For those who have watched the film:


Do you consider Mariah´s performance Oscar worthy?

It would be an interesting situation if (and I REALLY, REALLY doubt this will happen) the nominees unfolded like this:

Mo'Nique (Precious)
Mariah Carey (Precious)
Julianne Moore (A Single Man)
Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air)
Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: OnMyBirthday,

Review: "Precious" is great American cinema
by DAVID GERMAIN

As Hollywood closed specialty divisions that aimed for quality and personal stories, as studios focus more and more on superhero sagas and action blockbusters, cinema fans have rightly wondered, who's left to make great American movies?

For one, the makers of "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," who assembled some of the unlikeliest ingredients - Mariah Carey, Mo'Nique, and a lead actress plucked from an anonymous casting call - to create a wondrous work of art.

The film isn't easy to watch and will test your tolerance for despicable behavior as a long history of physical abuse and incest unfolds involving an illiterate, obese Harlem schoolgirl.

Yet "Precious" - both the film and its grandly resilient title character - will steal your heart. Lee Daniels, in just his second film as director, crafts a story that rises from the depths of despair to a place of genuine hope.

This isn't a fairy tale. "Precious" doesn't strain to present some happy-ever-after transformation that simply never could happen considering the harsh reality in which it's set.

Rather, the film reflects an inner spirit everyone can recognize, that role-playing game we indulge in to get us through our big and small hard times, imagining our lives are different, better. That we are different and better.

Claireece "Precious" Jones literally wills it to be so, and as played in a phenomenal screen debut by Gabourey Sidibe, she makes an utterly believable and electrifying rise from an urban abyss of ignorance and neglect.

Adapted from the novel "Push" by Sapphire - who taught reading and writing for eight years in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to students like Precious and her peers - the film is simultaneously tender and savage as Precious learns to apply that simple verb: Push yourself, push your boundaries, if others try to stop you, push them out of the way.

(The film debuted as "Push" at January's Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the top jury prize and the award as the audience's favorite film; the title was changed to avoid confusion with Dakota Fanning's sci-fi adventure "Push," released last February.)

When we first encounter her, Precious is pregnant with her second child by her own father, who raped her repeatedly while her mother, Mary (Mo'Nique), looked the other way and later heaped abuse on her daughter out of jealousy and spite.

To call Mary a viper would disrespect the other human reptiles that walk among us. She is the lowest of the low, a woman in need of new and nastier adjectives than loathsome and contemptible to do her justice.

Mo'Nique, best known for raunchy, low-brow comedy (and who coincidentally played a character named Precious in Daniel's directing debut, "Shadowboxer"), embodies Mary perfectly, not as a villain but a woman too ignorant, too unaware to fathom what a horrible person she is. When Mo'Nique's Mary says she did her best for Precious, you believe that she believes it. Mo'Nique should win an Oscar for this performance.

The reverse of Mary is Blu Rain (the radiant Paula Patton), a teacher at an alternative school where Precious finally begins to learn after years of getting good grades while remaining unable to read and write at public school.

Blu is chief among the guardian angels that come into Precious' life. Her benefactors also including Lenny Kravitz as a maternity-ward nurse, Sherri Shepherd as a worker at her new school and a room full of vibrant young women who become more like sisters than classmates to Precious.

Carey delivers warmly and honestly in a small role as a social worker, a surprising turnaround from her laughable musical bomb "Glitter."

While veteran performers reveal previously unsuspected depth, Sidibe is an out-of-nowhere revelation. She was in college in the Bronx, where she had appeared in some campus theater, when she turned up for open auditions on "Precious."

Sidibe's Precious is scary, funny, fragile, willful, exasperating, ferocious, sweet, indignant, joyful - while at heart remaining a little girl in desperate need of just one hand to hold, one finger to point her the way. She and Mo'Nique both could be going home with Oscars.

Geoffrey Fletcher's screenplay mirrors Sapphire's first-person novel, allowing Precious to blossom in her own words as her confidence builds as a writer.

