For Colored Girls (2010)

Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.

Director:

Tyler Perry

Writers:

Tyler Perry (screenplay), Ntozake Shange (play)

Stars:

Janet Jackson, Anika Noni Rose, Whoopi Goldberg

15 wins & 16 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Kimberly Elise	...	Crystal / Brown
Janet Jackson	...	Jo / Red
Loretta Devine	...	Juanita / Green
Thandie Newton	...	Tangie / Orange
Anika Noni Rose	...	Yasmine / Yellow
Kerry Washington	...	Kelly / Blue
Tessa Thompson	...	Nyla / Purple
Phylicia Rashad	...	Gilda
Whoopi Goldberg	...	Alice / White
Macy Gray	...	Rose
Michael Ealy	...	Beau Willie
Omari Hardwick	...	Carl
Richard Lawson	...	Frank
Hill Harper	...	Donald
Khalil Kain	...	Bill

Storyline

The movie is based on Ntozake Shange's play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf." Unlike the original play which featured only 7 women known by colors performing the collection of 20 poems, the movie has given each of the 20 characters names. Each of the poems deal with intense issues that particularly impact women in a thought-provoking commentary on what it means to be a female of color in the world.

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Plot Keywords:

sex scene | woman | poem | f rated | african american protagonist | 

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Taglines:

Many voices. One poem.

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Genres:

Drama

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for some disturbing violence including a rape, sexual content and language

Details

Official Sites:

Official site

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

5 November 2010 (USA)

Also Known As:

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

Filming Locations:

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$19,497,324, 7 November 2010, Wide Release

Gross USA:

$37,721,949, 16 January 2011

Company Credits

Production Co:

Lionsgate, Tyler Perry Studios, 34th Street Films

Technical Specs

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital SDDS DTS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Janet Jackson's character's name is Jo, which is Jackson's second middle name in real life, Janet Damita Jo Jackson.

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Goofs

When the "Lady in Green", Loretta Devine, does her solo of "Someone took my stuff" because her boyfriend walked out on her; she has on two different green earrings.

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Quotes

Juanita: I got a real dead loving here for you now, because I don't know anymore how to avoid my own face wet with my tears! Because I had convinced myself that colored girls have no right to sorrow!
Frank: I guess this is goodbye.
Juanita: Like you've never seen it before.

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Connections

Referenced in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Whoopi Goldberg/David Hogg & Lauren Hogg/Mike Shinoda (2018)

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Soundtracks

Drive Me Crazy
Written by Zach Danziger, Sarai Howard and Ali Dee (as Ali Theodore)
Performed by Miss Eighty6
Published by Canvas One Music (BMI)
Courtesy of DeeTown Entertainment

User Reviews

A gorgeous, layered, over-the-top emotional ride...I really liked it

For Colored Girls (2010)

An artful, gutsy, moving experience.

You could easily see this movie and say that it's overly artful, overtly gutsy, and an overwhelmingly moving experience. You would have to like this kind of high drama to get into this at all. Very high drama. I do, and so I loved this movie.

If you've seen "Crash" you know how this movie is put together--a series of high powered characters in tough situations are followed separately in an interwoven and increasingly connected urban universe. This is a work about women, African-American women, and about their ultimately horrible plight in a world of greed, horror, and men, who don't come off very well. So they turn increasingly inward, and to each other, to survive.

Director Tyler Perry has great material here--the Ntozake Shange play that wowed Broadway in 1975. One of the strengths here is one of the things people find irritating--the characters speak at times in long lines of poetic monologue. It isn't realistic, but it's beautiful, and in fact it really is poetry, and is part of the overall style. This helps form the overall aura of the movie, as well, of highbrow seriousness in a gutsy, often low income narrative. The story gets tweaked for 2010, though some of the themes don't make sense for our times, most glaring the backstreet abortion.

The acting is fabulous, and uniformly so. Everyone is able to really pour it on, which is difficult when they are sometimes speaking through actual poetry. And so through all the tears comes a realization that this very artificially outrageous drama has deeply deeply serious intentions.

If you like movies for how they are made--the editing, the filming, the set design--you'll be impressed. It's highly artful in a Hollywood, expensive way, an uncompromised production. Of course, as a viewer, you have to like that, especially when it gets artsy, as when a mother and daughter speak in two simultaneous monologues and the camera, and the sound, film back and forth between them, while still delicately keeping both threads continuous and palpable throughout. And the moment has huge symbolism, too, because it's about how they never understand each other, even when they pretend to try.

If there's a large problem here, it's in the endless excess. There is more tragedy, and more emotional crisis, than you can handle in a movie. I think it starts to be a parody of itself, and toward the end you are just ready for a catharsis. The choreographed ending is a little predictable and breezy, too, though even here, when the women gather on the roof, there is still a complex, interwove poetic power.

Forget the cynics and the impatient, if you can, that have slammed this film. It's not a typical Tyler Perry movie at all. It's a smart, beautiful film, and in some ways a great film.