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   Movie Reviews: For Colored Girls
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Studio:
     Lionsgate
Plot:
     Writer/director Tyler Perry brings brings Ntozake Shange's Obie Award-winning play, of poetic exploration of what is to be of color and a female in this world to the big screen.
Cast:
     Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, Michael Ealy, Kimberly Elise, Omari Hardwick, Hill Harper, Thandie Newton, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, Tessa Thompson, Kerry Washington and Whoopi Goldberg. 
Rating:
     R
Bottom Line:
     ***1/2

Coverage:
by
Laurence Washington

Some plays don’t transfer well into film. Especially when the characters breech the third wall and start to monologue. On stage it’s OK. On film, the audience might wonder what’s going on?

This is not the case with Tyler Perry’s "For Colored Girls" based on the 1975 Tony-nominated "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" by Ntozake Shange. 

"For Colored Girls" is ambitious with its soliloquies. Moviegoers familiar with the play will embrace the soliloquies, while average moviegoers will find them unconventionally endearing. In other words, they work.

Perry does a fair job of directing the film’s traffic in the spirit of a Robert Altman film – moving the camera between main characters dealing with their personal problems….

Are you ready? Hang on, here we go:

*Janet Jackson plays a high-powered magazine publisher whose husband is cheating on her with another man.

*Kimberly Elise, plays Jackson’s assistant whose husband is suffering from posttraumatic stress.

*Phylicia Rashad plays a nosy landlady, who trying to evict sexually assertive neighbor Thandie Newton.

*Loretta Devine plays a nurse who teaches women safe sex.

*Tessa Thompson plays Newton’s troubled younger sister and Whoopi Goldberg plays their mother their mother who is in a cult.

*Kerry Washington plays a social worker who stumbles into these women’s lives that come together at the end of the picture and find commonality among each other.

It should be mention here that Washington’s devoted husband, played by Hill Harper is the only decent male character in the film.

"For Colored Girls" can get a little heavy handed with melodrama, as Perry seems to be a better director with his signature comedies, however, this is a good picture and a triumph in translating difficult material onto the big screen.

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