For Colored Girls

While this movie obviously had great talent, it was so depressing I barely made it through. Every woman had a heavy burden, from being HIV positive from her husband, having her children dropped from a 5th story window (the worst part), being raped by a casual acquaintance, being pregnant as a teen and having a back alley abortion, and more......it was all just about too much to take in one sitting. I don't have a problem with drama, but this was overload. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Much of the dialog was in prose and though it had a few great lines, it was difficult to follow/understand. When we left the theater and talked we found we'd both wanted to leave early in the movie...I wish one of us would have made the move!!!

Tyler Perry has performed a little miracle in transferring Ntozake Shange's exquisite play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" into an opened up and expanded film. The dialogue still is deeply embedded in Shange's poetry but the narrative Perry added makes the stage experience a flowing cinematic story: the result is a powerful film that happens to be populated by some of the finest actresses of today. The plat cannot be faithfully summarized, as it is a cluster of vignettes of ten women in crisis. Each character is given the name of a color of the rainbow, but they also have real names and the men in their off track lives actually do appear. It would be unfair to single out any one of these actresses as best because their roles are all different and make demands on the actresses in different ways. Whoopie Goldberg is the religiously inclined mother of Thandie Newton (a woman of physical needs that cannot be satisfied despite nightly change of partners) and Tessa Thompson (a high school girl with aspirations crushed by an unwanted pregnancy); Janet Jackson is a bitter, wealthy magazine editor married to the Down Low Omari Hardwick; Loretta Devine is a community service giver in a relationship with the undependable Richard Lawson; Kimberly Elise (breathtakingly magnificent!) is paired with the war-torn PTSD alcoholic and abusive Michael Ealy; Kerry Washington works for child services despite her infertility in her marriage to Hill Harper; Anika Noni Rose is a lovely innocent dance teacher brutally treated by Khalil Kain; Phylicia Rashad is the tenement house manager who is the central mother confessor to her tenants. How these women's lives are interconnected is fascinating as a story/screenplay: how these gifted actresses deliver the poetry of Shange is beyond anyone's expectations. There are many issues this film deals with - single mother, violence against women, death, loss, partner abuse, etc - and each of the issues is poignant and keenly defined and acted. How this film slipped under the line for awards is anyone's guess. It is not to be missed. Grady Harp

I'm sorry to write this down, there is so much haters around here! people that don't know anything about movies whatsoever. don't write a review after reading the "expert critics" those journal critics are so lame they are full of sorrow, dreams that they didn't accomplish, its sad to see the beautiful work from Tyler Perry, getting so much hate. GREAT MOVIE!!! personal opinion here shouldn't be used as review, there is a lot of kind of movies, people that like horror, thriller, drama, comedy. if you don't like, please don't be a hater!