"But in offering up their heroine's misery for the audience's delectation, they've created something uncomfortably close to poverty porn."

Thank you, Ms. Stevens, for sharing your upper-middle class White-girl Bonifides.

And yet, so many American's live in worse conditions than this film describes.

Rather than "poverty porn", it's more like a poverty scared straight.

I bet the first thing Ms Stevens did after watching this movie was call her stock broker.

and "poverty porn" is some sort of bona fide link. it was underlined and in blue. i didn't click it on - no telling where it goes.

this is case where i don't think dana is actually against capturing poverty on film. or a prisoner of her white middle class upbrringing.

call it "too clever by half", or believing that she's too hip to be square.

and that's the problem - she's trying to hard. she's truly unable to recognize great acting and writing. she sits in a darkened room, scribbling notes, working off some sort of self-induced equation to try and decide the value of the film she's seeing.

or maybe she's was (or is) just a fat girl who feels uncomfortable seeing other fat girls make it good?

(just kidding dana - you definitely strike me as the sort of person who is too thin and too white)

You can grow up poor and black without growing up abused, dehumanized and maltreated at every level.

What is bothering Ms. Stevens is that while the poverty isn't all through our culture, the taste for dehumanization, abuse, maltreatment and general coarseness is going all through it.

There are people who are very wealthy who go around talking trash and doing the coarsest, most abusive things. We are inundated and can't escape coarse imagery, coarse language, dehumanizing treatment of other people as though it were normal.

Our culture has become so busy tearing things down and pulling people and things into the gutter so they are "real" that it is hard to find gentleness and manners and courtesy and people talking without coarse language. What used to be something no person would want to do publicly, for fear of being a social outcast, is just "keeping it real".

You almost have to go to a Disney (not Touchstone) movie to avoid coarse crap.

Poverty doesn't necessarily have to mean abusiveness and coarseness and dehumanization.

Poverty doesn't have to mean that but unfortunately much of the time in the real world it does.

I feel kind of bad for Dana. It really must have hurt her neck, straining to look down from her privileged white pedestal.

Wow, I’m pretty shocked at the abuse Ms. Stevens is taking for her review of this film, mostly from people who haven’t even seen the film yet! It’s like people hear that this film is a realistic depiction of poverty in inner cities, dealing with difficult and disturbing subject matter, and they automatically assume it must be a great film and believe that anyone who doesn’t like it is a racist or, as is the case here, a privileged, ivory-tower type whose precious (sorry!) sensibilities just can’t handle gritty reality. I’m sorry, but I didn’t get any of that from this review. It is possible for a movie to deal with realistic and important subject matter, and even have some great acting, and still not be a great movie. Something could be off in the directing, the dialogue, any number of things. It’s also possible to show so much gruesomeness and violence that it starts to feel exploitative, especially if it’s not balanced well with other realms of human experience. That is the sense I got from this review.

I don’t know how I’ll feel about this movie—I’m not going to comment because I HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET! I may differ in opinion from Ms. Stevens when I do. But I certainly don’t expect a reviewer to give a movie a glowing review just because of the nature of its subject matter.