Customer Reviews

Beauty Shop

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

In this movie we have a woman, Gina, played by Queen Latifah. Gina works in a beauty parolor owned by a rude, self-righteous man. She finally is fed-up with working for someone else and strikes out on her own. It's hard for her, she has a daughter to support but her determination is strong.
I really liked this movie, it was fun, yet had the message in it to never give up, never. QL does an outstanding job portraying the feelings of Gina and the supporting characters worked well with her. If you get a chance sit down and watch this,very entertaining and upbeat, a story with heart and soul.

I am not black. I am not a woman. I have never had a weave or extensions, and I try to stay out of the ghetto as much as possible.

Yet I got a kick out of Beauty Shop for some reason???

The script itself is not all that strong, but the performances by QL and the rest of the ensemble cast are watchable and engaging.

Props to Kevin Bacon. His outrageous and flamboyant Jorge' is a nice departure from his other roles and he comes across as quite convincing in the part.

The movie only gets 3 stars from me because the storyline is quite conventional and played out. However, for the most part the jokes are funny and the actors deliver them nicely.... so tack on an extra star for that.

While it won't win any awards, "Beauty Shop" is pure mindless fun.

This movie was hilarious. I saw it in the theatre and I laughed the entire time. People should not always expect a comedy to be all serious and have a perfect plot... this movie is about having fun and that's exactly what i did. It was "FIIIIIEERCE FIIIIEEERCE"!!!

I absolutely love Queen Latifah. She makes any movie worth watching in my humble opinion. It's a shame that Latifah aside `Beauty Shop' is rather dull. It's not that it doesn't bring the funny; it's just that it's all funny we've seen many times before. I understand that it's harder and harder these days to find an original concept for anything, but really, watching `Beauty Shop' is like major deja vu. I've seen this done almost word for word before, I swear it.

The story revolves around Gina, a hairstylist who's fed up with working for the man (that man being the snobbish Jorge). Gina decides it's time to take her talent to the next level and open her own salon. Jorge of course doesn't like this much and begins working to shut her down. Things are difficult, being a single mother and all but she has the support of her friends and this gives her strength to push through. In the meantime Gina is given a huge opportunity when her own conditioner recipe (would it be called that?) is brought to a big wig corporation by a wealthy client. Things look to be going up for Gina, but will they stay up?

Latifah is funny as Gina. I just love her to death and she always creates the most likable characters. Even if her movies are all B-Grade at best (`Chicago' and 'Set it Off' aside) she always makes the experience worth it. The real standout here though is Kevin Bacon who is obviously overjoyed to be hamming it up as Jorge. His blonde locks and wispy attitude is just such a huge departure for him it's hilarious to see. I don't normally like Bacon but he had me in stitches. Alicia Silverstone also makes her return to the screen here, but her impression is less than impressive. Her accent is obnoxious and I found myself wishing she would get off the screen.

The cast is huge here with names like Andie MacDowell, Mena Suvari, Alfre Woodard and Djimon Hounsou showing up every now and then. Everyone does a decent job with what they are given and they all seem to work well with one another, feeding off the others energy.

As far as comedies go this one is funny, it's just very unoriginal. It doesn't mean that you can't find enjoyment out of this one since the laughs are there, just know that you'll have laughed at these gags before. If you're a fan of Latifah or anyone else in the cast then by all means check this one out. I have yet to see either of the `Barbershop' movies but I really need too since I hear they are a laugh riot. I'm sure they are better than this film as far as plot goes.

Queen Latifah & Alicia Silvestone scintillate as hairdressers in this Black-Is-Beautiful movie. As the Queen sashays into her own shop, where she sells her 'hair crack' conditioner, and Alicia wins as a wanna-be black girl, Djimon Hounsou really glistens as the hunky upstairs electrician who becomes the Queen's handyman.

All the ingedients are here, as comedy mixes w/edginess. Kevin Bacon is Jerome, a nasty Eurotrash hairdresser who ab/uses the Queen until she quits, taking a shampoo girl w/her. Winning a loan for her new shop, a place that looks like 'somebody ate the 70's & threw up', the Queen loses 2 loser hairdressers & learns to cope w/her ghetto location. Alfre Woodward is another, winning 'do do-er, & Della Reese is a surprise quick cameo. Go see it ... unless you're not into humor & beautiful black babes!

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a big fan of Queen Latifa. She's just so versatile and so immensely talented; she can sing, dance and act, and she has a sassiness that is a beguiling mixture of the adorable and the sexy - she can shake her booty with the best of them. Which is why I expected better from her than what she gives us in Beauty Shop.

