Why Did I Watch This Movie?
nlike a lot of black folk, I’ve never been a big fan of Tyler Perry. Well I’m not sure that’s really accurate because in order to decide whether or not you are a fan, you would have to have seen the person in question’s work. But I dunno…all the commercials for his Madea movies left me feeling that they were just more coonery that I could do without. I mean, after all, I remember when way back in the 80s, Shelly Garrett got blacks to start going to plays with his over the top silliness, Beauty Shop, the very definition of foolishness:
I have had years of watching black people look foolish on large and small screens. From JJ in Good Times to Martin Lawrence in everything, it just was too much. After a certain point in my life, I just had to stop watching. It was killing my brain cells and wounding my soul. No more for me, thankyouverymuch.
But then I heard about Tyler Perry’s more serious movie, Why Did I Get Married? I thought to myself, how bad could it be? It’s got Janet Jackson, my girl Jill Scott and even Malik Yoba who we haven’t seen in a while. Even the trailer didn’t look that bad:
So the movie is about four married couples who travel annually somewhere for a week of discussion and marriage strengthening exercises under the tutelage of Janet, the therapist. All I can say is that if these people have been doing these exercises for years, then as a therapist Janet sucks. These folks got issues.
There’s the constantly fighting couple, Angela and Marcus, with Angela as the loud, alcoholic, neck rolling, extremely grating stereotypical sista-gurl who is supposed to have an advanced degree, but sounds like she just came off the block. Yet she is the instigator for much of the movie and does have her funny moments. Her hot bodied husband Marcus (yeah that was his yummy form in the trailer) has one good line:
Her: I’ll drink to that!
Him: You’ll drink to nouns.
Tyler Perry and Sharon Leal are the uptight power couple. He’s a pediatrician and she’s a partner at a law firm. He wants another kid and is pissed that they don’t have sex. She’s really busy and doesn’t want another kid. Can we say failure to communicate?
Janet and Malik are mourning the loss of their child. Honestly, they were the most believable and balanced couple in the movie. I’ll just leave them alone.
And then there was Mike and Sheila (Jill Scott), or I should say Mike and Sheila and Trina. Where do I begin with this group? OK, perhaps I should start at the part of the movie where AdoringHusband and I dropped our jaws in unison. And that would be at the beginning.
Mike, played nastily by Richard T Jones, Sheila and Trina are boarding the plane to Colorado to travel to this retreat. Mike insists on sitting next to Trina, instead of his wife Sheila and Sheila takes the middle seat in the row in front. Unfortunately Sheila is fat and has FOS (fat overhang syndrome) such that the person in the next seat ends up encroached on. The passenger complains and the flight attendant comes and tells her that people of her size must buy two seats, but since the flight is full, she is out of luck. So what does dear Mike do for his wife? Tells her that he told her that she was too damn fat and that he’s not paying for an extra seat. He says that he and Trina will fly on ahead, but she should just drive by herself. He gives her some money to cover the costs. And meekly Sheila slinks off the plane.
All I could say was that there was no pit in hell too hot for the likes of Mike.
Mike shows up at the lodge with his mistress while his wife is driving hundreds of miles alone through a snowstorm and he doesn’t even give a damn. And what do his college buddies say? Two of them give him a little crap about whether he’s “hittin’ dat” but basically they feel, that’s Mike.
My husband, on the other hand, almost had a coronary watching this movie. “What the hell is that?! He’s bringing his mistress in there and nobody says anything?! I’d be like, ‘You take your girlfriend to a hotel, but you aren’t staying here with her!’ I want to hit him with a bat!”
Yay, hubby!
After dating such an amazing series of losers for so long, sometimes I am just stunned to realize that my husband is a nice guy who respects his wife and doesn’t understand how other men don’t feel similarly about their partners. I know that by now I shouldn’t still be stunned, but I did date an amazing array of jerks. (Like my second fiance who ignored me for 600 miles on a cross country road trip because I looked at him the wrong way when he asked for the shampoo.)
