The star TV talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey has been involved over the years in three significant movies based on celebrated novels by black authors. In 1985, she appeared as a natural rebel alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Steven Spielberg's skilful, soft-centred adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple about the oppression of black women in the Deep South, the need for sisterhood and the romance of Africa.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire
Production year: 2009Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 109 minsDirectors: Lee DanielsCast: Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe, Gabourey Sidibe, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Mo'Nique, Paula PattonMore on this filmIn 1998, she produced and starred in Jonathan Demme's film of Toni Morrison's Beloved. In this ambitious failure, Winfrey played the runaway slave who kills her baby rather than see her recaptured by white pursuers and, a decade after the Civil War, is haunted by the child's ghost. Now she is the co-producer of Lee Daniels's Precious, adapted by Geoffrey Fletcher from Push, the bestselling 1996 novel by Ramona Lofton, the writer and performance poet who styles herself "Sapphire".
Made on a much smaller budget, Precious is a simpler, tougher work than the two preceding films and altogether more effective. The setting is Harlem in 1987, the central character the obese 16-year-old black girl Claireece Jones, known as "Precious", unforgettably played in her first professional role by the vast, imposing Gabourey Sidibe, daughter of a New York gospel singer and a Senegalese father. Precious is illiterate, aggressive, constantly tormented by fellow high-school pupils and abused, both physically and verbally by her alcoholic mother and father. She has a daughter with Down's syndrome by her father, who constantly rapes her with the mother's connivance and is pregnant again by him. Later, it's revealed that the father has died of Aids.
You might well ask who is in the market for such a film and one thinks of Eliot's smug statement: "Humankind cannot bear much reality" and those newsreaders who preface horrendous reports from Haiti with the warning: "There are scenes some viewers may find disturbing." But over the years there have been a number of highly acclaimed pictures of this kind. Just after the Second World War, for instance, there was a widely shown Danish picture called Ditte, Child of Man, about the unremittingly miserable life of an illegitimate, working-class girl with a drunken mother, a brutal stepfather who was raised in poverty, seduced and abandoned.
The following year, in 1947, Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero, the most despairing of neorealist movies, charted the destruction of a 13-year-old orphan in the ruins of Berlin. More recently, there's Robert Bresson's religious allegory Mouchette (1967), about the endless humiliations heaped upon a teenage country girl in a remote French community that ends with her suicide. But these were art-house productions aimed at middle-class audiences, not from Hollywood and targeting mainstream viewers.
Precious certainly is unflinching in the presentation of its heroine's life and prospects. The brief impressionistic scenes in which she's raped are horrendous and the confrontations with her mother Mary (a performance of extraordinary courage by the stand-up comedienne Mo'Nique) tear at one's guts through their language and their violence.
But from very early on, Precious invites our sympathy, her first aggressive act being an attack on two boys who disrespect a white teacher she admires. She has an inner life in which she imagines herself a star. Worthy of a love she can't find, she's struggling to find meaning in her life.
An understanding principal arranges for her to go to a special school that offers remedial education through a programme called Each One/Teach One, where she encounters an sympathetic teacher and some fellow outsiders. The teacher, Ms Rain (Paula Patton), helps her come to terms with her life through writing about it and to learn she is capable of being loved. The girls in her new class are all bruised and scarred in different ways and involve her in volatile exchanges that are sometimes violent, but also roughly comic. A lot of the film is, indeed, edgily funny, as in a moment where the other girls laugh when Precious says "insect" instead of "incest" and she comes back: "Are you a scientist now?"
Another practitioner of tough love (or what we used to call being cruel only to be kind) is a perceptive social worker, Mrs Weiss (Mariah Carey), whose ethnic identity and social background intrigue Precious. Weiss presides over a final confrontation in her office between Precious and her mother. Earlier, we've seen Mary deceive an easily convinced welfare inspector into believing she's a loving mother. Now, the mother is drawn into a confessional breakdown, explaining how she came to persecute her daughter; Mo'Nique's handling of the moment is a tour de force.
There are other revealing and moving scenes. Precious, for instance, is introduced to the notion of organic food (though it doesn't take) by a thoughtful male nurse. His job is as much a revelation to her as the discovery that Ms Rain is in a stable lesbian relationship. More than incidentally, there is on the wall of the gay couple's apartment a poster for the surprise 1976 Broadway hit, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange's landmark "choreo poem" about the social and moral empowerment of African-American women. The show no doubt influenced Sapphire as a writer.
Precious ends on an affirmative note that is sufficiently hopeful to let the audience leave the cinema without rushing to find a strong drink or a lethal dose of arsenic, but is yet consistent with its heroine's situation. The film does not, however, address itself to any larger social context. We have experienced a story, not read a case history.
The excellent cinematography, mostly raw but on occasion appropriately romantic, is the work of the British cameraman, Andrew Dunn, whose films include Gosford Park and the original BBC series Edge of Darkness.
By Phillip French
Tuesday 7 September 2010
Sunday 5 September 2010
Ebony Front Cover
Leading Star Gabby Sidibe, poses for Ebony magazine. (Ebony is one of the most and oldest African American Magazines)
Reviews
Reviews:
The Telegraph (January 28th 2010) By Sukhdev Sandhu.“Mariah Carey (don’t laugh!) as a counsellor, Lenny Kravitz (okay, laugh!) as a male nurse — are less than dark-skinned. Blackness is ugliness, a social pathology. Hmm, hardly an 'empowering’ vision, is it?”
