Whoopi Goldberg

Film Review: Kate Hudson Reveals Hell in ‘A Little Bit of Heaven’

PatrickMcD — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:31:57 -0400

CHICAGO – Kate Hudson portrays a dying woman in “A Little Bit of Heaven,” and the film is so annoying that her extinguishment can’t come fast enough. The film insults both living and dying, and virtually everything in between, and brings along Lucy Punch, Kathy Bates, Gael Garciá Bernal, Peter Dinklage and Whoopi Goldberg for the funeral.

Rating: 1.0/5.0

Hudson plays an almost sociopathic character, who is suppose to become sympathetic just because she is diagnosed with colon cancer. Yes, that is the serious premise, but as filtered through the Hudson character it is merely a prop designed to make everyone else in the film love her. There are no redeeming qualities to her crass talking, self destructive nature in the story – ignored by those around her – but it is cancer that is suppose to make such a character noble. It’s impossible to imagine the inner turmoil of a real cancer struggle, but one minute of that courage is worth a million times of films like these.

Marley (Kate Hudson) is a blunt talking New Orleans ad executive, the youngest vice president in her firm. When her best Sarah (Lucy Punch) notices that her “boobs are shrinking,” Marley reluctantly visits a doctor, who diagnoses her with Stage Four colon cancer. While going through testing, she has a vision of God (Whoopi Goldberg), who gives her three wishes. The first two seem impossible, but come true, and the last comes in the form of the specialist working on her treatment, Julian Goldberg (Gael Garcia Bernal).

Marley’s condition creates unexpected situations, such as her divorced parents (Kathy Bates and Treat Williams) emerging to re-ignite old problems. But there are some lighter moments, as when a little person male escort (Peter Dinklage) is hired to show up to Marley’s apartment and “entertain” her. Also, Dr. Goldstein is falling in love with Marley, which both complicates and fulfills her treatment cycle. As the disease progresses and hope starts to fade, Marley’s third wish may be the most important of all.

“A Little Bit of Heaven” opens everywhere on May 4th. Featuring Kate Hudson, Lucy Punch, Gael Garcia Bernal, Kathy Bates, Peter Dinklage, Treat Williams and Whoopi Goldberg. Screenplay by Gren Wells. Directed by Nicole Kassell. Rated “PG-13”

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “A Little Bit of Heaven”

Odd God: Kate Hudson (Marley) and Whoopi Goldberg (The Deity) in ‘A Little Bit of Heaven’
Photo credit: Patti Perret for Millennium Films

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “A Little Bit of Heaven”

Blu-Ray Review: Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Color Purple’ Gets HD Upgrade

BrianTT — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:30:05 -0500

CHICAGO – Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and became a highly-acclaimed film just two years later from what was then-seen as an unlikely directorial choice in Steven Spielberg. Despite the controversy, the film went on to be nominated for a stunning eleven Academy Awards and is now one of the first Spielberg works to get the HD upgrade.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

Known solely for blockbusters like “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Steven Spielberg seemed like an unusual (and, in some circles, downright insulting) choice to adapt the acclaimed Walker novel about the life of an African American woman in the early 1900s. The film was met with almost widespread critical acclaim, garnering Spielberg a DGA Award for Best Director and a stunning 11 Academy Award nominations, although controversy would greet it again when it would win none of those nominations, causing some to claim the Academy was racist.

The Color Purple was released on Blu-Ray on January 25th, 2011
Photo credit: Warner Bros.

Watching “The Color Purple” twenty-five years after it was first released has an interesting time capsule effect. It’s impossible to ignore what the people involved would go on to accomplish in the years that would follow. It’s hard to watch Oprah Winfrey’s excellent debut and not think of “Oprah” or to consider that Whoopi Goldberg is now a talk show host as well. And it’s interesting to see Spielberg developing his tools as a storyteller. Now, it would be unsurprising to hear that one of history’s best directors is helming anything he wants but he was still the “E.T.” guy back then.

As conversation turns to “The King’s Speech” vs. “The Social Network” for this year’s Oscars, one wonders how history will look at those two films. The last month has seen the release of several past Oscar powerhouses on Blu-ray, including “Dances With Wolves,” “Raging Bull,” and “Broadcast News” (and “All About Eve,” “Network,” and “All the President’s Men” are coming soon). “The Color Purple” is far from my favorite film of this wave of Academy Award juggernauts but it’s an important part of the history of ’80s cinema that deserves its place on HD, especially with a transfer as nice as Warner Bros. commonly delivers (along with their very handsome book-esque cases for their notable catalog titles).

