If Tyler Perry gets an Oscar nomination for his acting in Madea Goes to Jail, can a washed-up actress scold him for taking away female roles? Actually, could it just be Cuba Gooding Jr. in drag, a la Boat Trip?
Seriously, though, Madea won’t be up for any Academy Awards next year, but damn is Perry’s character popular. Enough that the sassy matriarch has now evolved from a supporting character into the star of her own vehicle (which gave the filmmaker his biggest opening yet this past weekend). Yes, it’s true that Madea is a central figure in most of Perry’s films and has previously been the main protagonist in his plays (including the one Madea Goes to Jail is based on), but in the movie world she was introduced as a secondary role in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. So, now she belongs in that small club of supporting characters who’ve earned their own film(s); other members of which include Jay and Silent Bob, Bruce and Lloyd, Cousin Eddie, Marshal Samuel Gerard, the Scorpion King and Wolverine.
And Madea is one of the very few female characters to belong to the club, which is another good reason for an actress to scold Perry. But the problem also lies with the people who write woman characters, apparently, since in coming up with ten other supporting characters who deserve their own spin off, we managed to only include two females on our list. Perhaps if we’d permitted classic film characters there’d be more to choose from — though even then we might be more likely to include a Peter Lorre or a William Demarest role than a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden.
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Being that it’s at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it’s a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise. Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema. That all of this talent is put to the service of an adaptation which fundamentally bastardizes the main project of Richard Yates’ novel and neuters its cruel vision of the inability of the individual to grapple with his/her own soul sickness without projecting toxicity outward, doesn’t diminish the actors’ achievements, but it does force us to question whether masterworks of the literary form should be adapted into prospective Oscar cash-ins to begin with, if it means necessarily stripping said masterworks of the daring that makes them masterful.
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The Day The Earth Stood Still managed to pull in $30 million dollars this past weekend, which you can mostly attribute to clever marketing, but it’s not a promising number for the much-loathed movie, which is sitting at 21% on Rotten Tomatoes right now. Beyond the wooden acting and the eviscerating of a beloved sci fi classic that most people are talking about, there are some moments in this movie that just make my teeth clench. Moments that are so poorly written, thought out, filmed, and constructed that I just can’t keep myself from venting. Read on to see all five, and just in case it’s not clear enough from the header: there are spoilers below.
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“No pictures, no attacking — none of that,” warned the junket manager to the online press, who had been assembled for an hour in the tiny Waldorf Astoria ballroom, awaiting their audience with the director and four top-billed stars of Revolutionary Road. The admonition was necessary because two of those stars were of such grand stature, and more so in combination with each other — you may remember, they once pretended to fall in love in front of a green screen whilst standing atop a scale model of a famous boat — that of course the average bottom-feeding, basement-dwelling blogger could be forgiven for forgetting that they were in fact human beings asking questions of other human beings, and not bloodthirsty animals driven feral by the scent of fame.
Not long later, they appeared, as if out of nowhere (although it should be noted that from my seat, I didn’t have a clear view of the door). Kate Winslet, remarkably slim and tan. Leonardo DiCaprio, rocking the wispy facial hair of a posturing adolescent. Kathy Bates, looking just like Kathy Bates, but more so. San Mendes, being British. Michael Shannon, wearing the vague stare of a time clock puncher. The warning, it turned out, was unneeded. The talent cast such a glow on the assembled press that all thoughts of aggression were easily pushed aside. How wonderful life is, now that potential Oscar contenders are in the world!
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This Hollywood Reporter story says Tyler Perry––whose most recent film, Meet the Browns, opened with $20 million but failed to hit number one as so many of Perry’s films have, and dropped off sharply in its second week in release––is looking to attract a crossover (white, suburban) audience without alienating his working-class Black base. And he’s got a foolproof plan: Perry’s next film, titled The Family That Preys, is set to star box office it girl Kathy Bates, who, of course, has proven time and time again to have a hypnotic lure on white audiences. I literally cannot hold on to a dollar bill if a Kathy Bates movie is playing in the vicinity.
In all honestly, this might be a smart move: if Perry’s broad comedy-spiked faith-and-family melodramas have a natural chance of crossing over to any white sub-demo, it’s older, middle-class women. But the makeup of the movies themselves is only half the battle. Even leaving race aside, if Lionsgate (for whom, as Carl DiOrio puts it in the THR story, “getting into the Tyler Perry business has been like acquiring a license to print money”) really wants to open up the appeal of these movies, they’ve got to make some changes in the way they’re marketed and released.
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