Yes - the film is minimally entertaining, but it's also a rather flat, standard, and pedestrian affair, where the jokes aren't nearly as funny as they should be and where the producers are just content to let the proceedings meander along without much of a plot. There are a few humorous moments, along with occasional randy, and outrageous one-liners, but generally the movie lacks impact and a lot of the humor just doesn't quite work.

There's no doubt that Beauty Shop is earnest and sweet natured, but it's also a rather ramshackle affair, thrown together from leftover materials and, in the last reel, so rushed to completion that it threatens to collapse from the effort to cobble everything together at the last minute. It doesn't help that the movie is stuck with a PG rating.

Black women of this nature can be so inherently funny, bawdy, and outrageous that perhaps an R rating would have helped give the film the naughtiness that it so desperately seems to desire. It's as though there's a much better and far more shocking film buried somewhere beneath the blow driers and the bottles of conditioner just waiting to burst out and surprise us.

Queen Latifah stars as Gina -a talented hair stylist who has moved from Chicago to Atlanta so her child, Vanessa (Paige Hurd), can attend a prestigious music school. She moves in with her mother-in-law (Della Reese) and headstrong sister-in-law Darnelle (Keisha Knight Pulliam) in what looks like a nice suburban house in a good neighborhood - hey, she can park her SUV on the street overnight and not even lock it!

Unfortunately, she's not happy working at a pompous beauty shop run by her unappreciative, euro trash, and streaky haired boss, Jorge Christophe (Kevin Bacon, having a lot of fun). It's an upscale, fancy place with some nice customers, and the money is pretty good, but Gina can't stand Jorge. He treats her like trash and ends up taking the credit for all her hard work.

Finally, she quits, and with the help of a back loan, goes off to start her own shop helped by the enthusiastic and sweet-natured stylist Lynn (Alicia Silverstone). The hook is whether Gina will succeed with the colourful assortment of staff that she assembles. There's the eccentric Josephine (Alfre Woodard), outspoken Chanel (Golden Brooks), sassy Ida (Sherri Shepard), as well as a hunky ex-con named James (Byron Wilson).

It's not long before Gina's having problems with her electricity, but Joe (Djimon Hounsou), comes to the rescue. He's a sexy and hunky electrician who just happens to be living upstairs; he's also a talented musician who encourages Vanessa and also serves as a romantic interest for Gina.

Much to Jorge's chagrin, Gina begins to attract some regular customers from her old job, most notably Terri (Andie MacDowell), a jittery, neurotic society wife with marital issues, and Joanne (Mena Suvari), a pretentious blonde who has just had some new breast implants.

Most of the drama comes from the typical struggles Gina faces as she renovates the shop. She has difficulties with employees and also has cash problems as she tries to make ends meet. All of this is fine, and might be enough material for several stand-alone comedy sketches, but it all amounts to a series of scenes instead of a cohesive story with a clear plot, climax and resolution. It also doesn't take much intelligence to figure out who is trying to sabotage her shop and why.

There are a lot of lines such as "you go girl" complete with the obligatory "sister" and "booty" references, some of which work and some of which don't. Golden Brooks as Chanel and Sherri Shepherd as Ida have most of the funny one-liners and they certainly bring some wackiness and attitude to the shop, but a lot of the humor falls flat, particularly Woodard's character who is reduced to randomly and intermittently reciting poetry.

Beauty Shop is one of those films that have a cast of thousands with each character seemingly jostling for attention and screen time. Some hog the limelight more than others, with the uninhibited Silverstone, Woodard, Underwood, and Shephard, for example, getting the lions share of the attention, but in the end, it all looks as though Queen Latifa has phoned the film in, merely inviting a bunch of her friends over for lunch and a good gossip. Mike Leonard August 05.

Oh, dear. How I WANTED to like this movie!!!

What a cast: Queen Latifah, a beautiful woman, a great soul and a terrific entertainer; Djimon Hounsou, toweringly talented, potent, sexy, AT LAST as the romantic male lead; Alfre Woodard, always awesome, in too small a role; Alicia Silverstone, charming; Della Reece, underused in a cameo; Kevin Bacon-- hysterical!

