Sunday, February 22, 2009

Madea Goes To Jail


Maybe Tyler Perry needs to hang up the wig.

His latest movie, Madea Goes to Jail, which is based on his hit play of the same name, is a hilarious mess that suffers from a thin script and a weak ending.

Perry has talent and ambition, both of which have led him to unparalleled success. He has built a loyal following that has catapulted his movies to box office glory and made him a name outside of the hard-to-break Hollywood movie studio system.

He, like Frank Sinatra, did it his way.

But Madea has, in many ways, become a creative crutch for Perry, a way to clumsily mix in broad humor with tear-jerker drama. It has worked in powerful ways in his previous movies, The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and Madea's Family Reunion. And Madea is as funny as ever in Madea Goes To Jail.

But the story that surrounds Madea's antics is just not up to par. In the movie, Derek Luke portrays Joshua, a young prosecutor whose life is going smoothly. He is successful and he is about to marry another ambitious prosecutor by the name of Linda (Ion Overman).

Life is almost perfect until Candace (Keshia Knight Pulliam) shows up. Candace is a childhood friend who once had a promising future but is now addicted to drugs and working as a prostitute. Joshua is moved to help her but Linda urges Joshua to look the other way and tells him Candace and every poor person like her dug the ditch that they find themselves stuck in.

Meanwhile, Madea leads police on a car chase and then later dumps the car of a woman who stole her parking space at K-Mart. And she goes to jail (the title is indeed literal).

As is true in most Tyler Perry movies, predictability rules. You could, if you wanted to, write the script yourself. We know Madea and Candace will cross paths. We know Joshua is in love with Candace. We know Candace has a dark secret that led her on the path she is on. We know that in the end, God will fix everything if you have faith and believe and take responsibility for the choices you have made. All of these are good messages that Perry unfortunately piles on a bit too thick.

The movie is entertaining. Madea is a trip, and Perry knows what his audience wants and delivers it.
Yet as funny as Madea is, it doesn't make up for the weak script and the huge lapses in logic that you see. There's no gray in Perry's movies. The characters are either saintly good or demon-seed bad.

And no matter how awfully deep the situation, it somehow works out in the end, like the movie is a sitcom with the problem fixed in under 30 minutes. I don't mind happy endings but I do mind happy endings that aren't well-earned and lack credibility. A drama has to have some level of believability or else it doesn't move you. Or at least, it doesn't move me.

I applaud Perry for what he has been able to do in movies. I think it is important. But Perry has to do better than this. Take the wig off now, Mr. Perry.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

He's Just Not That Into You


The whole thing started with a six-word phrase uttered on an episode of that chicky show, Sex and The City, which turned into a bestselling self-help book which in turn became a movie starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston. Don't you just love Hollywood?

"He's just not that into you" cut through all the perceived crappiness of dating, the messiness, the mixed signals, the overanalyzing, the nonsensical rules we try to follow.

The complicated became simple. If you're a woman and a man doesn't call you after the first date, guess what, he's just not that interested in you, as Alex (Justin Long), a bar manager, tells hapless unlucky-in-love Gigi (Gennifer Goodwin) after his best friend, Conor, fails to call her after a first date.

Oh, how I wish the movie were so simple. But it's not. The film gives us a grand cast of characters in various stages of relationships. We have the aforementioned Gigi, who had a disastrous date with Conor, a real-estate developer who is hopelessly in love with Anna. Anna is having an affair with Ben, who is married to Janine, who happens to be friends with Gigi and Beth. And Beth desperately wants her long-time boyfriend, Neil, to marry her, which is tough because Neil doesn't believe in marriage. And oh, there's Mary, played by Drew Barrymore, who's being rejected by seven different kinds of technologies.

Got all that?

Despite all the scattered-yet-linked storylines, the movie actually works for quite a while before it all collapses into romantic-comedy cliches.

The director Ken Kwapis manages to create nice moments and the dialogue is pretty witty. Jennifer Connelly, who plays Janine, brings some depth to her character, and the whole storyline with Beth and Neil works mainly because of the chemistry between Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck, though it ends way too neatly and, at least for me, is a cop-out to appease some women who believe marriage-averse boyfriends will eventually cave in and pop the question if they really really are into you. Wouldn't it be nice if a movie like this didn't take the easy way out?

Justin Long brings an incredible amount of charm to Alex as he dishes out harsh dating advice to heartbroken Gigi who is oblivious to what she is doing wrong. Gennifer Goodwin gives her Gigi so cute and adorable and human even as we cringe at every embarrassing act of desperation perpetually single Gigi performs in her pursuit of love.

But we forgive her because we all know what it is like to like someone and hope beyond hope that he or she likes us back.

Too bad the movie soon runs out of ideas near the end, the edginess fading into predictability and dullness. We know how this movie is going to end. Unfortunately, it takes about 15 to 20 more minutes of tidying up loose ends before we get to it.

Just goes to show that as simple and as wonderful a phrase "He's Just Not That Into You" may be, it might not make a movie that we might be into.