“There’s no 'real’ here”
www.Rottentomatoes.com Gives Precious 91% on the Tomato Meter, with 185 Fresh Comments and only 18 rotten ones. Leading to an average of 7.8/10
The guardian By Peter Bradshaw.
“It isn't the transcendent masterpiece that some admirers would have you believe: more like a black-comic nightmare that isn't exactly supposed to be funny. It's certainly arresting, though.”
The Telegraph (January 28th 2010) By Sukhdev Sandhu.“Mariah Carey (don’t laugh!) as a counsellor, Lenny Kravitz (okay, laugh!) as a male nurse — are less than dark-skinned. Blackness is ugliness, a social pathology. Hmm, hardly an 'empowering’ vision, is it?”
“There’s no 'real’ here”
www.Rottentomatoes.com Gives Precious 91% on the Tomato Meter, with 185 Fresh Comments and only 18 rotten ones. Leading to an average of 7.8/10
The guardian By Peter Bradshaw.
“It isn't the transcendent masterpiece that some admirers would have you believe: more like a black-comic nightmare that isn't exactly supposed to be funny. It's certainly arresting, though.”
Research
Media Representations:
A Black teenage female named Precious, she is represented as a stereotypical black female teenager, due to the fact that she is pregnant and has been the rebel girl in school. She is pregnant with her second child and struggles to keep up with both home and school life. I think the representation is showing how people stereotypically see people like Precious, however after watching the movie fully, we are shown how hard her life is and that she never had a control over how her life would turn out to be. The representation is neither fair nor accurate because it is solely based upon one person’s life. Towards the end of the movie, Precious get’s a chance to change her life, as soon as she decides to take care of her own children and actually devote herself not only to her children but also her education.
Media Languages and Forms:
Throughout the movie there is great use of both denotative and connotative meanings. Connotations are used through the representation of Precious. The use of connotations is very important, because if shows how the audience change their opinion on precious from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie. The mise en scene helps us as viewers understand Precious’s story better, as we see how she lives we can see how hard it is for her at home. There are many shots of the streets to show the rough areas where she lives and contribute to her stereotype. There is a constant use of juxtaposition used throughout the movie, where we see shots of Precious in a glamorous set singing and signing, which shows the viewers just how different her life is from her dream.
Repetitive shots of the boiling pan of food, to reinforce the idea of how repetitive her life is (Going school, coming back home, making food and so on) and also to prominently contrast the difference between her reality and her dreams.
Iconographies consist of:
Big hoop earrings
Flat’s
Rough streets
Dialect of the actors and actresses
Narrative:
The viewers follow the story of Precious from scratch and are told about her story through her own voiceover, which allows the viewers to feel how she makes them to. As the movie has shots of real sets, and the costumes are not as glamorous, ‘real people’ can gain personal identification, as they to may be living in a state like her, or have an abusive household. I think Ideologies such as ’never judge a book by its cover’ are conveyed from the movie.
Genre:
Can be placed under the Teenage drama genre. The text does conform to the genre as it has little to no humour in it at all, and is based upon a forever contemporary issue of teenage pregnancy.
Values and ideologies:
‘Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is....Precious.’
A Black teenage female named Precious, she is represented as a stereotypical black female teenager, due to the fact that she is pregnant and has been the rebel girl in school. She is pregnant with her second child and struggles to keep up with both home and school life. I think the representation is showing how people stereotypically see people like Precious, however after watching the movie fully, we are shown how hard her life is and that she never had a control over how her life would turn out to be. The representation is neither fair nor accurate because it is solely based upon one person’s life. Towards the end of the movie, Precious get’s a chance to change her life, as soon as she decides to take care of her own children and actually devote herself not only to her children but also her education.
Media Languages and Forms:
Throughout the movie there is great use of both denotative and connotative meanings. Connotations are used through the representation of Precious. The use of connotations is very important, because if shows how the audience change their opinion on precious from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie. The mise en scene helps us as viewers understand Precious’s story better, as we see how she lives we can see how hard it is for her at home. There are many shots of the streets to show the rough areas where she lives and contribute to her stereotype. There is a constant use of juxtaposition used throughout the movie, where we see shots of Precious in a glamorous set singing and signing, which shows the viewers just how different her life is from her dream.
Repetitive shots of the boiling pan of food, to reinforce the idea of how repetitive her life is (Going school, coming back home, making food and so on) and also to prominently contrast the difference between her reality and her dreams.
Iconographies consist of:
Big hoop earrings
Flat’s
Rough streets
Dialect of the actors and actresses
Narrative:
The viewers follow the story of Precious from scratch and are told about her story through her own voiceover, which allows the viewers to feel how she makes them to. As the movie has shots of real sets, and the costumes are not as glamorous, ‘real people’ can gain personal identification, as they to may be living in a state like her, or have an abusive household. I think Ideologies such as ’never judge a book by its cover’ are conveyed from the movie.
Genre:
Can be placed under the Teenage drama genre. The text does conform to the genre as it has little to no humour in it at all, and is based upon a forever contemporary issue of teenage pregnancy.
Values and ideologies:
‘Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is....Precious.’
New Movie.
After doing some more research I have decided to do my summer project on ‘Precious’ the movie which has had many different reviews and was released in January of this year.
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