In the movies, you rarely see a teenager like the one at the heart of "Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire." That's the film's complete title.
Claireece Precious Jones is a morbidly obese black girl who has one child and is again pregnant, both events the result of being raped by her own father. Her huge size notwithstanding, she is essentially invisible to society.
We're in Harlem in the early 1980s, and Precious lives a life of quiet desperation. She dreams of greater things, but her reality is that she is the object of verbal, physical and emotional abuse from her mother, who needs her daughter in her apartment for the welfare check it brings. The family's existence depends on government support. Without Precious, mother Mary also becomes invisible. The woman controls her daughter with the ugliest kind of humiliation and abuse.
Tossed out of high school for being pregnant, the illiterate Precious ends up in a special education class, where she joins other girls with hopes and ambitions and the promise of a dead-end life. She is mentored and urged to succeed by a teacher and social worker, both of whom care about her future. The movie is about rising up and reaching for the redemption that could be within your grasp.
The acting is exceptional, and it includes Gabourey Sidibe as Precious, Mo'Nique as Mary, Paula Patton as the teacher, Mariah Carey as the social worker, Lenny Kravitz as a nurse and Kimberly Russell as the teacher's partner.
The film works as well as it does because of the performances, especially from Sidibe, who forces you to believe in her character's spirit as you recoil at the horrors inflicted upon her. Mo'Nique is awe-inducing as the mother trapped in her own web of rage and despair.
Director Lee Daniels is fortunate to have the cast he has. He almost undercuts the movie's raw emotions by using a cold documentary style that becomes annoying. He seems afraid to edit, but rather jerks his camera up and down and lurches it in and out within scenes.
Geoffrey Fletcher's screenplay is spare, but powerful. The film has moments of hideous brutality and utter cruelty, but also moments of charm, as when our heroine wishes her life were happier. Thoughts of movie stars and beauty queens swirl in her head.
Precious has hopes, but there's seething anger bottled up inside her. She does lash out. If she wants to succeed, she will need to channel her anger into something positive and stand up for herself.
Teenagers of a different sort are at the center of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," which is less a motion picture than it is a money-making machine. Nobody begrudges anyone the right to rake it in, but do me a favor and don't pretend you're churning out a masterpiece for the ages. And please try to make it fun.
The movie is part two of what should be a four-part series, because that's how many of these awful "Twilight" teen vampire books there are. Have you tried to read one? If Anne Rice were dead, she'd be spinning in her grave. Bram Stoker certainly is.
The basic premise of these badly written, young adult romance novels is that you can't always get what you want. But in these adventures in absurd fantasy, you also can't always get what you need.
In the film, we're still mired in Forks, Wash., where love-struck Bella Swan goes to high school and moons over moody vampire Edward Cullen, who is 80-something and is repeating senior year for the umpteenth time. I think that's what's going on, because Edward disappears for much of the movie. There's a lot of fuzzy logic within. His wacky vampire family abstains from blood. This blends in with the sexual abstinence theme of Stephenie Meyer's literary claptrap.
The romantic triangle with Bella, Edward and werewolf pack member Jacob Black is about doing nothing if you're horny and liking it. The first film locked in the teenage girl audience, and this new effort goes for the teenage gay male audience. The werewolves are toned-up muscle boys until they leap about and become lupine.
To make sense of this 130-minute mess, you should have read the book and seen the first movie.
Director Chris Weitz, who lets his actors stand around and look pretty amid fields of flowers, has delivered a picture that is lacking in energy and thrills. The laughable screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg is an amateurish, cliche-ridden pile of hokey words to be spouted by characters who look like participants in a fashion ad. The acting, if you want to call it that, is dreadful.
"New Moon" is old hat.
"An Education" also features a teenager at its core.
Jenny is a smart, free-spirited 16-year-old who knows that her future will be bright and fulfilling, especially if she can get into Oxford. She lives in a lovely, green London suburb with her very supportive and decent parents. There's a school chum who's smitten with her, but you know that Jenny is going to be too much for him to handle.
One day, she is standing in the pouring rain holding her cello when David, a sophisticated, intelligent 35-year-old man, offers her a ride home, because he can't bear to see the instrument get wet. He's proper and decent and relatively well-off. Eventually, she will begin dating him. Her amiable parents are surprised at first, but they will warm to the fellow, and everyone will enjoy each other's company.
As directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig and written by Nick Hornby from a memoir by Lynn Barber, none of this is uncomfortable or prurient. In fact, it's sweetly comic.
Director Scherfig knows exactly what her superb true-life movie is about: A young girl experiences many good things until reality hits her hard. Will it defeat her?
Carey Mulligan is wonderfully alive and carefree as Jenny. A star is born, and that's not hyperbole. It helps that Mulligan has an excellent Peter Sarsgaard as David with whom to act. I want an Academy Award nomination for Alfred Molina, who plays Jenny's father with a curious stoicism that is a delight to watch. Cara Seymour as her mother and Emma Thompson as her school's headmistress round out the fine cast.
"Paris" is a very good French film about people being observed as they go about their daily lives. This pleasant love letter to the city captures the spirit of people who face humdrum tasks, but know that they live in a place whose allure makes everything seem a bit more magical.
In this city of light -- and love -- we find Pierre (Romain Duris), a once-vibrant, 30-something dancer who needs a new heart. He enjoys spending his time watching passersby from his balcony and rediscovering the joy of his neighborhood.
His sister (Juliette Binoche) arrives to assist him as he faces the possibility of death. Her goal is to forget her own troubles and make Pierre laugh.
The movie is written and directed by Cedric Klapisch, and it's a joyous ode to the Paris he adores, as well as an enjoyable and engaging study of how to cope with melancholy when urban beauty exists all around you.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 24 2009 |