Movie Version of Terry McMillan's 'Dollar' Worth Was Worth My Money

Back in 2000, I was working a second job cleaning offices and would listen to books on tape (they were actual cassettes at the time) to keep myself entertained while I performed menial tasks such as scrubbing toilets, sweeping floors, dusting desktops, etc.

One of the books I listened to back then during my night job was Terry McMillan's A Day Late and a Dollar Short. I remember the book portraying the everyday struggles of a black family, going back and forth from the first-person perspective of several different characters .

Whoopi Goldberg and Ving Rhames play the matriarch and patriarch

            of a family in crisis in A Day Late and a Dollar Short.

Watch clips of the movie at the following link: http://www.mylifetime.com/movies/a-day-late-and-a-dollar-short

When I recently visited my neighborhood video store (yes, I still go to a bricks-and-mortar video store) and saw the movie version of A Day Late and a Dollar Short on one of the racks, I picked it up. I was curious to see how a movie would capture the numerous plot twists of the family saga.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short was actually a television movie that aired on Lifetime this spring. The movie stars Whoopi Goldberg as the matriarch of a loving yet conflicted clan that also includes Ving Rhames as her estranged husband and as their adult children, Mekhi Phifer (Soul Food), Tichina Arnold (Everybody Hates Chris), Kimberly Elise (For Colored Girls) and Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls).

The story has many of the melodramatic elements that viewers have come to expect from Lifetime movies, all rolled into one: life-threatening illness, infidelity, broken homes, child abuse, feuding siblings, addiction, etc.

Overall, it's great to see a movie that depicts African Americans as neither saintly and perfect nor completely dysfunctional - in other words, a three-dimensional portrayal. McMillan has a knack for telling stories that accurately convey the full range of middle-class black life.

For example, Tichina Arnold's character is a package courier by day and runs a Laundromat on the side. Rose is a popular television chef who can afford to have her own gardener (who also romances her). But the only brother in the family, Phifer, is a borderline deadbeat dad who has to move back home because of run-ins with the law.

For a few dollars I spent renting the DVD, A Day Late and a Dollar Short was worth the money.