wesley morris - The Screengrab

SXSW: The Final Roundup

The whirlwind of SXSW often takes on a life of its own, and that was certainly true this year for me and the rest of the Screengrab contingent. There are movies we fully intended to see and cover for you here, but fate decreed otherwise. (Winnebago Man proved particularly elusive for various reasons; my worst SXSW memory this year involves sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on 5th Street with no hope of finding a parking space before a screening began. In my anger, I cursed the Winnebago Man, but I now understand it wasn’t his fault.) There are also movies I saw and never found the time to review during the festival. And they are:

Slate's Movie Club Still Swinging

Just when we think we’re completely burned out on year-end critic’s awards, list-making and assorted summations of What It All Means, along comes another installment of the Slate Movie Club to remind us how much fun it is to argue about this stuff. The annual roundtable of film pundits is always at its most entertaining when the gloves come off. The 2004 edition was particularly juicy, with original ringmaster David Edelstein and guests including A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Salon regular Stephanie Zacharek gleefully taking their shots at everyone’s favorite infuriating contrarian Armond White. (White’s style is accurately characterized by the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim as “entertainingly predicated on a bullying, unpredictable subjectivity.”)

Reexamining Tyler Perry

When a small, perhaps technically ragged movie strikes gold, the way films as different as Chasing Amy and My Big Fat Greek Wedding did, it may be because there are a lot of people who think that it connects with their lives in a way that glossy Hollywood product never does. Sometimes, this can be confusing, and even disconcerting, to critics and studio people who aren't a part of that target audience, and who don't know what to make of the news that we're not yet all part of one, big totally homogeneous culture. But it's been clear for a long time now that black women don't see their fantasies or their real-life concerns reflected in most Hollywood movies, and that they feel that as a loss. Waiting to Exhale shocked critics by how thoroughly it cashed in with that audience; Dreamgirls got a toehold with them. But for the last couple of years, it's Tyler Perry who's really picked that ball up and run with it. And his audience, with many black women, has responded gratefully and loudly to having a one-man entertainment industry they can call their own. Perry's movies — he's written, directed, and co-produced two features this year, Daddy's Little Girls and the new Why Did I Get Married?, and co-stars in the latter — combine broad comedy with church-based moral lessons and sociological observations, in a way that his fans find uplifting. His studio, Lions Gate, has basically stopped screening them for critics, partly because they know that mainstream critics don't get it, but also because his real audience is so aware of who he is and what to expect from him that his movies are pre-sold without reviews.