Daniels seamlessly blends the stark awfulness of Precious' life with fantasy sequences in which she's a star, interviewed at red-carpet premieres, performing at the Apollo, then ultimately and lovingly coaxes his heroine into a better reality somewhere in between.

Since its Sundance premiere, the film has gained its own guardian angels. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry were so charmed by the film, they signed on as executive producers, while Mary J. Blige wrote a song to add to the soundtrack.

You could call "Precious" one of those little miracles of independent film, but you'd be wrong. "Precious" and all its disparate ingredients constitute one very big miracle - and a glimpse of what American cinema still can be, whether or not Hollywood cares about making good films.

"Precious," a Lionsgate release, is rated R for child abuse including sexual assault, and pervasive language. Running time: 109 minutes. Four stars out of four.

quote:

Originally posted by Atypical:
Review: "Precious" is great American cinema
by DAVID GERMAIN

Where was this from?

quote:

Originally posted by stevie:

quote:

Originally posted by Atypical:
Review: "Precious" is great American cinema
by DAVID GERMAIN

Where was this from?

AP Wire

It's early, only a handful of reviews, the score definitely will go up...

but Precious on Metacritic is currently at a mediocre 59.

(Still a point ahead of the final score for you know what).

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
It's early, only a handful of reviews, the score definitely will go up...

but Precious on Metacritic is currently at a mediocre 59.

(Still a point ahead of the final score for you know what).

No, what? Ernest Goes to Camp?

"Given her range of leisure interests—smoking, cursing, channel surfing, baby tossing, munching pigs’ feet, and throwing televisions down the stairs—there is no reason that the character should be more than a vicious cartoon. But Mo’Nique gives tremendous life to this dead soul, makes you wonder where her own misery sprouted from, and closes the proceedings with a monologue of selfishness so storm-driven that for a second, despite ourselves, we are almost swept away." --The New Yorker

A "monologue of selfishness"? Is she playing a Republican?

Predicted oscar nominations for PRECIOUS...

BEST PICTURE
BEST DIRECTOR- LEE DANIELS
BEST ACTRESS- GABOUREY SIBIDE
BEST SUP. ACTRESS- MO'NIQUE
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
BEST FILM EDITING
BEST ORIGINAL SONG..

Scott Foundas/LA Weekly

(published first in the Village Voice)

favorable with clear reservations, exuberant about Mo'Nique and Sidibe

Precious Is the Diary of a Sad Black Woman
Pushing the limits of taste, but locating the heart—and hell—of its heroine's struggle
By Scott Foundas
published: November 03, 2009
Lionsgate

From generation to generation—no slumdog millionaires here.
Details:
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Directed by Lee Daniels
Lionsgate
Opens November 6
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a four-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is, also, the father of her own two children. Precious—as she prefers to be called—is the central figure in the poet Sapphire's bestselling 1996 novel Push, an homage of sorts to The Color Purple (which it directly references and also mirrors in its diaristic style), set in the pre-gentrification Harlem of the mid-1980s. And it's a testament to Sapphire's affecting prose (written in Precious's own words and dialect) that her protagonist emerges as something more than a mere statistic or representative—that we understand how Precious's story is, for all its commonalities with other abused black women, uniquely her own.

Director Lee Daniels's film adaptation (which has been retitled Precious since its Sundance premiere, and also acquired two high-profile "presenters" in Tyler Perry and Oprah) is a somewhat blunter, but nevertheless effective object. Working from screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher's faithful adaptation, Daniels cultivates an aesthetic that is often more grotesque than artful, sometimes artfully grotesque (like a Courbet painting), and rarely delivered with less than a sledgehammer thwack. Bleak though it was on the page, the apartment shared by Precious (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) and her layabout welfare mother, Mary (Mo'Nique), here appears like a Lenox Avenue Grey Gardens, with a television perpetually tuned to The $100,000 Pyramid and curtains that don't seem to have parted since whatever decade Mary last left the premises. When Daniels flashes back to Precious's horrifying rapes, the wide-angle close-ups of her father's heaving body, and of fried chicken sizzling on the stove, feel like outtakes from one of Rudy Ray Moore's outré blaxploitation farces (or from Daniels's own risible, little-seen debut feature, Shadowboxer, featuring Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. as oedipal hired assassins). And when Precious enrolls at the alternative school where a teacher improbably named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) inspires her to stand and deliver, the classrooms are wreathed in ethereal light.

