Precious

Black folks are sensitive about our image, and for good reason. Our history is one of misrepresentation, of dehumanization, one in which the act of a single bad apple is used to denigrate the entire race.

And when you look to Hollywood, you see a legacy of images seared into our public consciousness, one that elevates buffoonery and obscures our dignity. So anyone surprised by the controversy surrounding the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire just hasn't been paying attention.

Here we have a story about a obese, illiterate black girl who has birthed two children by her own father and endures horrifying physical and sexual abuse by her mother, poor dysfunctional black people living in the grittiest of conditions.

Precious exists, and so does her mother, Mary, and her father, Carl. They exist even though we don't want to see them. They exist even though we pretend they are as invisible as Ralph Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man.

The problem is that when it comes to Hollywood, it seems as if that's the only image we see, as if every black family is that messed up, that we all live in the ghetto, that bullets fly all the time in all of our neighborhoods. And when that happens, all the nuance of black life is lost.

This is why us black folk are so sensitive and it's why some people have reacted to Precious like this guy.

It was in this context that I approached the film, directed by the ever-provocative Lee Daniels, who made the equally controversial Monsters Ball. That movie garnered Halle Berry an Academy Award in a performance some raved as powerfully raw and others criticized as playing into the most awful stereotypes surrounding black women.

Given all the controversy about this movie, I ended up carried away by the simplicity of the storytelling and the pain-drenched performances by everyone. Daniels knows something all good storytellers know -- less is more.

He shows restraint in places where the novel itself is unflinchingly graphic. The abuse is there, but he pulls back just a bit.

More importantly, he allows Precious to tell her story. That's where the power of the novel and this movie lies, in Precious' voice, her ever-growing ability to tell her tale, both of tragedy and triumph.

It is in her broken English that she founds, gradually, the power of words.

Daniels allows us entry into her world, her confusion about her circumstance, her desire for something better, her anger at her abuse, her fantasies of being a superstar with a light-skinned boyfriend. Precious is a girl who knows not the meaning of her name, who is bowed down in self-hatred, who has never known love.

As teacher Blue Rain, who heads up an alternative school that Precious is sent to, Paula Patton is the shining light of love that Precious needs. And so are the others who come into her life, the students in Ms. Rain's classroom, the nurse (played by rocker Lenny Kravitz) and the social worker (portrayed by a nearly unrecognizable Mariah Carey).

But the revelation is Gabourey Sidibe, a relative newcomer in the game of acting, who fully inhabits Precious in a performance transforms stereotype into fully-realized human.

And comedian Monique gives a horrifying and heartbreaking performance as Mary, Precious' abusive mother who is wholly ignorant to her monstrous behavior.

But the movie isn't without its problems. I wonder, as others have, why the good characters in this movie, such as teacher Blue Rain, are light-skinned, while Precious and her parents, the most dysfunctional people in the movie, are all dark-skinned. Lee Daniels has said in interviews that he has had issues with colorism, that discrimination that black people practice against each other, and it shows in his casting.

The other problem I have is the ending. We find Precious dealing with the fact that she is HIV positive in a movie set in the late 1980s. I wondered what would happen to her? How long would it be before she died? Would she complete her education? Would she find work? Would she find a way to take care of her two children, one of which has down syndrome?

Neither the movie nor the novel answers those questions. We are only left with the hope that Precious' new-found determination and desire for better things will help her overcome her obstacles.

But in the end, I liked the movie. I saw the movie as art, as one that challenges us and moves us beyond our comfort zones, to get to a truth we may otherwise not want to see. I don't want to see just positive images of black people. And I don't want to see just negative images of us.

I want to see us as who we really are, human beings, flawed, some of us good, some of us bad, some of us in-between, complex, complicated, four-fourths man and woman. Human. The bottom line is that all of our stories deserve to be told, not just this one.

This Is It

I wanted to keep Michael Jackson frozen in time, just as he looked on the cover of his pop masterpiece, Thriller. There, he was dressed in a white suit with a black shirt, his brown skin smooth, his eyes intense, his aura all innocent, a singer still somewhat a child but also on the brink of coming into his own as a young man.
But the Michael Jackson who died at the age of 50 was something far different. His nose was halfway gone, his skin turned vanilla, the Jheri curl replaced with straight black hair. His face was skeletal. He didn't look human even though he was, no matter what anyone might say. His musical genius had long been obscured by his weirdness, the child-molestation charges he successfully fought, the money problems, the drama, oh the drama.
When he died, I mourned the death of an incredible entertainer who poured his soul into his music, and I tried to forget about the strange being he became in the eyes of many. So when This Is It, a documentary of his last days rehearsing for his 50-city tour, arrived in theaters, I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see Michael Jackson at his worst.
I finally gave in recently, however, my curiosity getting the best of me.
And what I found was that the Michael Jackson of old had never left, despite the media representations of his rather odd behavior. The passion that informed his life was ever present.
What the film shows is a man still at the top of his game, even if in a few days, his life would end. We saw what could be when a genius pushes for perfection. We saw what happens when magic is allowed to flourish.
I still cringed at the sight of Michael Jackson. He is scarily thin, and we never get to look into those eyes of his because in every scene he wears sunglasses.
But that tender voice of his is there. He, in that quiet way of his, sweetly admonishes when the music isn't quite right or something else is off in the performance. He tells a young guitarist that it is her time to shine.
The moments I remember the most are the performances, where we see that even with age, his dance movements are as sharp as ever. That falsetto voice of his still brims with soul.
Kenny Ortega, who was the producer for Michael Jackson's comeback, edits this archival footage with care and sensitivity, allowing us a rare glimpse of an artist in his rawest creative mode. We get caught up in the excitement of seeing Michael Jackson and his collaborators birthing something ambitious, something that, if Michael Jackson had lived, would have blown the eye-sockets out of anyone who had the pleasure of seeing it live.
That, we know all to well now, never happened. On June 25 of this year, Michael Jackson died. And the most heartbreaking footage of the movie is seeing dancers auditioning for the show talk about how overjoyed they are to have the chance to be on stage with Michael, their inspiration to dance, shout and shake their bodies to the ground. We see them almost delirious at the time they get to spend with Michael and you feel sad knowing that these are Michael Jackson's final days.
Yet, here is This Is It, a lasting testament to remind us that however strange, however odd, however troubled Michael Jackson may have been, he was also the penultimate entertainer, someone who gave us the beauty of his musical soul, who touched us all with his vision.

