Perry’s comic “mad black housewife” returns, but mixed in with a romance and melodrama involving two of her nieces. The plot is trite but the characters are pretty good.
Madea
was the title character of the critically lambasted but popular Diary of a Mad
Black Housewife. As played by writer-director Perry in drag, she’s the same
sort of comical character as Momma in the Big Momma’s House movies,
except without an alter ego. She’s feisty but supposedly wise, although her
solution to most problems seems to involve whacking somebody upside the head.
But she—and her elderly brother, also played by Perry—are only in about a
third of the movie. The other two thirds are taken up by her nieces, and these
stories are straight soap opera, for better and worse. There’s the younger
daughter (Rochelle Aytes), afraid to escape a fiancé (Blair Underwood) who
beats her, and her older sister (a convincing Lisa Arrindell Anderson), afraid
to believe that the ridiculously handsome bus driver who asks her out could be
a nice guy.
The mixture of pathos and very broad comedy is mildly jarring.
Judging by the guffaws I heard during the Madea parts, I probably thought a
little less of the humor than some. The plotting is ordinary. But there were
some interesting things, things you don’t see too often in typical movies.
(Read: movies where white people have speaking parts.) For example, you
probably don’t see an older woman beating a child’s behind, not played for
laughs, anyway. You don’t see the romantic lead tell his date that he’s a
Christian, or her telling him she’s staying celibate until marriage (and
meaning it). You don’t see Cicely Tyson make an interminably weird speech about
how the young’uns have forgotten family and black men need to be strong.
Finally, you don’t get to see what must be the tackiest wedding since the
Britney Spears-Jason Alexander Vegas quickie.
posted 9/11/13
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