Hothouse melodrama one moment, kitchen-sink (and frying-pan-to-the-head) realism the next, with eruptions of incongruous slapstick throughout, this may be Daniels's stab at finding a cinematic analog for the novel's inventive, naïf-art language—a film style, like Precious's writing style, seemingly being made up as it goes along. Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop. What Daniels lacks as a craftsman, he makes up for in his willingness to put the lives of abused and defeated black women on the screen with brute-force candor and a lack of sentimentality. Where Push the novel echoed The Color Purple the novel, Precious the movie operates as something of a corrective to Steven Spielberg's 1985 film, with its narrative sanitizing and artery-clogging Quincy Jones score. Its own inspirational touches notwithstanding (not for nothing did it cop the audience awards at Sundance and Toronto earlier this year), Precious is less about overcoming adversity than about survival—a battle the movie does not begin to pretend can be won in two hours of screen time. No slumdog millionaires here, Daniels's movie puts us through hell—Precious's hell—and leaves us somewhere like limbo.

A former casting director, Daniels shows undeniable savoir faire with his actors, a mix of musicians and comedians effectively cast against type, from a dark-haired, deglamorized Mariah Carey as a tough-love social worker to a subtle Lenny Kravitz as an attentive male nurse. The picture belongs, however, to the gale-force Mo'Nique, who transforms an ostensibly one-note monster mom into a complex portrait of a psychologically damaged woman (no matter that Daniels seems to have edited her most showstopping scene in a blender), and to the magnanimous Sidibe, who carries the alternately exhausting and exhilarating narrative on her formidable shoulders. For most of the movie, her stoically beautiful face stays wrought tight in a mask of sadness and self-loathing. When she relaxes those muscles ever so slightly—one of the movie's few subtle touches—it is like a weight of centuries has been lifted.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,

A mixed review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...

There are worst-case scenarios, and then there is Precious, who’s in a hellish league of her own. The heroine and narrator of the novel Push by Sapphire (born Ramona Lofton), now a much-hyped film called Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, is the embodiment of everything—I mean, everything—American society values least and victimizes most. She’s a poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, dark-skinned African-American girl. She was raped by her father from the age of 3, pregnant with his child at 12 (the baby, which she names Mongo, has severe Down syndrome), and then pregnant by him again at 16, when the novel begins. She’s also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse. The book gives you quite a bludgeoning. I started to pull back from it in a flashback when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor and her mother is kicking her in the face.



See Also
Edelstein's Response to Commenters
.

Sapphire goes on to chart Precious’s journey from darkness to light: her transfer to an alternative school and acceptance into a warm, matriarchal community, where she’s encouraged to give voice to her experiences in poetry and prose. A former teacher, Sapphire wants to show young women that if the damaged, emotionally locked-up Precious can develop a sense of self-worth and autonomy, anyone can. But Push, written in Precious’s distinctive patois (“I still don’t say nuffin’. This hoe is keeping me from maff class. I like maff class”), is so schematic, so single-minded in its depiction of predatory evil and empowering good that you may think its title is not an exhortation to drive through pain but a description of the author’s technique.



I dwell on the novel because the movie leads with it (that subtitle!) and because it faithfully, even reverently, sticks to Sapphire’s outline. But the director, Lee Daniels, working from a screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher, has a good sense of when to push and when to lie back. His rhythms are punchy—abrasive without being assaultive. And he has such a striking actress in Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, that he doesn’t need to force her alienation—or ours. I’m not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters’s pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you’re meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing. The movie is saying that she’s not an object, but the way that Sidibe is directed she becomes one. It’s only in a couple of heavy-handed fantasy sequences (she emerges from a theater in a bright-red gown to popping flashbulbs) that her eyes are windows to the soul.



