A bit of well-meaning manipulation, unevenly photographed, alternately oversaturated and washed-out and glossy and grainy, centered around a Harlem African-American illiterate obese unwed teenage mother of a Down’s daughter, now pregnant again, expelled from school, abused and battered at home by her welfare mother, an incestuous rape victim of her absentee father, and oh, HIV-positive. We don’t find out all of that at once. It piles up. Some interesting effects are gotten from the heroine’s first-person voice-over, interwoven at competitive volume with the dialogue, such that it plays as interior monologue rather than expository narration. The fantasy scenes almost attain a similar musing quality, triggered as they are by the heroine’s urgent desire to escape, but the actual content of these fantasies — a red-carpet Hollywood premiere, a mirror reflection of a slender beautiful blonde in place of a fat black, a subtitled black-and-white takeoff on a telecast of De Sica’s Two Women, etc. — exhibit a consistent inanity which works to rob sympathy from either the film’s heroine or its director, Lee Daniels. One or the other. You choose. With Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, and Mariah Carey. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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