For the bleak little indie that made such an unmitigated splash at last year’s Sundance Film Festival (although back then it was known as Push), Precious has had a rough time of it in wide release. While real people liked it (including us), certain critics found the film racist and felt the storyline perpetuated negative stereotypes.
Like Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy. He called it “a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick.” Noted critical loon Armond White was just as offended: “Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious…Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy.”
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1. Kid Cudi is leaving Lady Gaga‘s Monster Ball Tour to focus on his next album and acting commitments. He will perform at scheduled dates through the end of January. [via Billboard]
2. Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds, and Precious led the 16th annual SAG Award nominations. [via indieWIRE]
3. Sarah Palin was spotted in Hawaii wearing a John McCain campaign visor with his named blacked out. She coyly claims she was trying to go incognito. [via The Awl]
4. Morrissey has released an official statement in which he apologizes to fans for his last album, Swords, calling it a “meek disaster.” [via NME]
5. Good news: Your Big Mac will soon come with a side of free WiFi. Will McDonald’s become the new Starbucks for bloggers? [via Geek Sugar]
Bonus link: The decade’s best unread books
1. Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. The New York Times Op-Ed editors asked nine poets — Eastern European, American, Russian and German — to write new works inspired by the event. [via NYT]
2. After nearly 40 years Steven Tyler has quit Aerosmith as far as Joe Perry can tell. [via Guardian]
3. Jerry Fuchs, drummer for !!!, died after an elevator accident in Williamsburg yesterday morning. [via NME]
4. Precious (which we reviewed here) set a box office record for a film opening in under 50 theaters this weekend. [via Variety]
5. Paris’ Pompidou Center plans to fill a circus tent with famous art, “creating a roving museum to take its masterpieces of modern art to France’s culturally deprived rural regions and rough suburbs.” [via SF Gate]
Bonus link: A list of everything Don Draper said this season on Mad Men
Let this correspondent temper the choral praise for Lee Daniels’ — ahem, Tyler Perry and Oprah’s — Precious. It’s certainly not a total letdown (not with lead performances as immediate and crackerjack as that), but it’s also not the Great Urban Hope that so many have purported it to be. Indeed, the subject matter pulverizes the proverbial envelope — with incest, rape, poverty, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and child abuse all saddled on the obese, African-American heroine Precious — but each misery is strung up to be drip-dried until the melodrama’s last turn of screw. The best parts, alas, are probably in the trailer. Read More »
