As much as I have hated — and I do mean hated — Tyler Perry’s movies, I have always respected him as an independent filmmaker, for serving so successfully an audience that Hollywood has long overlooked. I’ve just always wished that he respected his own audience enough to make decent movies for them, instead of being content to give them any old crap to satisfy their unfulfilled movie jones.
So now I’ll be curious to see if that audience, which has come out in droves for his idiotic mishmashes of slapstick and melodrama, will come out again for a film that actually attempts to be a film, one with some actual ambitions and with something meaningful to say… and one without Perry himself in fat-old-lady drag as Madea. Or does his audience really want only the typical Perry minstrel show? Cuz they won’t find that here…
For Colored Girls opens in the U.S. and Canada on November 5; no U.K. release date has been announced.