Word: mcmillans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...make prime time more integrated than the average suburb, but the "colored on TV" instinct lingers on. It helps to explain why such a run-of-the-mill movie as Waiting to Exhale is a box-office hit. For many blacks, especially women, the film version of Terry McMillan's best-selling 1992 potboiler about lonely, frustrated black women and no-good men has become a catalyst for discussions about sisterhood and relations with the opposite sex. "It teaches you that you need to find peace within yourself. It has characters anyone can identify with," says Sabrina Williams, of Washington...
...clueless about defending herself from exploitative males--the romantically stunted career-girl stereotype that Hollywood has already perfected for white women. "One of the things I was hoping to accomplish was to point out that we as women often choose men who aren't necessarily healthy for us," says McMillan. "The bottom line is that people will do stupid things when they want to feel loved." The lesson is lost on some viewers. "The movie didn't do black women any justice at all," says Gail Christopher, author of Anchors for the Innocent, a guidebook for single parents. "As black...
...film when it debuted at Christmas, so many African Americans flocked to see it that it became the No. 1 box-office draw its first week. By last week, when it dropped to fourth, it had already earned $40 million. In this, the film is repeating the success of McMillan's novel, which stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for nine months almost exclusively because of its strong sales among black women. Says McMillan: "When the [executives at 20th Century Fox] found out we were No. 1, they were trying to figure out, 'How can we reach...
...reason for the widespread acclaim McMillan's book received was the depth of her characters and the web of personal relations that logically develop amongst them during the course of the novel. Whittaker skips over character development in favor of fancy establishing shots and slick symbolic poses that leave most people feeling as though they just missed something...
Bassett does all the heavy emotional lifting in Waiting to Exhale, based on Terry McMillan's best seller. It's the old story--as old as Four Daughters in the '30s or The Best of Everything in the '50s or Now and Then last fall--about a quartet of young females looking for love and identity. Here the setting is Phoenix, Arizona, and the women are black, but everything else is familiar. Bernadine (Bassett) finds that her longtime husband is deserting her; Savannah (Whitney Houston) has a lover who won't leave his wife; Gloria (Loretta Devine...