Daniels does everything to hold the melodrama at bay, but there’s only so much he can do. The comedian Mo’Nique gives a vivid and surprisingly varied performance as Precious’s mother, Mary (ironic-name alert): I have no doubt she found psychological justifications for Mary’s sadism, for the displacement onto Precious of her fury at a man who she thinks preferred her daughter to her. But the woman who drops a TV onto Precious as she hurries down the stairs with her infant is a sociopath, too singularly garish to be universal. As Precious’s teacher, Ms. Rain, Paula Patton is at the other extreme. A light-skinned beauty with fine features, she has a network-TV wholesomeness: Even her lesbianism has the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval—a poster on her wall of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. The most offbeat touch is a social worker played by Mariah Carey. She’s a tad too goody-goody, but her toasty, caressing voice is a gift beside Sidibe’s mush-mouthed monosyllables.



Daniels does well with the girls in Precious’s class, who have a mordant, barbed rapport. They’re almost as defended as she is, so when they bond with her it’s not sticky: You can feel their relief in being able to get out of their own heads and be kind. That’s when the film is genuinely moving without being manipulative. But it somehow skips over the part where Precious actually learns. When she tells us, in voice-over, that she won a literacy prize, you may think you missed something. Precious jumps from signpost to signpost. Set in 1987, it features obligatory images on TV of Reagan and Ollie North—but also, for hope’s sake, photos of Oprah Winfrey (thinner than she was at the time), who signed onto the film as co-executive-producer after it was made. The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.

They do not have written reviews yet but both Michael Phillips of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE and especially A.O. Scott of THE NEW YORK TIMES liked "Precious" from their comments on "At the Movies".

Scott will be reviewing a lot of films on At the Movies that he won't write about, since Manola Dargis is co-lead critic at the NYTimes.

It will be interesting to see how this works out, but I'm surprised that the Times would let him review a film he'd be writing about on the show before at the paper, so this might be a sign he won't be doing it. We'll see.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,

Did anyone else notice that while Precious is a limited release Lionsgate has intrestingly placed the film in many theatres that black audiences tend to frequent? I guess this is to take advantage of the fact that Tyler Perry’s name is on the film. It’s not opening like a typical platform release in just indie theatres. It’s opening in multiplexes. Certainly a box office and eventual awards push advantage that many other indies don't have.

Isn't that called "knowing your audience"?

Yes. But many independent films fail because the studio didn't "know their audience." I had a false perception that Lionsgate would open this in only arthouse theatres.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Jilpen,

They are placing the film exactly where it makes sense - high end upscale prestige/showcase theatres (which of course include black customers) as well as the top theatres in the heart of the black communities. I would have been shocked if they had done anything else.

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
They are placing the film exactly where it makes sense - high end upscale prestige/showcase theatres (which of course include black customers) as well as the top theatres in the heart of the black communities. I would have been shocked if they had done anything else.

Yeah, it seems smart to me.

quote:

Originally posted by Jilpen:
Did anyone else notice that while Precious is a limited release Lionsgate has intrestingly placed the film in many theatres that black audiences tend to frequent? I guess this is to take advantage of the fact that Tyler Perry’s name is on the film. It’s not opening like a typical platform release in just indie theatres. It’s opening in multiplexes. Certainly a box office and eventual awards push advantage that many other indies don't have.

Yes, I was suprised that not only was PRECIOUS opening on its first day in limited release here in ATL, but at a larger movie theater (not the usual independent cinemas). However, I know a TON of people who are excited to see this film. There has been 10 months of buzz and countless PR and promotions for this film. Gabby Sidibe, Mo'Nique, and Mariah are all making the rounds this week on talk shows (all 3 appeared on Ellen on seperate days, all will appear on Oprah, Mariah's doing Larry King and just did Jay Leno and will do Letterman next Friday when the film goes wide). The commercials have been playing non-stop on BET and other networks. All of people I know have expressed that this feels like THE film to see this year. I have to imagine that box office numbers this weekend will be through-the-roof for a limited release!

Incest a big problem in the black community?