Lee Daniels
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Connections, in both directions
Add in a few dirty jokes, including one about a woman asking a gent to stick both his hands up her vagina and clap (well, that one was needed to avoid a PG rating), plus pertinent news clips from each era, and you have The Cosby Show meets Forrest Gump meets Do the Right Thing .
Gaines’ voice is so quiet that it takes him until the 1980s to make a stand for equal pay for blacks on the White House staff — a moment Daniels treats as a watershed, but which seems more like a sad reflection on the slow crawl of racial progress at the seat of government and, by extension, in Hollywood, too, where “Driving Miss Daisy” (which “The Butler” also resembles) was trumping “Do the Right Thing” at the Oscars around the same time Gaines would have been asking for that raise.
Moonlight (2016)
Directed by Barry Jenkins
influenced by Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Themes
Informed by both Jenkins’ and McCraney’s own Miami upbringing, this environment may be gritty, but it’s not “Precious.”
The excessively charitable atmosphere at Moonlight’s New York Film Festival press screening led me to recall how Precious similarly won over a condescending audience.
It is one of the most well-written, well-acted and thought-provoking films of 2016, nothing less than a groundbreaking masterpiece, with content as compelling as other films such as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Precious.”
But while films like Ballast and Precious made it almost a badge of honor to rub our noses in miserablism, Jenkins is too sensitive a filmmaker to indulge in such exploitative tendencies.
Throughout, Jenkins conducts a symphony of naturalistic impressions from his cast, resulting in the most abundant handful of breakthrough performances since Lee Daniels reoriented the playing field with Precious .
Good Time (2017)
Directed by Benny Safdie
influenced by Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Characters
Nik is a truly pitiable character – in some ways he reminds us of Lee Daniels’ Precious, or worse, a refugee from John Steinbeck’s Great Depression.
(Think Amadeus , and how it reframed Mozart’s life as a back-and-forth between him and rival composer Antonio Salieri.)
Seven Psychopaths (2012)
Directed by Martin McDonagh
influenced by Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
The parade of secondary characters includes Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) as the unfortunate dog-walker who lost Costello’s beloved Bonnie, Tom Waits — clutching a bunny — as one half of a husband-wife vigilante team (“We go around the country killing people who go around the country killing people”), and Kevin Corrigan being Kevin Corrigan.
The women in the film (Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Gabourey Sidibe from Precious) are underdeveloped to the status of walk-ons.
Among them: grizzled singer Tom Waits (playing a typically random psycho named Zachariah), screen veteran Harry Dean Stanton (as a Quaker out for revenge), Boardwalk Empire's Michael Pitt and even Precious star Gabourey Sidibe.
Each new arrival is either famous (Harry Dean Stanton, Michael Pitt, Precious ’ Gabourey Sibide), insane, or both, as if creator and creation have become overly giddy with the possibilities of Hollywood.
As women are lamented as not being very fleshed out and easy targets, that is, of course, their destiny here with only Gabourey Sidibe ("Precious") making the most of a bad situation.
The Florida Project (2017)
Directed by Sean Baker
influenced by Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Themes
There are exceptions to the rule, such as Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Lee Daniels’s Precious, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.
There is a clear distinction between the white-trash movies and those about black Americans in similarly straitened circumstances — Precious (2009), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and last year’s Oscar winner, Moonlight.
Norbit (2007)
Directed by Brian Robbins
influenced Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Visuals
Sledgehammer hogwash of the shrillest kind, Precious suggests the Eddie Murphy of Norbit parodying one of Lillian Gish�s silent-movie bludgeons.
12 Years a Slave (2013)
Directed by Steve McQueen
influenced by Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Themes
As in "Precious," where the miraculous Gabourey Sidibe kept us watching what we didn't want to see, so, too, the solemnly powerful Chiwetel Eijofor provides us with a reason for not averting our eyes.
Despite featuring all the swampy melodrama and awkward sexuality of, say, “The Paperboy,” this film lacks that one’s redemptive sense of humor about itself.
Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Directed by F. Gary Gray
influenced The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021)
Themes
It’s a lot like a scene in Straight Outta Compton when police charge the stage when hip hop group N.W.A. plays “F– tha Police,” which shows you how much the world has censored Black people from speaking their truth even five decades later.
Elijah Kelley (“Hairspray,” “Red Tails”) and David Oyelowo (“Lincoln,” “Jack Reacher”) are both strong as Cecil’s teenage sons, one drawn to serve his country in Vietnam, the other to more radical courses of action.
This is no dry dissertation, however, but a deeply moving melodrama of the most honorable type (the script is the first feature written by Danny Strong, based on a Washington Post article by Wil Haygood), its politics and its heart illustrated through Cecil’s relationship with his wife, Gloria — Oprah Winfrey ( The Princess and the Frog ) is magnificent as a woman who’s not entirely satisfied with the life her husband has given her — and his sons, particularly the firebrand political activist Louis (David Oyelowo: Jack Reacher ), with whom the apolitical Cecil frequently clashes.