So we sat through the movie until the end. I. was. not. happy. What horrific images of the women in the film. Irrational, hysterical, demanding, high-maintenance, and selfish…except for Sheila, who was battered, abused, and in denial. Also after all the stuff that went down, why was it that the women had to make amends to the men, but the men offered no amends to their wives? And hello…why was the only repercussion for the extremely noxious and reprehensible waste of oxygen that was Mike that he ended up married to chickenhead Trina who is “burning up his Amex” and “not cooking or cleaning the house.” That’s it?! That’s all that happens to a man who laughed hysterically in his wife’s face when she tried to please him by wearing a pretty nightgown (suggested to her by Trina)? Why didn’t he end up miserable and castrated? How about married to a serial killer? Shanked by a she-male he picked up? All of those would have been much more fitting consequences for Mike.
AdoringHusband was so frequently appalled and angered that he chose to tune out and visit the flashlight forums on his laptop (yes, he’s a geek). But every time I thought he wasn’t listening, I’d hear another, “I just want to bust him with a bat!” directed at Mike, and I’d know that it was still getting on his nerves.
So the net of this pathetic movie review is no more Tyler Perry in the C/S household. We don’t need that much escalation of our blood pressure. (Shit, I even dreamed about ways to torture Mike.) This weekend I’ll probably watch the movie version of the saddest book ever…Atonement.
Tito, pass me the tissues…
Well, I guess I won’t be watching that one….
Did I ruin it for you, Deathstar? Sorry! But I think you will thank me. You won’t feel like pulling out any bats!
I thought the movie was FUNNY! I was never really into the Madea plays at all. But I liked the movie, obvioulsy not on a deep philisophical level, lol. I just thought it was funny. I was really pissed that something really bad didnt happen to Mike though.
I know that I’m such a pain about such movies. There were funny moments. Like the “you’ll drink to nouns,” line had me laugh out loud. But through the moments, I kept going, “is this how he sees black women?”
And what about with Tyler Perry and Sharon Leal? Both played roles in the marital trauma, but only Sharon had to make amends. Why was it OK for Tyler to cross a boundary and tell her secretary not to call her during the vacation?
I know…I’m looking at things much more deeply than they need to be. It’s just a stupid movie, after all. Maybe I’m just sensitized after my years of dealing with the divide that exists in black male and black female literature.
Well Liana you really won’t like the play that it was based on. It moves faster because it is a play. Plus the Shelia character loses weight and finds a great guy but in his defense he liked the Shelia character when she was a big girl also. But it plays on the notion that if you lose weight all will be right with your world. And I don’t know if this is in the movie because I really didn’t want to see it but the Trina character is Shelia’s best friend. Which just succeed is pissing me off. We never discuss “Black movies” in my family because everyone immediately assume I don’t like pictures produced or directly by black actors or directors. They have told me so but that is not true. I just don’t believe I should go on auto pilot because a movie was put out by a “black” person. What if it is a piece of crap? I don’t need to see “Boys in the Hood” because I lived it. And that is why I went to college and live in the suburbs. John Singleton and Spike Lee may be great directors but they just don’t make movies that appeal to me. I have tried and each time I am greatly disappointed so why keep wasting my money to try to prove to my family that I am “not anti support black movies”. By the way they have felt this way long before I started dating and then married a white guy.
They have always thought that I don’t carry the traditional “black perspective” on many issues.
It was horrible seeing Sheila denigrate herself so terribly with Mike. And Trina was a friend of Mike and Sheila in the movie, but I’m not sure if she was Sheila’s best friend. In the movie she found the guy but worked on getting herself together, so there wasn’t so much of a lose weight and your life will be all better type of message. Mike, however, still needed to be shived.
There are many black movies and plays that I loved. Soul Food was lovely. Even the hack’s books/movies (Terry McMillan) are enjoyable. I just cannot stand coonery and horrible depictions of our people!
I agree. I love Terry’s books and movies. But I chose my movies based on whether I like the actors or the stories not just solely on what race the director or writer is or was. After all what we like is really a personal decision.