Thanksgiving: For some, that time of the year to reconnect with friends and family, to eat plenty of turkey and trimmings, and figure out what to gift Aunt Ida with this Christmas. For filmgoers, a big fat plate of depression, as the movies grim up, some chasing Oscars and prestige, others going for our wallets, and all of them leaving us in serious need of candy canes and eggnog.

This season’s champ is clearly the feel-good urban horror movie Precious. It leaves no stone unturned to flatten us. A partial checklist of miseries: Poverty. Illiteracy. Morbid obesity. Incest and rape with dad. Two-time teenage pregnancy, the first resulting in a Down’s syndrome child matter-of-factly named “Mongo.” Oh, and it’s 1987, as AIDS did its worst to decimate whole communities. The movie is based, as the subtitle tells us, on the novel Push by Sapphire, and it pushes hard, squashing our tearducts. I smell a musical.
But wait, it gets worse. Poor Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), the punching bag of the title, is stuck in a festering, shades-drawn-tight Harlem apartment with her monster mother, played, in a performance of epic degeneracy, by Mo’Nique. Director Lee Daniels has conceived the film as a kind of fairy tale, with the big-boned actress as an unstoppable seven-headed dragon. From her sweaty couch she smokes incessantly, drinks buckets of Sunkist orange soda, defrauds the welfare authorities, and treats her daughter as her personal slave, hurling everything including the TV at her and poor Mongo—and she uses Precious for sexual gratification, too. Come awards time Mo’Nique should be whisked from the red carpet and transferred to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. (more…)








