EW’s Precious Rave

Yeah, seems like every time I turn around someone else is emailing me a bad Precious review. I get it, there is already awards fatigue and the films haven’t even opened yet. There is desperation in the air, no doubt about it, and there will continue to be until both shoes drop safely but firmly on the ground.¬† Owen Gleiberman says this about Precious in his grade A review:

Precious comes to the attention of a welfare counselor, played by Mariah Carey with an authentically deglammed compassion, and once she’s in the class, she starts to wake up. These episodes aren’t the usual inspirational claptrap; they’re about troubled girls striving, and often failing, to turn themselves around. The more Precious tries to get away from her mother, the more she’s pulled back, and the final scene of revelation between them will leave you tearful, shaken, dazed with pity and terror. Precious captures how a lost girl rouses herself from the dead, and Daniels shows unflinching courage as a filmmaker by going this deep into the pathologies that may still linger in the closets of some impoverished inner-city lives. Precious is a film that makes you think, ”There but for the grace of God go I.” It’s a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you’ve witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.

So, here’s the deal, maybe if both Kenneth Turan and Manohla Dargis beat the film to a pulp it is still going to have a chance with Oscar – there are just some movies you don’t turn away from.