Good Press

[Greg/Dean]

She Is Janet. Hear Her Roar.

Why do men always try to protect Michael’s little sister? With a new movie, look, and perspective on life after a painful year, Miss Jackson is serving notice: she can handle her own bruise control.

Rocco Laspata / Blackglama

Maybe it’s the big brown eyes. Maybe it’s the baby-doll voice. Maybe it’s her unusual family. Whatever the cause, Janet Jackson has long noticed she has a peculiar effect on men and, frankly, she doesn’t get it. “For some reason, men always want to protect me from something,” says Jackson, 44, her eyes and that voice as vulnerable as always. “I find it interesting because I consider myself strong and perfectly able to take care of myself. But I’ve had that reaction all my life from men. It baffles me.” In the last few years, the role of Jackson’s chief protector has been played by director Tyler Perry. He’s been there through breakups and breakdowns, as a friend and, possibly just as important, a source of constant employment. While her music career has cooled, Perry’s cast her in his last three movies. In fact, she was in the middle of filming Why Did I Get Married Too with him in Atlanta when her mentor, idol, and older brother Michael died from an alleged drug overdose. Perry promptly hired extra security and prohibited photos of her from being released to the tabloids. He even changed the ending of the film—over her objections—because it featured her in a scene at a funeral. “It was just too eerie,” says Perry. “When I think of Janet, I just want to protect her. Not that she needs it—she can handle whatever comes her way, and she has. But when I see what she’s been through, it makes me want to intervene in any way I can.”

All of which explains how they came to work together on their latest movie, For Colored Girls. The two had just wrapped up Married Too when Perry called to invite Jackson to see an Atlanta production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, the landmark 1974 Ntozake Shange play about a circle of African-American women who face so many hardships—rape, infidelity, infertility, the death of children—they could found their own Prozac nation. Typically, Jackson thought the invite was another one of Perry’s safety checks. “He worries about me a lot and calls sometimes just to see how I’m doing, so I had no idea he was thinking of making a movie out of the play—or that he’d want me in it, for that matter,” she says. Neither of them had ever seen the play. “I remember being about 10 years old and visiting Michael in New York when he was filming The Wiz. It was on Broadway then,” she says. “I always remembered it as the play with the really long name.” Perry had been hearing for years from women—most recently Whoopi Goldberg—who wanted him to adapt it. “I knew that some women really consider it the black woman’s bible,” Perrysays. “That was fascinating to me.”

Shange’s beautiful and haunting play is an especially un-film-friendly work. The original piece was told, in a very ’70s way, largely through dance and verse. None of the characters even had names. The women in Perry’s version (played by Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Kerry Washington, Loretta Devine, Phylicia Rashad, and Goldberg) do break into soliloquies at unexpected moments, and one of them teaches dance. But Perry has deftly updated their situations to feel more true to 21st-century Harlem, though you still must get past the dated idea that all the women feel consumed and defined by their relationships with men (and that the men, with the exception of one noble policeman, are worthless).

[Mr. Wonder]

Before I read, does this review have spoilers in it?

[s.omner]

Nice review. T4p

[SianGracious]

Before I read, does this review have spoilers in it?

[RedSimba]

Yeah, the full article warns about spoilers at one point.

I just cut the article out; I'm saving it!