Before Sunrise

I remember her, that sweet smile, the slender figure, the walk in the park on a fall day more than a decade ago.

What I don't remember is her name. I was in college at the time, in a small town, and she was a prospective student coming in for a day or two to see if she liked my college enough to attend. For some reason, I was her guide for the day, showing her around, and in those hours, there was this irresistible connection, a magnet drawing us together.

We talked and laughed as we walked from campus into the streets of that small town, holding hands, my skin tingling with a nice warmth.

Later, however, in the dorm room where she was staying, she asked me about an upperclassman she was interested in, apparently a much more handsome guy than me, who I also knew to be a bit of a ladies man. It was a gut-punch but I smiled anyway. The pain eventually faded, as she did, because she ended up going to another school. I never saw her again.

I thought about that girl as I watched Before Sunrise, the 1994 film by Richard Linklater, the genius behind cult-classic Dazed and Confused.

The movie centered on Jesse and Celine (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), two strangers who meet on a train destined for Vienna. Jesse is a backpacking American headed to Vienna for his flight back home. And Celine is a French grad student who just got back from visiting her grandmother.

Jesse sparks up a conversation with Celine. The chemistry is undeniable. The connection is there, and when the train stops at Vienna, Jesse invites Celine to accompany him until his flight leaves the next morning.

And so they do, their conversation going from heady to bawdy and everything in between, those moments of laughter interspersed with quiet moments when the two hit that sweet spot of intimacy.

This isn't your typical romantic comedy. Jesse and Celine don't hook up within the first hour of the movie, then break up and finally rush toward each other in some inane climax after realizing they're meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

The connection here is at first intellectual and gradually moves toward romance and there's no guarantee that they will end up together forever at the end.

In fact, they very well may never see each other again.

What I loved about the movie is that the connection isn't purely physical. There's this unexplainable emotional intimacy that develops between the two, some special chemistry drawing the two together and making it hard to let go.

There's a rhythm here, a rapid back and forth marked by pauses and brief and poignant moments of vulnerability. There's joy simply to be in one another's presence, something that I just don't think Facebook-based relationships can replicate (even though I admit to being a Facebook addict in need of Dr. Drew-like intervention).

At the end, Jesse and Celine promise to meet back in Vienna in six months. They never do. We know this, of course, because Richard Linklater decided to make a sequel called, appropriately enough, Before Sunset.

I saw this movie several years ago, way before I ever saw Before Sunrise. It was the rare sequel done years after the original that actually worked in that there's an added emotional tension, a history just surging beneath the surface of the characters' interactions.

Life got in the way and changed Jesse and Celine in surprising ways, but the connection was still there. They pick up where they left off more than a decade earlier, as if they never left each other at the train station at Vienna.

But they did and they can never go back. They have to live with the choices they made. Yet, the scene I loved the most is the ending, where they bask in the moment, an ecstasy of joy of that connection made so many years ago that never went away.

Before Sunrise and its subsequent sequel, I think, reminds us of the importance of searching for the bliss in those connections, even if some may be fleeting. This is where life is. This is where joy is. This is what we will remember when we see our lives coming to an end, and the more we have of them, the richer our lives are.

Paranormal Activity

Maybe scary is like beauty; it is in the eye of the beholder.

Lots of people have said that the new movie, Paranormal Activity, is scary, like for real scary, like The Blair Witch Project scary.

Sorry but The Blair Witch Project was never all that scary to begin with, and Paranormal Activity, also shot in that cinema-verite style, isn't either. The movie is not even creepy, the kind of creepy that keeps you up at night in a darkened house or apartment, jumping at strange sounds.

Suffice it to say, I slept well after seeing this movie.

The movie, the one made for just $11,000 but topped the box office this weekend, is about a young couple, Katie and Micah, who hear weird things go bump in the night. It turns out that Katie has been haunted by some demon/ghost thing ever since she was little that followed her every place she has lived, including the nice little home she has made with Micah.

Micah decides to set up a camera in the bedroom to record what happens. He also follows his girlfriend around during the day with the camera. Oh, how romantic. Look at how cute she is when she's brushing her teeth.

The audience knows going in that the ending is not so bright for this young couple since we are looking at footage that police found after some horrible occurrence. We just have to slog through the movie to find out what that is.

The concept is cool. And the director, Oren Pi, does manage some legitimate chilly moments, but nothing that jolts you out of the seat until the very end.

Katie Featherston and Micah Stoat, the newby actors who play the couple, have an easy-going chemistry together that grounds the movie and avoids reality-TV cliche.

But despite Katie's well-rehearsed screams, the movie lacks suspense. I hardly cared what happened to the couple because I wasn't invested in them or their survival.

And while the ending (which like any good movie critic, I won't reveal) does provide a juicy climax, it comes too little, too late.

Like The Blair Witch Project, this movie feels like a gimmick, a well-executed one, that in the end amounts to bleh.