Synopsis: “Color it fuller, color it richer, color it even more of an enthralling movie experience: in Hi-Def Blu-Ray, The Color Purple shines anew. Celie. Mr.Sofia. Nettie. Shug. The unforgettable characters of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize novel brighten the screen in this rhapsodically cinematic adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg. At the story’s center is Celie (Whoopi Goldberg in her movie debut), whose search for fulfillment in a world closed to her becomes a triumph of cruelty overcome by love, of pain eclipsed by joy. Acting and filmmaking honors all came to The Color Purple. But its greatest honor is the lasting embrace of movie fans everywhere.”

Special Features:
o Conversations with the Ancestors: The Color Purple from Book to Screen
o A Collaboration of Spirits: Casting and Acting The Color Purple
o The Color Purple: The Musical
o Cultivating a Classic: The Making of The Color Purple
o Behind-the-Scenes and Cast-Focused Featurette Galleries
o Theatrical Trailers

“The Color Purple” stars Danny Glover, Adolph Caesar, Margaret Avery, Rae Dawn Chong, Oprah Winfrey, and Whoopi Goldberg. It was written by Menno Meyjes and directed by Steven Spielberg. It was released on Blu-ray on January 25th, 2011. It is rated PG-13 and runs 154 minutes.

By BRIAN TALLERICO
Content Director
HollywoodChicago.com
brian@hollywoodchicago.com

Film Review: Cluttered, Melodramatic ‘For Colored Girls’ Never Comes Together

BrianTT — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:24:47 -0400

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” was a landmark event in 1974, giving voice to a segment of society rarely seen on the stage. It took 34 years for a filmmaker to tackle this remarkable work in film form and Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” retains some of the inherent power of it source and features some strong performances in the process but never finds the narrative cohesion needed to translate it to modern movie audiences.

The stage version of “For Colored Girls” consisted of nothing more than monologues or poems – stories, life lessons, and confessions of a group of women finding their voices through expression. Perry takes several of those expressions and works them into a narrative, adding other characters, relationships, and connective tissue in an effort to make a piece of poetry into a piece of prose. The biggest problem is that it’s not that easy. Poetry works for different reasons than prose. Theater works for different reasons than film. And Perry too often gets caught in the gray area in between the multiple forms that he’s trying to weave into one fabric. It’s too easy to see the seams.

Read Brian Tallerico’s full review of “For Colored Girls” in our reviews section.

More damagingly, the new structure of “For Colored Girls” falls victim to its own structure because Perry is forced to insert another emotionally draining scene nearly every five to ten minutes. Hearing different voices express the pain of their lives has a much different impact on an audience than trying to turn it all into one interconnected story. “For Colored Girls” becomes numbing in its melodrama as we know each moment of pain will be followed by another one a few minutes later. And it lessens the connecting scenes when it feels like they are merely pushing us to another breakdown. There are more shots of tears and snot in “For Colored Girls” than any other movie in a very long time.

“For Colored Girls” basically tells nine interconnected stories – that of Crystal (Kimberly Elise), Jo (Janet Jackson), Juanita (Loretta Devine), Tangie (Thandie Newton), Yasmine (Anika Noni Rose), Kelly (Kerry Washington), Nyla (Tessa Thompson), Gilda (Phylicia Rashad), and Alice (Whoopi Goldberg). All of the characters are related either directly or through minimal degrees of separation. For example, Alice is the mother of Nyla and Tangie, who lives across the hall from Crystal, who works for Jo, and so on. Every character in “For Colored Girls” comes with significant, life-changing drama including abuse, rape, murder, addiction, promiscuity, unplanned pregnancy, and more. There’s enough melodrama in “For Colored Girls” for an entire season of most soap operas.

Continue reading for Brian Tallerico’s full “For Colored Girls” review.

‘For Colored Girls’ stars Kimberly Elise, Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Whoopi Goldberg, Omari Hardwick, Michael Ealy, and Hill Harper. It was adapted and directed by Tyler Perry. It opens on November 5th, 2010. It is rated R.

For Colored Girls
Photo credit: Lionsgate

Interview: Thandie Newton on the Passion of ‘For Colored Girls’

PatrickMcD — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:19:57 -0400

CHICAGO – The expansive and intuitive prose poetry of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” comes to life in Tyler Perry’s film adaptation “For Colored Girls.” Thandie Newton portrays Tangie (color Orange) and saturates the character with a precise truth.