But a screenplay in the hands of Kate Lanier, whose previous "credits" include "Glitter", replays every trite and tired cliche which could be shoe-horned into this situation. These actors are too good for the script to do damage to their careers, but the characters are almost all stereotypical. All the laughs-- and there are a few-- are anticipated by the audience; we've heard the jokes, and the laughs are homage to the actors, not the script. One or two conflicts which could have been interestingly developed are de-fanged and de-clawed; for example, it has been observed that the majority of black women start off with a better physical self image than do the majority of white women, an interesting concept that gets two whole lines in the movie. It's a very labored script; the actors are so good they should have abandoned the words on the page and done the entire movie in improvisation. The edge which Queen Latifah brought so comically to "Bringing Down the House" is homogenized into blandness. This is the stale white bread version of a comedy which should have become a classic with these actors, who do their best to give us something on the stage which is clearly not on the page.

Queen Latifa as Gina, hairdresser extraordinaire, is driven by the hilariously affected Kevin Bacon's "Jorge" to quit his fashionable salon ("you're fired!" "No, I quit" dialogue is embarrassingly overused, even with the delivery talents of Queen Latifah and Kevin Bacon). So Gina "magic make-overs" her way into a small business loan, buying a ghetto-ized salon and homogenizing the decor and humor to accommodate both black and white customers. Hackneyed dialogue and unoriginal challenges fail to deliver even the expected "payoff" shots: where's the shot of Della Reece or of Jorge after their "make-overs"? Why can the only way to get Djimon Hounsou back into the salon at the end of the movie be for him to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Gina? Why didn't they ask someone else to write the screenplay? Why, oh why?

Sadly, this movie will play better on network TV, where there are commercial breaks, and boredom doesn't have so much opportunity to set in. Maybe there will be some good outtakes and improvisations on the DVD. C- .

If you examine this movie with a critical eye, you'll find a pretty lightweight, formulaic plot, a lot of superficial characters, and more than one questionable performance - but the critical eye cannot gauge the comedic beauty shop atmosphere or quantify the aura Queen Latifah exudes over the whole movie. There are ample doses of humor spread throughout the entire film, and thus Beauty Shop succeeds fairly well - albeit unevenly - as a comedy. I actually watched this film because Mena Suvari is in it, and I just have to say: Mena, the magic is gone. What in the world happened to bring Mena down to the level (nay, below the level) of Alicia Silverstone?

The story's pretty simple. Gina (Queen Latifah) is a hairstylist for the fabulous Jorge - until he pushes her past her breaking point and she makes a few references to certain posterior body parts and leaves. Let's just stop and talk about Jorge. Just when I was beginning to take Kevin Bacon seriously as an actor, he shows up in what has to be the most excruciatingly embarrassing role I've encountered in years. Anyway, Gina decides to open her own shop. It's rough going early on, but she and a bevy of outspoken women soon turn her dream into a reality. Oh, there are more problems later on, of course, but it doesn't take her (and her hair crack conditioner) very long to start stealing some of Jorge's best customers away from him. This is where Mena Suvari and Andie MacDowell come in - I don't think either one will want to put these roles anywhere near the top of their acting resumes. Mena is particularly disappointing, and it didn't help her or the story when her character suddenly underwent a complete personality change for seemingly no reason whatsoever toward the end. Then there's Alicia Silverstone; I don't know if she can possibly come back from this performance. She's the white girl trying to fit in with her black co-workers, and her performance just gets more and more painful to watch as time passes (and what is with that terrible Southern accent?). The performance of Little JJ as a little playa on constant booty patrol will help get you past the bad parts, though - he's hilarious.

Naturally, there's a little romance thrown in the mix, but you'll spend more time trying to make Darnelle look like the Keshia Knight Pulliam you remember from The Cosby Show than worrying about whether Gina can make a love connection with the electrician living above the boutique. I know I haven't said a lot of good things about the movie, but most of the good things come from the interaction of the outspoken women inside the beauty shop. There are some real characters in that bunch, and they do keep the comedy flowing. Basically, Beauty Shop is an average movie with a slightly better than average level of comedy.

Wait for the DVD; this is OK. It's not good, but it's not horrible. Queen Latifah is great, but even she can't carry this predictable fare.

Having seen all of Latifah's movies, I wouldn't say this is her best. The plot is just a spin-off of Barbershop 1+2 and is not very strong, but Latifah shines as she does in any role. Playing Gina, the owner of the shop which is actually next door to Calvin's Barbershop, Latifah seems to be able to make what would seem the dullest of characters, the owner of a beauty shop, seem vibrant and exciting. An absolute must-see for any Queen Latifah fans.