Black Males Feel BASHED By "For Colored Girls" Movie?

by Natasha

 

Tyler Perry's "For Colored Girls" movie may have raked in the dough to the tune of $20.1 millie and landed at the #3 spot at the Box Office opening weekend (even though it was shown on half as many screens as the #1 and #2 movies).  But even with the relative success of his stage play adaptation, there are some (possibly many) black men who are up in arms about how the movie put them in a bad light to the rest of the world.

Y'all know I have my thoughts on that ish.  But check out the article written by a black male Washington Post writer who blames Tyler for the way black men are portrayed in movies, especially in his latest.
Washington Post writer Courtland Milloy took a slightly comedic approach to his For Colored Girl complaints that I personally heard from other black men as well this weekend.   Here's the article (some parts removed for length reasons):

Can anyone name a movie that came out recently starring a black man who wasn't a sociopath? Someone who had a terrific screen presence, like a young Paul Robeson? And he portrayed a character who was complex and fully drawn? Did he respect black women, too?

Anybody saw that movie? I didn't. But surely it's out there somewhere, right? An alternative to those Tyler Perry films portraying black men as Satan's gift to black women? But where is it?

Maybe I didn't hear about it because of all the buzz over Perry's "For Colored Girls," which opened Friday and is based on Ntozake Shange's 1975 stage play, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf."

Or maybe I didn't hear about it because I was retching too loudly after seeing "For Colored Girls" - and reading so many inexplicably glowing reviews.

"This movie is powerful," Demetria L. Lucas wrote recently in Essence, the nation's premier magazine for black women. "It is incredible. The performances in it are astonishing, but most of all, this film will leave you lifted."

Me, I thought the movie should have renamed: For Black Men Who Have Considered Homicide After Watching Another Perry Movie.

"Oscar buzz, breaking news," read the Hollywood Reporter on Friday. "Will 'For Colored Girls' blindside Tyler Perry's critics?"

Too late. I was blindsided while watching the movie, especially when superstar Janet Jackson appeared on screen looking like Michael Jackson with breast implants.
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"Don't laugh," says Shadow and Act, an online publication about black films and filmmakers. " 'For Colored Girls,' an Oscar contender?"
Oscar for what?

In the category for best infection of a black woman with a sexually transmitted disease that renders her infertile. . . . And the winner is: Black man.

For best down-low, double-dealing husband who has sex with wife while sneaking around having sex with men on the streets. . . . And the winner is: Black man.

What an awful year for movies featuring black actors. Samuel L. Jackson in "Unthinkable." Thoughtless would be more like it. "Brooklyn's Finest" had a nice cast, with Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes. But Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke got top billing. "Our Family Wedding" with Forrest Whitaker was okay. But how many black wedding comedies can you watch. Even preacher T.D. Jakes is coming out with his own copycat wedding movie next year.

Surely Spike Lee and Denzel Washington could team up for a sweeping historical drama - say, a black sharecropper's son, educated in a one-room schoolhouse built by slaves in Alabama, who grows up to become one of Wall Street's most powerful CEOs.

Smarter than Gordon Gekko, but more complex. With a cameo appearance by former Merrill Lynch chief executive Stanley O'Neal.

Maybe you saw the kind of movie I'm talking about. If not, maybe it's time to make one.
SOURCE

Hmm.  My take?  This movie was a true representation of real and horrific events that many black women (and women of all races) suffer through during their lives.  Many of those events are at the hands of men.  And in For Colored Girls, at the hands of black men specifically.  But we can't and shouldn't ignore these things simply because of the ignorant folks who will generalize a few men on a movie screen to all 20 million+ black men in America.

In my experiences in life (and even backed up by a few controversial scientific studies), black women are treated without empathy, without respect, without praise, and quite honestly, worse than the other gender and many other races.  I would go so far as to say one of the worst when it comes to how we are perceived --thanks to sweeping and usually incorrect stereotypes perpetuated by the masses and media.  This movie truthfully and tastefully showcases these hardships women go through on the daily like abortion and rape and molestation and oversexualization and cheating and STDs.  So if the movie slightly affects how black men are perceived, then so be it.  At what point do we stand up and take a bold stance to air out the issues in order to combat them?  When will we have to stop apologizing for being a black woman?  We have these issues--which many times include the black man--and they need to be addressed.  PERIOD.  If we don't address them, who will?

The last thing on my mind while watching this movie was, "I wonder how the black man feels."  There were MUCH bigger issues at hand.  And quite honestly, the black men who felt threatened by the visuals and actions of the men portrayed on the screen, should maybe channel that anger into changing the root of the problem in their own communities.

I do agree with Mr. Milloy, however, that this was far from an uplifting movie.  I barely found half of a moment of joy or upliftment.  The ish was depressing.  But needed.

While Tyler is not responsible for the original literary work, he did make it come to life on a large Hollywood scale, which made it even more powerful.  I had to have not one, but SEVERAL drinks after seeing the movie.  So yes, it was difficult to process or even discuss right away.  And instead of missing the entire point of it all and whine about how it made black men look, how about we focus on the fact these ARE relevant problems to our community today.  And we should focus on fixing that fact.
Your thoughts?

FYI: Tyler stated on his interview on the "Today Show" that he took it upon himself to add in Hill Harper's cop character (the only "good guy" in the movie), as he didn't want his fellow brothas to feel and appear totally bashed.  He commented that he wanted to show a different, more loving side of the black male.