Newton is familiar to audiences as a performer in many notable films. After making a memorable debut in the Australian film “Flirting” (1992), she has been featured in “Jefferson in Paris” (1995), “Beloved” (1998), “Mission Impossible II” (2000), the TV show “ER,” “The Pursuit of Happyness” (2006) and as Condoleeza Rice in “W.” (2008). She might be best remembered for her role as Christine in the Oscar winning Best Picture of 2005, “Crash.”

Confronting Themselves: Thandie Newton as Tangie and Whoopi Goldberg as Alice in ‘For Colored Girls’
Photo Credit: Quantell Colbert for © Lionsgate

Thandie Newton was in Chicago recently to promote For Colored Girls. HollywoodChicago got the opportunity to explore the film with her.

HollywoodChicago.com: This film is about the development of survival techniques in the face of soul and life crushing circumstances. What did you admire about Tangie in the way that she handled her situation and the way she eventually survived?

Thandie Newton: I did not admire how she handled her situation at all, which was why I found it hard initially to play her. I couldn’t get into the sympathy vibe at all, and once you start treating people badly, that is your wake-up call. For me, that’s when you need to reflect.

I didn’t know I was going to do the film until a couple days before I started, they had already shooting. But it was also great because there was a feeling of frustration and discomfort that I completely put into the role. The way she behaves is her coping strategy and I do admire her for having any way to cope with her history. You realize in the climatic scene between her and Whoopi [Goldberg, playing her mother in the film] that she hasn’t talked about this with anybody. You wonder if she had been in a form of denial about it herself. She obviously hasn’t dealt with it.

HollywoodChicago.com: What life choices of Tangie stood out as you were formulating the character?

Newton: You see the choices she has made. Money is of great importance. There is some kind of status with how many people she sleeps with and how she’s able to reject men…she takes pride in the fact that she’s not a victim. But of course she is a victim. She’s a complicated unconscious person. I felt it was a real value to play a character that was deep in her unconscious self sabotage.

Everyone is at different stages in their evolution in the movie. Most women have a sense of what their crap is and come to terms with it. Tangie has no idea, but she does at the end, so you do get a sense that there will be some type of catharsis.

HollywoodChicago.com: The title of the film almost sounds esoteric, toward a specific group of women. But in looking at this story as they try to reclaim their lives, do you see this as more of a universal theme?

Newton: Absolutely. For the playwright Ntozake Shange it started with what she knew, when she wrote it in the 1970s, among women studies and African-American studies. I’m English, and I didn’t know anything about the play until [director] Tyler Perry called me, it wasn’t in my cultural bibliography. So when I read it, it had huge relevance, and it resonated for me, even though it’s 2010 and not 1975. I do think it has universal themes, and in terms of the title of the movie, it is ironic, and what the work is really about is exploding stereotypes.

What Ntozake really meant when she called it ‘For Colored Girls…,’ was [the character names] red, orange, yellow, green, brown, white, purple and blue. That’s an invitation to look beyond the stereotype of ‘girls colored.’ We can go as far out as we want…let’s include men, let’s embrace all races and religions. Because frankly which country, which religion or which group doesn’t experience this kind of self sabotage and victimization.

HollywoodChicago.com: Since you were raised in England, what lessons did you have to learn about American racism when you first started working here?

Newton: Racism is racism wherever you go. Perhaps African American issues are so different because it stems from slavery. But it’s important to tackle the issue today, because it is universal. I’m glad that racism has been made illegal, that you can get a criminal record if you involved in any racist victimization.

Specific to the movie and the role, it’s actually quite nice to be in a movie which is specifically about black Americans, and there is no racism in there. It’s about how we effect each other, not about how we’re victimized. It’s a big deal to have a movie about black Americans and not have it be about race.

Secretary of the State: Thandie Newton as Condoleeza Rice in 2008’s ‘W.’
Photo Credit: Sidney Ray Baldwin for © Lionsgate

HollywoodChicago.com: In performing the character of Condoleeza Rice in ‘W.,’ what did you end up admiring about her and on the opposite spectrum, not admiring about her?

Newton: I didn’t know a huge amount about her, again because I’m from England. When I came to research Condi I had to rely heavily on research, because I didn’t have an opinion about her. I read biographies, watched documentaries, Charlie Rose and YouTube clips in unguarded moments. I got a really interesting portrayal together and what I ended up creating in the characterization, was that I was filtering everything that I researched. I don’t think it’s a particularly flattering portrait, but that’s what I came to believe. I was deeply disappointed that all her potential got channeled into that administration at the critical moment in history, which is still being felt massively today. I just felt deep disappointment and that hasn’t changed.

HollywoodChicago.com: I wanted to talk about your film ‘Beloved.’ What are you recollections of working with Jonathan Demme on that film?

