Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (review)
This isn’t a movie: it’s a buffet at which writer-director Tyler Perry (Diary of a Mad Black Woman) piles your plate with spoonfuls of absurd melodrama, a taste of gritty urban drama, a heaping of cheap cartoon, and a big side of corn. Angela Bassett’s (Akeelah and the Bee) struggling single mom hauls her kids from Chicago to rural Georgia for the funeral of the father she never met, where she makes friends with a dreamy basketball coach (Rick Fox: Holes) who thinks her teenager son could play pro (as long as he can stay away from the allure of the street drug trade!) and sticks around to fall madly in love with her, too; and she is subjected to a parade of caricatures of siblings -- the fat stupid one; the bitchy catty one; etc -- she’s never known who come complete with their own cartoon theme music. Wild inconsistency among the characters and preposterous coincindence are on the blatantly calculated menu, too. For dessert there’s one pointless scene featuring Perry’s signature character Madea -- ie, Perry in a fat old-lady suit. You don’t need to save room: it’ll be forced down your gullet.
(Technorati tags: Tyler Perry, Meet the Browns, Angela Bassett)
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rated PG-13 for drug content, language including sexual references, thematic elements and brief violence
official site | IMDB
comments
posted by Martin Munroe (March 31, 2008 5:47 PM)
I saw this movie and I'm wondering if I saw the same film as MaryAnn.
Absurd melodrama? Over stuffed buffet? What do you want staid, linear drama that doesn't encompass the often absurd, over stuffed buffet that is the extended family?
This movie is a family sized pizza, a little piece for all. Tyler Perry maybe guilty for trying to please all the people all the time, but he deserves more credit than you allow in your review.
It's interesting that Perry makes movies for non traditional movie audiences, as such he leaves most critics scratching their heads. Hitting number 2 spot in it's opening weekend highlights this fact, that most critics, like Hollywood, know nothing.
Yeah, this isn't a traditional movie like Leatherheads that the critics will lap up, but Perry is not a traditional filmmaker, he's a lot more than that and understands an audience a whole lot more than critics ever will.
posted by MaryAnn (April 2, 2008 6:15 PM)
Read some more of my reviews and you'll understand what I want.
Why? His movie did not please me. That's all I'm reviewing for. Why should I give him credit for making a movie that I didn't like?
I'm not scratching my head. I see precisely what Perry is doing. And I find it asinine.
Right, I forgot. "Popular" ALWAYS equals "good."