Critic Pally: “Calling For Colored Girls the best thing Tyler Perry has ever done is pretty faint praise. Terrific performances buried inside an after-school special about abuse, sexual repression, rape, etc.”

Me: “A journalist friend said it has great performances.”

Critic Pally: “Except one character is a high-powered magazine exec whose lofty status apparently has emasculated her stockbroker husband to the point that he’s gay.”

Me: “He turns gay at…what, age 35 because his wife makes him feel unimportant and diminished? That sounds ridiculous. Does the movie feel like now or like a ’70s thing, which is when the play was written?”

Critic Pally: “Call me crazy, but I think that devoting a long segment to a girl getting a back-alley abortion — in New York City in 2010 — is a tad anachronistic. That had resonance in 1976, when Roe v Wade was still a recent thing — but it seems kind of clueless today, unless Perry means it as a pro-life statement.”

Me: “What about Janet Jackson?”

Critic Pally: “I have to say that Janet Jackson looks/sounds like a transgender Michael Jackson. She’s distractingly unnatural-looking.”

Me: “It sounds perfectly dreadful.”

Critic Pally: “I actually admire the original for what it is: a series of poetic monologues. But Perry, in adapting it, felt compelled to create characters with stories and intertwine them in trite and obvious ways.”

Me: “Perry is a mediocre director, at best, who feeds a niche audience (i.e., older African American women with no taste) and that’s all he’ll ever be. Lionsgate’s release and awards campaign is strictly a good-manners political gesture. They’re basically saying ‘thank you, Tyler, for making us lots of money with your previous terrible movies.'”