Review of For Colored Girls (2010) by Shiira — 25 Nov 2010

Jo hates the ghetto, just hates it, but Crystal(Kimberly Elise), the editor-in-chief's personal assistant at Robe Rouge magazine, left behind some important company documents in her tenement apartment, so the fashion magazine maven drives the "colored" woman home, and waits inside a chauffeur-driven car, seething with contempt for "places like this", while business is attended to.

Within the next few minutes, Jo will discover that the ghetto hates her back, equally, angry at this haughty woman's stance against her own kind, when the ghetto condition takes hold of a war veteran's mind, compelling Crystal's boyfriend to dangle their two young children, over the pavement, from an open window.

The ghetto will remind this woman that she's colored, too, with an act so heinous, no ordinary words can describe it, so poetry is called in to do the job. He lets go of their ankles; she lets go of her masquerade, and becomes black again, while red pools on the sidewalk.

Later, back home, speaking about Crystal in regard to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mentally unstable boyfriend, Jo admits to the husband that she knew nothing, even though the woman was in her employment for the past eight years.

Jo, played by Janet Jackson, who looks uncannily like her late brother whenever she's under duress, could very well be speaking about the "King of Pop" himself, since the incident can't help but evoke the Berlin episode where Michael suspended his baby Blanket aloft from a hotel balcony, with nothing separating the eleven-month-old infant from the ground.

Incidentally, or perhaps not, Janet was eight years old when both Ntozake Shange's choreopoem "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" and the Norman Lear-created sitcom "Good Times" impressed themselves upon the American consciousness, back in 1974.

Not for nothing did the filmmaker cast Jackson as Jo, which just happens to be one-half of Janet's middle name(Damita Jo), because in a filmic sense, it's good times all over again; it's as if Penny Gordon, the young girl that Willona(Janet DuBois), the Evans family's neighbor, rescued from an abusive parent and eventually adopted, has returned home to the inner-city, and remembered what it was like being a colored.

In real life, while Janet was playing the victim of a violent mother on the teevee, Damita Jo's father, by all accounts, would administer corporal punishment upon her older siblings, especially Michael, and maybe her, too(according to older sis LaToya).

When Jo talks about Crystal, it's not hard to make the leap and say that she's actually talking in her own voice about Michael, who proclaimed in his last great song, 1991's "Black or White", that he wasn't "going to spend the rest of his life being a color," but probably did, down deep inside, contrary to his white appearance.

This, of course, is pure speculation, but when Janet first saw news footage of her brother behaving badly in Germany, it might have dawned on her, the exactitude of the toll that child abuse took on Michael.

Although not to the extent of her late brother, Janet, by her participation in "For Colored Girls", practically outs Joe Jackson as a child abuser, since all of the women, in some shape or form, were done wrong by a man, like Tangie(Thandie Newton), a promiscuous woman who could be a character from one of Damita Jo's hyper-sexual songs.

When the women congregate for a group hug at the film's end, it's quite possible that Janet needs one for real. In many, if not all of her scenes, you want to close your eyes, because the youngest Jackson practically channels her dead brother, the loneliest man on the planet.