The Screengrab : why did i get married

Unwatchable #65: “Meet the Browns”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

First, let me apologize for the long layoff between Unwatchable entries. I deserve some of the blame, as does Netflix, but mostly I’d like to blame Tyler Perry. In my capacity as a film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I have been assigned to review several of Perry’s movies. Since Perry never screens his stuff for critics, this generally entails catching the first show on opening day and quickly turning around a review, which is a pain in the ass – but then, so is sitting through a Tyler Perry movie in the first place. When Meet the Browns came out earlier this year, I held my breath waiting for the assignment, but this time I dodged the bullet. Until now, that is. I’d blame cruel fate, but I think we all realize by now that I’ve brought this upon myself.

When Meet the Browns appeared at #65 on the IMDb Bottom 100 list, I dutifully clicked over to Netflix and put it at the top of my queue. It arrived a couple of weeks ago, and after seven or eight stiff drinks, I popped it into the DVD player. What appeared on my television was not the 2008 theatrical release Meet the Browns, however; rather, it was a 2004 stage production of same, shot on shoddy video and released straight to DVD. “Netflix,” I says, “you sent me the wrong Meet the Browns. Send me the right one.” And then I wait and I wait and it never shows up. “Netflix,” I says, “the Unwatchable faithful are waiting! Where the hell is Meet the Browns?” So they send another copy and it finally arrives and now here I am. So let’s just get it over with.

Single mother Brenda Brown (Angela Bassett) is struggling to raise her three children in the projects of Chicago. When the factory that employs her closes down and the electric company shuts off the lights, things are looking bleak. Bus tickets to Georgia arrive in the mail; it seems Brenda’s father, whom she never met, has passed away. She and the kids, including oldest son Mike, a basketball phenom, go down for the funeral and meet the extended, wacky Brown family as well as neighbor and basketball scout Harry (Rick Fox).

Harry sees great potential in Mike, but Brenda is mistrustful of him, and men in general, mainly because Mike’s daddy is a non-child-support-paying jackass. When Brenda’s father’s will is read, it turns out that she has inherited a dilapidated house he used as a rental property. Will Brenda and the kids stay in Georgia surrounded by her crazy relatives or return to the Chicago projects where she has no job and no prospects. It’s a head-scratcher!

Basically what we have here is another bowl of Tyler Perry’s usual tepid gumbo of sermonizing, self-help platitudes and ham-handed ensemble comedy. I hate to come down too hard on a grassroots filmmaker catering to an underserved audience, but watching his movies, I get the impression that Perry’s holy trinity is Jesus, Oprah and Good Times, and he doesn’t seem to notice when the pieces don’t fit together. It’s a jarring transition from the chitlin-circuit antics of David Mann in his Bozo the Pimp outfits to the would-be wrenching social commentary about absent fathers. And let us not even speak of Perry's obligatory yet inexplicable cross-dressing cameo as Madea.

I can say that Meet the Browns is the best Tyler Perry movie I’ve seen, mainly thanks to the heartfelt performance by Angela Bassett, who elevates the proceedings above the likes of Why Did I Get Married? or The Family That Preys. That’s not the same thing as saying it’s any good, though.

Previously on Unwatchable:
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam
69. The Perfect Holiday (pending)
70. Epic Movie

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

Reexamining Tyler Perry

Peter Smith — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

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.

The best thing about Perry, and the best reason for his success, is that he's one of the few filmmakers in this country now who's focused on showcasing women. In an industry with no shortage of talented black actresses and a significant shortage of interest roles for them, he's filling a gap. As Wesley Morris puts it in Slate, "Perry may not yet have mastered fluid dramatic structure or where to put the camera, but he knows how to get out of the way of good and determined women. In fact, although his movies draw men and women alike, what Perry is making are really women's pictures, the popular genre that reached its height in the 1940s, starred actors like Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell, and melodramatically saw women through all kinds of modern crises, from deceitful daughters to the career-vs.-stay-at-home dilemma. Perry uses the genre to deliver easily digestible hope." And given the chance to strut their stuff a little, beautiful, talented and underutilized actresses such as Gabrielle Union, Kimberly Elise, and Tracy Ellis Ross really come through for Perry; his latest features a breakout performance by the singer-actress Jill Scott that would be getting her Oscar-contender talk if it were in a critically accredited movie. Perry seems to be happy working his niche, though he does have ambitions: he recently told one reporter that he has a script he calls "the Oprah project" that he wants to make but will only make if Oprah Winfrey agrees to work with him on it. Without knowing anything about it, we can confidently say that she's probably done worse. — Phil Nugent