Oh my f-ing god. I can’t even…
I don’t know if I’m happier to see you back or more pissed that you have brought me this blight of bad news.
ETA: Let me guess. The kid has AIDS, is abused by the doctor that delivered him, the nurse, the social worker, his grandma and the police he tries to report it to. He is kicked in the head each morning as an alarm clock, he is black as night, fat as fuck, retarded and autistic, poor and broke, ugly and mean.
In the next installment, Precious’s granddaughter, Hi-5, moves into the carcass of a dead abused elephant and becomes a whore for a schizophrenic pimp, Little Yaller, who gives her hepatitis before beating her to death with a CB antenna. There is a funny side story about a homeless microcephalic dying of rabies, but it might just be a fantasy sequence from when Hi-5 eats the lead paint chips.
Sampiro!!! 
Actually, all of these things happen.
And that’s just the first half-hour!
There’s also a children’s book addition to the series written from the perspective of Mongo. I haven’t read it but I downloaded the chapter list:
Chapter 1: “I Likes Fish and Not Being Beat”.
Chapter 2: “By Being Beat, I Mean Being Raped”.
Chapter 3 “I Gets Beat Up and Raped”
Chapter 4: “They All Out of Fish”
Chapter 5: “Mongo’s Coffin”
Chapter 4 was the saddest.
Somewhere, Gabourey Sidibe is screaming
“Are you fucking kidding me? There had better be some goddamned flashbacks!”
On 30 Rock they parodied Precious by having Tracy Jordan become a respected, serious actor when he starred in the film “Hard To Watch: based on the book “Stone Cold Bummer” by Manipulate.”
Plenty of these girls had WAAAYYYYY more than just the incest pregnancy going on. Like Precious they had multiple problems combounding on each other such as the man responsible for the incest pregnancy still being able to abuse them and as a result of the abuse they had started using narcotics, etc. Oh, and usually girls like that aren’t head of their class either. They’ve got learning problems including functional illiteracy. I imagine if I went through some of my old records for clients of the family center I volunteer at, I could find girls whose situations had almost perfectly matched Precious’s.
I don’t believe you. Not perfectly matching Precious. No way.
I occasionally try to convince people that the movie Precious is simply a remake of the movie 8 mile. I truly believe it is the same story, told in the same way. Even 'though Eminem’s life as told in 8 mile isn’t as soured as Precious’s life, I really feel it in the way the supporting cast behaves, and also in the special way the urban scenes are tinted and shot – those really make me think I’m watching the same move with a different star. Also color me in the somewhat uplifting in the Precious has barely survived given her terrible circumstance. As I understand it, the book is more complex, as the book progresses, the grammar and diction improve, so you can see, as you’re reading, how Precious begins illiterate, and improves as the book improves. No really good way to show that in a movie.
I view it as a sort of one-woman snuff film.
It’s not even imaginative. Celie from the beginning of The Color Purple (i.e. barely literate teen with no support group who’s been raped and had two kids by her stepfather by the time she’s 15) falls through a timehole into the 20th century inner city ghetto. Subtract lesbianism/add AIDS, substitute horrible abusive mother for horrible abusive husband, and you’re in biz.
…at what point does Coleman Francis fly in on a Cessna?
And I know some people had a problem with The Color Purple, but I didn’t. I thought it was a beautiful movie, and I realized that people like Celie have existed.
I have posted this list plenty of times, but I am going to post it again. It’s the line up of events and characteristics that Sapphire burdens Precious with. I mean, even starting with making her character not only black, but as black as she can possibly be…that is a burden in this society, if you aren’t pretty or slim. That is why, when people say they know white people with the same set of circumstance, I don’t believe you can say that…being white in this society is already one less burden than what Precious had to endure. I know that many poor, miserable kids have dealt with many of these hardships, at the same damn time. But ALL OF THEM AT ONCE? I’m going to bold the parts that I think is just too unlikely to happen ON TOP of every thing else.
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Very Dark. Several shades darker than what this society is willing to consider attractive usually (though I find her skin tone gorgeous).
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Morbidly Obese
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Poor
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Sexually abused by dad
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illiterate
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Pregnant *twice *by dad
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physically abused to the extreme (kicked in the head while giving birth, for instance)
**8. sexually abused my mom.
**
9. gives birth to a baby with Downs Syndrome
****10. saddled with AIDS
Are there kids with AIDS, that they got from their Dad? Yes, perhaps. But AIDS in children picked up through heterosexual sex in the 80s was vanishingly rare. And being illiterate is possible, but to the point where a teenager has to be taught the ALPHABET? Very unlikely.
It is all of these things working together that makes the movie ridiculous. The author showed no restraint and just kept throwing more and more things at the protagonist until I just stopped believing any of it.
Now, it is possible that someone has met someone who has had all of these things befall them. I mean, I have never been to Texas. I don’t know every single kids’ story in New York. Or Chicago. Or anywhere. But it is also possible that an invisible tea pot is floating in space. I reserve the right to be very skeptical if something doesn’t add up for me.
ETA: Ranchoth, I had to look up Coleman Francis.
8 Mile = Purple Rain
Purple Rain =/! Precious
The End.
Then she becomes a roadie for Kanye.
But it gets her a date with Chris Brown.
I know nothing about Sapphire (nee Romona Lofton) and was curious how “inspired by life events” a story it was so I looked her up on wiki and in an author database. She was a military brat who became a self-described hippie and spoken word artist, got a MFA, taught here and there, is active in various artist colonies/lesbian & feminist poetry websites and mags/does volunteer work. In other words, and by her own admission in one interview, it’s not remotely autobiographical, though she insists it is (her term) “observational” and based on actual people.
It reminds me a bit of JT Leroy, the over-the-top child prostitute son of a ‘lot lizard’ (i.e. truckstop prostitute) mtf transgendered memoirist from few years back. That turned out to be a hoax in that the ‘real’ JT was a middle-aged female teacher, a ruse uncovered largely because JT Leroy was so damned exaggerated and got even moreso in interviews. Sapphire at least admits hers is a work of fiction, but both Precious and JT Leroy are about equal in the exaggeration aspects.
I wonder if my YA novel Belvedere’s One-Armed Homeless Schizoaffective Mommy and Her Afro-Korean Epileptic Smack Addict Convict Girlfriend Get Married could get some of the same audience.
Gabourey Sidibe was/is (not sure if it’s still running) a regular on The Big C and plays a high school student in a class taught by Laura Linney’s character’s (Cathy?). In an early episode she breaks down and weepingly tells Linney about her horrible homelife: the missing father, the abusive mother, the drugs, the poverty, the general one-stop-shopping-for-social-problems.
Later Linney visits her home and discovers, of course, that she lives in a perfectly nice middle class house with two doting parents. When she confronts Sidibe’s character, she laughs and then admits that it’s fun to manipulate liberal white people with preconceptions sometimes. (She later ends up moving into Cathy’s house due to her parents leaving on a missionary trip or some other lame plot point.)
I wondered if this was done deliberately to get rid of the preconceptions of Sidibe as Precious. In any case, years old but one of my favorite evermeme pics.
