Kevin's Watch

Lord Foul wrote:I'm usually leery of inspirational flicks, but this might pull me out of my cave.

Cagliostro wrote:Entertainment Weekly is starting to go on about this movie. It's not my usual fare, but if I ever do find myself going to see this in the theater, I will use the full title when asking for a ticket. Just to be obnoxious. Then again, the full title is obnoxious - just call it Precious and put in the credits that it is from a book. Or call it by the name of the book.

[/rant]

Precious is a film about how disgusting poor black people are. The men rape their daughters and make them pregnant. The women are bitter, abusive, potty-mouthed and don’t shave their armpit hair. The kids are fat and dumb. They all eat pigs’ trotters (with the hairs still on them) and fried chicken. Loads of fried chicken. They steal it from takeout joints; they eat it while walking in the street; it stains their mouths and clothes; they vomit it up again into dustbins. Hmm-mm, they loves their fried chicken, yessir.

But it’s okay, because this isn’t a film made by racists who want to show us how disgusting poor black people are. It’s a film made by influential, middle-class black people who want to show us how disgusting poor black people are. Directed by Lee Daniels (who produced Monster’s Ball and directed Shadowboxer), and funded and enthusiastically promoted by Oprah Winfrey, Precious is designed not to make us hate poor black people (well, not all of them) but to make us pity them. So that’s all right then.

This is black trash porn. Set in Harlem in 1987 (and yet Precious daydreams about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 – now that’s dumb, Mr Daniels), it tells the story of 16-year-old Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones (played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), who already has one child by her father and is expecting another. She is morbidly obese and pretty much illiterate. She lives with her mother – spectacularly overplayed by comedian and talkshow host Mo’Nique – who is a welfare parasite, never leaves the apartment, and cares more for her mangy cats than she does for her ‘fat motherfucker’ of a daughter (sorry, but they’re her words).

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.
Let’s scrutinize their endorsement: Precious isn’t simply a strivers’ message movie; Perry and Winfrey recognize its propaganda value. The story of an overweight black teenage girl who is repeatedly raped and impregnated by her father, molested and beaten by her mother comes from a 1990s identity-politics novel by a poet named Sapphire. It piles on self pity and recrimination consistent with the air-quotes’ own oft-recounted backstories. Promoting this movie isn’t just a way for Perry and Winfrey to aggrandize themselves, it helps convert their private agendas into heavily hyped social preoccupation.
But Perry and Winfrey aren’t all that keep Precious from sinking into the ghetto of oblivion like such dull, bourgie, black-themed movies as The Great Debaters or The Pursuit of Happyness. That’s because the film’s writer-director Lee Daniels works the salacious side of the black strivers’ street. Daniels knows how to turn a racist trick. As producer of Monster’s Ball, Daniels symbolized Halle Berry’s ravishment as integration; Kevin Bacon titillated pedophilia in Daniels’ The Woodsman and Daniels’ directorial debut, Shadowboxing, hinted at interracial incest between stepmother and son Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr.
Winfrey, Perry and Daniels make an unholy triumvirate.They come together at some intersection of race exploitation and opportunism. These two media titans—plus one shrewd pathology pimp—use Precious to rework Booker T. Washington’s early 20th-century manifesto Up From Slavery into extreme drama for the new millennium: Up From Incest, Child Abuse,Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty and AIDS. Regardless of its narrative details about class and gender, Precious is an orgy of prurience. All the terrible, depressing (not uplifting) things that happen to 16year-old Precious recall that memorable All About Eve line, “Everything but the bloodhounds nipping at her rear-end.”

Cagliostro wrote:Strangely enough, Brendan O’Neill and Armond White have recently disappeared with no trace. Family members are very concerned.


The imperial hand of Oprah?