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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Publisher Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith have come up with the best way to make a literary work more accessible since the creation of Classics Illustrated comic books: they’ve added “all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action” to Jane Austen’s 19th century novel Pride and Prejudice. This new version, out in stores this May, is titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Mayhem! And if you didn’t think it was a masterpiece before, chances are you will now.
Could we do the same thing to classic films? Well, the technology to add extraneous enhancements to movies exists. Just check out The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for proof. But like Pride and Prejudice, we’d need to “enhance” films in the public domain if we wanted to get away with it. Fortunately, there are hundreds of such titles (see a list at Wikipedia), some of which actually already have zombies (Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, and in a way the “scientific” film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms).
Avoiding the majority of public domain movies already consisting of horror and science fiction elements, we’ve come up with ten great classic films that would be even greater with the addition of zombies.
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I took these photos off my TV the other night, with my iPhone, whilst watching Mad Love on Turner Classic Movies (the 1935 horror film about the brilliant but creepy doctor who tries to steal the wife of one of his patients, not the Drew Barrymore movie about manic depressive teenage runaways. It was Peter Lorre night.) This post partially exists to see if I can successfully blog from the iPhone WordPress App. It’s also an excuse to repeat two of my favorite lines from Mad Love.
1. Frances Drake tells Lorre’s Gogol that even if she didn’t love her husband, the doctor would still be too scary for her to consider dating him. “You are cruel!” he cries. Then he reconsiders.”But only to be kind.”
2. Later in the same scene, our heroine figures out that the doctor has used his medical genius to try and break up her and her husband. Gogol denies it. Then he sort of admits it: “I, a poor peasant, have conquered science! Why can I not conquer love? You MUST be mine!”
Then he puts on this getup in order to convince the husband that he’s a decapitated criminal come to life.
As a former fat guy, I have to salute actor Ron Lester, who went on the Today Show yesterday showing off his slim figure (see the segment here). You may remember Lester as the really, really fat high school football player “Billy Bob” from Varsity Blues, or his identical character from Not Another Teen Movie. Back in 2001, he lost 315lbs. — 43lbs. of it extra skin that had to be removed — and even lost 2 inches worth of height (thanks to the weight lost from his head). He did this by gastric bypass surgery and it was primarily for heath reasons, but damn if he doesn’t look much better, too.
The problem is, according to the person submitting this story to Fark.com, he may now be handsomer but he may also have cost himself his acting career. Obviously he had been employed in the past for his physique more than his acting talent, and now he’s missing that thing that guaranteed his being hired (his only significant movie post-surgery was Karate Dog). Certainly he’d rather be alive, though, than typecast. It’s not like he just went out and got plastic surgery thinking he’d be better off in an industry obsessed with good looks. But I did immediately think of Jennifer Grey and Meg Ryan as two prime examples of how physical changes, which were intended to be favorable, ended up more damaging career-wise. …Read more