Newton: Amazing. You know sometimes you can do something and realize that afterward it was amazing? I knew at the moment that this was the biggest challenge, the biggest opportunity based on a book that I loved and it was life and career changing. I’m really proud of everything I did in that film. It was as rewarding as it was challenging. So it was extremely rewarding.

That character was super hard to tackle. I’m glad it was in a point in my life where I didn’t have kids and I could really focus and really engage. Everything I had done up until then I used, my degree in Anthropology became powerfully important in how I got to the role. I embodied it utterly and it was very cathartic, too.

I didn’t feel a lot of trust for directors at that point in my life. I was suspicious and cynical about the power dynamic between directors and actors. But Jonathan Demme completely revived my faith, trust and joy in that collaboration.

HollywoodChicago.com: You once said you don’t derive pleasure in life from the movies, but you enjoy it as a career. Since you work rather selectively, how is the business for you today? How do you know when you want to do a project?

Newton: My career has a wonderfully accidental flow to it, I get knocked around but I make the choices as to where I go. There is never a formula to the next one, the more I work with people, the more people I meet and the more films that I make, I’m in the company of like-minded filmmakers. I find myself everything feels right now, this is where I should be. Working with Tyler Perry at this point feels right now.

Because I’m open, there is something very valuable about the fact that I worked twenty years doing this. That is good and bad. I’m not the new ingenue anymore, but I am tried and tested. I think I’ve earned my stripes in that I can’t be pigeonholed, and I’m very grateful for that. Also that I can still change and do different things. For me it’s all about changing. I don’t want to do the same thing, I want life to be different and interesting.

I appreciate learning about different people and situations through the work that I do. I never know what’s going to happen but I am really open. You know how if you are open and just try to be in the moment as possible then things come, as in if I predicted this or wanted it to happen, it exactly what would have happened. I feel like I’m in that place right now.

”For Colored Girls” opens everywhere on November 5th. Featuring Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Loretta Devine, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Tess Thompson, Macy Gray, Michael Ealy, Omari Hardwick and Whoopi Goldberg. Screenplay by Tyler Perry based on a play by Ntozake Shange and directed by Tyler Perry. Rated “R”

By PATRICK McDONALD
Senior Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
pat@hollywoodchicago.com

Blu-Ray Review: Robert Altman’s ‘The Player’ Has Lost None of Its Power

BrianTT — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:58:01 -0400

CHICAGO – Robert Altman’s “The Player” is one of the more important and influential films in the life of this film critic. It came out at a time when the film industry was in a bit of a slump and stood out as an original, creative, mesmerizing vision that I feel helped usher in a period of such productivity in the ’90s. It is a brilliant masterpiece that has lost none of its power almost twenty years after its release.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

Tim Robbins gives one of the best performances of his career as Griffin Mill: an on-the-rise studio executive caught between professional and personal struggles. Power plays at work are threatening his livelihood while a writer threatens his life. Based on the excellent (but notably different in that it’s more about paranoia than the film) book by Michael Tolkin, “The Player” features everyone involved at the absolute top of their game. It’s one of the best films by one of the medium’s best directors ever.

The Player was released on Blu-ray on September 7th, 2010
Photo credit: Warner Bros.

If you’ve never seen “The Player” before, I’m jealous. I was in high school when the film came out and it completely changed the way I looked at the medium, opening the door to Altman’s amazing career, which I think I devoured between this and the next year’s equally-brilliant Altman film, “Short Cuts.” See it. Now. I think it’s more likely that a number of our readers probably saw “The Player” years ago and simply haven’t returned to it in ages. I’ll admit that I hadn’t seen it in probably a decade. Just ten minutes into the film, I was struck by how remarkably well it’s held-up. Everything about “The Player” works as much as the day that the film came out.

As for the Blu-ray, it’s a bit of a disappointment. The video transfer is lackluster, feeling almost too polished in its lack of grain but also not-quite-right in its color blend. The movie just doesn’t feel accurately transfered. And the release includes no new special features. Go buy it if you love the movie as I do and realize that the 4-star grade above is for the BD not for the 5-star film.

Special Features:
o Commentary by Director Robert Altman and Writer Michael Tolkin
o Additional Scenes
o “One on One with Robert Altman”
o Theatrical Trailer

“The Player” stars Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Brion James, and Cynthia Stevenson. It was written by Michael Tolkin and directed by Robert Altman. It was released on Blu-ray on September 7th, 2010 and is rated R. Head here to pick up a copy.

By BRIAN TALLERICO
Content Director
HollywoodChicago.com
brian@hollywoodchicago.com