Jada (2008/Vivendi DVD)
Picture:
C- Sound: C+ Extras: D Feature: D
In what
is a weak, flat attempt to do a religious faith project in an urban setting,
Robert A. Johnson’s Jada (2008) is a
story of the title character (Siena Goines) surviving against all odds via
faith and her church to hold her family together and maybe find happiness if
she can. There is a story that could
work here and without the Tyler Perry comic approach, but we instead get a production
that never takes off or adds up.
Everyone
talks at each other, too many of the scenes are indoors and not well-lit, the
acting is uninspired (no pun intended) and no new points save the obvious
(follow their version of Christianity or you deserve nothing good) to the point
of passive smugness. I don’t even know
if this really represents The Black Experience, but it does no represent good
storytelling and when “love” seems like a shotgun religious contract, all it
seems like is someone trading one form of misery for another. That misery can be seen throughout this dud.
The letterboxed
1.78 X 1 image is really soft and weak with staircasing, aliasing errors and
edge enhancement all over the place. The
lack of good location use is obnoxious and this is hard to watch. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is really
stretching out the sound and is lucky it is not weaker, though some audio
sounds like bad location work. There are
no extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
