Waiting to Exhale (1995) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

I suppose that IMDb is probably the best site on the internet if you measure that by the difference between it and its nearest competitor. If you score IMDb at 100, I don't know if the next best film site is even a 25. I love the site and have visited it every day for years and years. Why am I saying this? I guess cuz I'm about to trash some elements of their movie "scores". The IMDb rating system has its flaws. It is dominated by films which appeal to young, white males. The most egregious example of that is that the execrable toy commercial known as Return of the Jedi is rated among the top 250 films of all time.

Waiting to Exhale is a chick flick, by any definition, including our official objective measurement. (The IMDb male score minus IMDb female score is 1.0 or more). It is a black chick flick. To elaborate, it is a gentle, mature black chick flick about powerful, educated, upper middle class women. To top it off, it does a healthy bit of male-bashing. In other words Waiting to Exhale is on the South Pole if IMDb's fan boys are on the North, so this puppy ain't never headed for the Top 250.

It's actually a pretty decent flick, much better than you'd expect from the 5.1 score at IMDb. It pulled in more than sixty million at the box office, Roger Ebert scored it at three stars and Rotten Tomatoes says it got 50% positive reviews.

Now don't get me wrong, lads, I didn't enjoy it that much myself. Like most of you reading this, I'm into sports and guns and hookers and poker and fast cars and sizzling steaks and tall glasses of scotch and other manly, big penis stuff. This film has no squinty-eyed shoot-outs in dusty saloons, no car chases through the L.A. river, no gross belly laughs, and no sharks with frickin' laser beams. It has minimal nudity, and all the sex is presented from the women's point of view. In other words, it is missing all the things that make both life and the movies worthwhile. Watching it is like hanging out with Oprah for a couple of hours, pretending to be mature and evolved enough to meet her standards. But although it is not my kind of movie, I can recognize that the script tried to show the real problems faced by people in this demographic. Even the most successful and beautiful women find it as hard as the rest of us to find love, and have to kiss a lot of frogs before they find a prince. This is not an especially profound insight, and it is not particularly easy to sympathize with these women who have material comfort and each others' deep friendships for spiritual comfort, but at least the film tried to speak honestly about their lives, and the box office showed that many women were able to relate to the film's messages.

It was directed by Forest Whitaker in a quiet, understated and subtle way that kept the film from degenerating into a sassy, high fivin', "you go, girlfriend" kind of thing, which it could easily have become. On the other hand, a little less dignity and a little more energy and humor might have made the film work better for me, because on the day I saw it, I left my vagina in my other suit.