I readily concede to the admission that I had nothing but malice in my heart, going to see Precious. The evil movie hate trolls who spend most days simmering in the fetid stench of my mind bowels, the cretins, had gone Darfur on any remaining strands of kindness I deigned to feel for cinema, leaving my eyes beady, bloodened and zeroing in for the sweet, sweet kill.

So, why all the PMSing? Well, I took one look at the marketing campaign for Precious and realized that every single (OVERWEIGHT WOMAN) advertisement was (LOWER CLASS) geared towards showing (BLACK) one thing. Every image, commercial, thing we know about this movie is designed to blaxploitate lead actress Gabourey Sidibe’s body. A movie that conceptually is built to show something Precious, but shows instead something Pitiable, drawing the kind of attention that vehicular manslaughter draws from passing motorists. To keep the P theme going, Pain Porn.

Hi, my name is Morgan, I’m a cinemaholic, and its been five days since I was wrong about Precious.

Precious takes place in 1987 Harlem and is about Claireece “Precious” Jones, a 16 year old girl still in junior high school, living on welfare with her abusive mom, and pregnant with her second child. Ostensibly, a movie about an African American woman living in poverty in New York who has learning disabilities, health problems and suffers social, emotional, physical and sexual abuse and just needs one rogue teacher to help her believe in herself again sounds like a pretty damn racist movie. None of the things I just said have been missing from any movie about the struggle of a minority against adversity and in this way it doesn’t challenge a single preconceived notion we have about race or its associated stereotypes.

The film’s response to this is “So?” And it gets away with this because, one, there aren’t really any white people in this movie. The shadow of our pale empire isn’t felt in this movie at all, nor are there any comments made about anyone’s presence or lack of melanin in their epidermis, seemingly a hot button issue in human history for, oh, ever. Also, two, there are hardly any men in this movie, because movies about oppression usually aren’t complete without the dongle-equipped half of society brandishing big phallic guns to penetrate people with warm lead or wield girthy bureaucratic pens to box in the rest.

There’s not much romance in this movie either, save from a superb cameo by singer/songwriter/all around sexy individual Lenny Kravitz, and so love doesn’t throw a Hail Mary Pass in the fourth quarter just to save Precious Jones from all her misery and woeitude.

Now I find myself in the curious predicament of giving this movie a lot of credit for everything it didn’t bother to do wrong.

Hi Morgan, this is your constituency of readers, and you’re scaring us.

But think about it, when has a movie about race ever taught you anything about race? I mean, really. People are always praising a movie for being "inspirational," but are those people inspired to live their lives any differently? Of bloody course not, people just say those things to give their spine the warm fuzzy once over, which is just silly because now every major movie centered around non-whiteys has to in some way involve being downtrodden. Hell, if Precious had been about a thinner black woman, it’d probably be less popular just because we’ve seen enough thin black women be oppressed and need some slightly newer designer drug to get the same high we got from the last racist race movie.

Precious is the first movie I’ve seen since Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing that on the surface is purely about race, but below all that is really about people who life takes a dump all over. You can’t make a meaningful movie about social issues like race and gender if every frame is pregnant with accusations towards other races and genders, because yes, that makes your movie racist. You can hit people over the head with your [big air quotes] message all you like, but you’ll just give audiences brain damage if you make them think your stereotyping has any merit at all.

Beyond all my high falootin' bullpucky, Precious is a good drama. Precious Jones, far from being a Perfect Paragon (okay, stopping), is a girl who’s a little quick to anger, self-centered and simple-minded from time to time, who has some fascinatingly warped and bombastic dream sequences in the film’s first half as she’s try to squirrel herself away from reality biting and thanks to the performance (and not the poundage) of Gabourey Sidibe, has a lot of screen presence.

The film is sometimes a little too stylistic for its own good, its first half trying out new kinds of camera angles, editing, special lenses and color schemas every alternate minute, but it keeps the very familiar exposition material from getting stale until you get engaged in the characters halfway in. There are slip-ups here and there, like an inspirational teacher who’s a little too, but not too too and a plot that is akin to checking off a list of twists from an after school special.

And while soundtracks are generally the things reviewers only talk about when they're getting paid by the word, Precious has one of the most inventive, off the wizall soundtracks since Watchmen paired 99 Luftballoons with Me and Bobby McGee. Every moment of drama where you're prepared to feel like crap, some indie R&B piece detonates between your ears and you get sucked into Precious' skewed worldview. Every time you want to feel a little too hopeful, a woman cries sofly into the hole in her acoustic. I don't want soundtracks that blend unnoticed into the background, I want to be musically goosed! Then I want to take that unexpected aural violation and put it on my Zune, because that's how I do.

At most every turn, Precious very relentlessly insists on being treated like any other movie instead of a movie that needs a cast of people with a darker skin color to get attention, and so at its very worst it has the same flaws that any other drama does: that it’s about a procession of exceedingly sad things happening to human beings. I dot E dot, this is not escapist fantasy but rather a movie for people who like movies. A very sans humor affair that can best be described succinctly with a lot of :'(s. By following in the footsteps of the drama genre and not the drama/race/boy-howdy-you-sure-oughtsa-to-feel-guilty genre, it earns cinematic self-respect as well as its title.

3.5/5 stars