through all the tears comes a realization that this very artificially outrageous drama has deeply deeply serious intentions.
If you like movies for how they are made--the editing, the filming, the set design--you'll be impressed. It's highly artful in a Hollywood, expensive way, an uncompromised production. Of course, as a viewer, you have to like that, especially when it gets artsy, as when a mother and daughter speak in two simultaneous monologues and the camera, and the sound, film back and forth between them, while still delicately keeping both threads continuous and palpable throughout. And the moment has huge symbolism, too, because it's about how they never understand each other, even when they pretend to try.
If there's a large problem here, it's in the endless excess. There is more tragedy, and more emotional crisis, than you can handle in a movie. I think it starts to be a parody of itself, and toward the end you are just ready for a catharsis. The choreographed ending is a little predictable and breezy, too, though even here, when the women gather on the roof, there is still a complex, interwove poetic power.
Forget the cynics and the impatient, if you can, that have slammed this film. It's not a typical Tyler Perry movie at all. It's a smart, beautiful film, and in some ways a great film.
- secondtake
- Nov 21, 2010
- Permalink
Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Official site
- Language
- Also known as
- For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Budget
- $21,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $37,729,698
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $19,497,324
- Nov 7, 2010
- Gross worldwide
- $37,981,984
- Runtime2 hours 14 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1