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DVD Losing Isaiah
Jessica Lange is a social worker who falls for an abandoned newborn and breaks all the rules by bringing him home. Halle Berry is the homeless druggie who dumped the baby. One of the film's best attributes is that it reveals everyone's perspective, though much of the story is told from Berry's point of view. Strung out on crack, Berry's character thinks nothing of hiding her baby in a cardboard box near a dumpster before going off for a fix. We watch Berry painfully pull herself up out of the gutter and make a life for herself. She embraces decency and sobriety and becomes the person she might have always been had her childhood been different. After Lange and her amiable spouse (David Strathairn) have formed strong family ties with this difficult child, they find themselves fighting to keep him when Berry decides she wants Isaiah back. Naomi Foner's clever script reveals a legal system that is as much a character in this painful story as the attorney (Samuel L. Jackson) who takes on the case pro bono. Though the film ultimately flounders under a hesitant ending, Lange is such a dynamo that this tragic story still comes recommended. --Rochelle O'Gorman
Perhaps the biggest complaint I have with custody battles is that they are ultimately based around the selfishness of the adults involved, whether it be a battle between the child's mother and father, or between the biological parent(s) and the foster parent(s). "Losing Isaiah" is an example of a movie that uses this sad truth to tell a compelling story.
Normally, I'd be quick to write off someone like Halle Berry's character (a former crack addict who abandoned her baby in an alley) as someone unfit to raise this child. I'd also be uneasy about tearing Isaiah away from the only home he's ever known. Thankfully, this film does not end there.
After the courtroom decision is rendered, we see a much different Isaiah than the playful, cheerful child we first encountered. Did anyone bother to stop and ask him what he wanted? In an ideal world, someone would have. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, but at least we have people who (albeit a little slowly) realize this mistake in "Losing Isaiah." Were I to be given the assignment of filming a movie based around a custody battle, this is the kind of movie I would make.
honest
Very good movie. Halle always shines in whatever type of role she plays. Man she can act.
Halle's best performance. She deserved an Oscar for this.
Losing Isaiah is Halle Berry's best movie. I wish she had gotten the Oscar for this film because She gives a breakthrough performance here as a black drug addict who abandons her baby and struggles to get him back from the white mother (Jessica Lange) who adopted him. Other Noteworthy performances here are Samuel L. Jackson and Cuba Gooding Jr. The film is great, not playing race as an issue, but showing us people as human beings letting the events play and showing us the outcome. I highly recommend this film.
Dorothy Dandridge was a Hollywood trailblazer. A confident sex symbol in the 1950s, she was the first black woman ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but the electrifying stage chanteuse and dancer was forbidden to even enter the nightclubs and show rooms she performed in except from the stage. As portrayed by Halle Berry, who shepherded Dandridge's story to the screen, Dandridge is a sure, insistent star who battled racist studios and Jim Crow laws to maintain her dignity in public while stumbling through a private life marked by bad relationships and abusive lovers. Berry gives her best performance to date, brimming with ambition and moxie offstage, charming audiences with the slinky, sure moves of a nightclub veteran onstage, and convincingly "becoming" Dandridge in dramatic... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Martha Coolidge DVD Release Date: Released the 07 August 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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What was director Robert Townsend thinking? His movies, such as The Five Heartbeats and The Hollywood Shuffle, are sweet, enjoyable little pictures. But this "comedy" about two flashy Georgia women hoping to find money and men in Los Angeles is stereotypical, unfunny, embarrassing, and boring. Halle Berry and newcomer Natalie Desselle are trapped in pitiful roles playing against the distinguished but miscast Martin Landau and a wasted Ian Richardson. B.A.P.S., by the way, stands for black American princesses. There are better urban comedies out there, the badly named Booty Call for one. --Rochelle O'GormanMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Halle Berry - Martin Landau - Natalie Desselle Director(s): Robert Townsend DVD Release Date: Released the 13 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Unlike Jamie Fox in Ray Charles and Angela Basset in What's Love Got to Do With It Larenz Tate never got the character of Frankie Lyman right and that's why the movie just doesn't rise to what it could have been. First, Tate is way too old to play Frankie. The boy was only 13 when he recorded Why Do Fools Fall in Love. He was dead at just 26. Second, the movie fails to show what a huge talent Frankie Lyman was and it doesn't, perhpas delberately, dwell on what a tragedy his life was. The movie should have been about how the talented black artists of the 50s were cheated out of their royalties (Ray Charles was the rare exception), used and discarded. Instead it focuses on the widows. No discussion is given to why at least two of these women were messing with a teenaged boy and they are... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Halle Berry - Vivica A. Fox - Lela Rochon - Larenz Tate Director(s): Gregory Nava DVD Release Date: Released the 01 May 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Few things can be more noble than a wholehearted effort to tell the story of black secular music in America, especially through the eyes of a mid-20th century rhythm-and-blues vocal group breaking through race barriers to popular success. Comedian and filmmaker Robert Townsend's The Five Heartbeats (1991) is one such ambitious effort. If its story frequently sags under epochal burdens, the film makes up for it with a surprisingly tough look at the music business and classy appearances by Diahann Carroll and hoofer Harold Nicholas. Townsend plays one-fifth of the titular act, whose collective life and times we follow from 1965 to the 1990s, through friendships, break-ups, and re-groupings. The director's script, cowritten with Keenen Ivory Wayans, is wobbly and short on good... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robert Townsend - Michael Wright Director(s): Robert Townsend DVD Release Date: Released the 22 January 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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It looks like writer-director Rick Famuyiwa started a popular trend with his marriage-jitters comedy about three friends who reminisce about their lives together as one prepares to leave the group when he gets married. Everyone who rushed to see The Best Man should catch this sleeper which also stars Taye Diggs (as Roland, the reluctant groom), as well as Omar Epps and Richard T. Jones, who together provide charming, cheerful performances full of warmth and humor. This buddy story is told through flashbacks to 1986, when the three met at public school. The young men gain our affection in their competition to win the most girls, which enhances the bond of loyalty we see in them as men on the eve of Roland's wedding. The casting of the boy actors is almost spooky in its perfection,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Rick Famuyiwa DVD Release Date: Released the 18 January 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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