"For Colored Girls"

Before going to see the movie, I heard the movie summed up in just a few words: "too melodramatic." I was afraid that this would affect my experience, but it was totally accurate. Sure, all of the women in the narrative had some pretty horrific things happen to them, but it just seemed to pile on. As we were talking about the movie afterward, we discussed the monologues that each character had. This tool can be very effective in theatre-- and very well could have been in the stage production of this narrative-- but in a motion picture, it just seems a bit out of place, especially when they came as randomly as they did. The one that stuck out the most to me was toward the beginning, when the teenage girl was in her dance class, talking to her classmates about her romantic encounters. I was perplexed at first, because I did not realize what she was trying to do. Was she supposed to sound like she was about to break out into song? Was she just delivering her lines poorly? Even though I finally figured things out, the monologues still seemed a bit overdone.
Another thing that really stuck out to me was the extremely poor portrayal of African-American men in the film. Only two men were "good" to their women, and one of them turned out to have been deceiving his wife by living a sort of a double life and lying about his sexual encounters with other men. Granted, it is not Tyler Perry's job to paint a sterling picture of African-American men through his films, but I think this aspect of the film is just another component of the whole overly-melodramatic tone the film has to it.