subject: Watch For Colored Girls Full Movie Free Download Online [print this page] Watch For Colored Girls Full Movie Free Download Online
It's not "Precious," but "For Colored Girls" marks an advance for Tyler Perry, as well as a big step back. In adapting Ntozake Shange's Tony-nominated play -- a cycle of poetic monologues about abuse, abortion and other issues facing modern black women, rather than a traditional narrative -- the do-it-all auteur demonstrates an ambition beyond any of his previous work. And yet the result falls squarely in familiar territory, better acted and better lit, perhaps, but more inauthentically melodramatic than ever. Perry's faithful should ensure a healthy berth for his 10th feature, while cast and pedigree will give "Girls" longer legs.
Perry was considered a controversial choice to direct Shange's celebrated "choreopoem," and understandably so. Though the text of the playwright's most affecting poems is virtually intact, Perry has unmistakably wrestled "Girls" into the same soap-opera mold of his earlier pics, connecting the passionate testimonials with cliched characterizations and two-bit psychoanalysis.
In Shange's original 1975 show, seven African-American dancers, each dressed in a different color and identified not by name but by their place in the spectrum, alternate time in the spotlight, while serving as a form of support network for the others. Each represents specific individual challenges facing black women, even as the group presents the community's collective experience. But if the intention, as suggested by Shange's original title ("For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf"), was to offer universal, easily identifiable experiences, then Perry's handling has regrettably diluted the effect into a series of interconnected stock stories.
The mere act of translating "For Colored Girls" to film forces fundamental and unfortunate changes on the material, softening and reducing the archetypes to specific characters. Perhaps the most fully formed of the ensemble is Crystal, inspired by "Lady in Red's" abused-lover tale and played by Kimberly Elise, star of Perry's 2005 bigscreen debut, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman." Where the show used mere words to paint the long-suffering mother's unhappy existence, here we see the sad confines of her life and meet the broken war veteran (Michael Ealy) who crosses the line trying to convince her to marry him. It all seems small by comparison, the performers so obviously play-acting, the situation so transparently false.
