Tyler Perry Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Oprah is pushing both Precious and the book it's based on, Push by Sapphire, on her show, and I'm seriously curious to know what her audience will think about it. How many people will be able to watch a film told from the point of view of an illiterate high schooler who is raped by her father, physically (and, in the book, sexually) abused by her mother, hates herself for not being white, has given birth to one child with Down's Syndrome who's nicknamed Mongo (short for Mongoloid), and is pregnant for a second time with her father's child?

Let's assume that Oprah's reach is strong enough and far enough to get her demographic to plunk down their eight to 12 dollars to see Precious – the Oprah Effect in full effect. (You can find out where and when Precious is playing near you on the official movie website.)

I'm not talking about critics and journalists or the people in big cities who like to participate in a friendly Oscar pool or want to be up on what was in the New York Times. They're already seeing the movie in droves; it made $1.8M in limited release its opening weekend. The latest numbers I could find on her demographic are from 2007, back when people were wondering if Oprah could help get a president elected. (Answer: Yes, she can.)

According to Nielsen via MSNBC, "Oprah's audience is predominantly female, white, and over the age of 55. Nationally 7.4 million people watch Oprah daily -- about 2.6% of American households. Four percent of American women (about 5.7 million) watch her daily, compared with 1.2% of men (1.7 million people). Overall, 2% of all 18- to 49-year-olds watch Oprah."

Ho-hum, another Tyler Perry movie, another first place opening. The man is a franchise unto himself, obviously, and it's somewhat heartening that this -- his seventh film in four years -- is his consensus best; maybe Lionsgate will actually screen his next one (coming in April, natch) for critics. I Can Do Bad All By Myself didn't put up the numbers that Madea Goes to Jail did earlier this year (despite the apparent presence of Madea -- I wonder if her name in the title is what makes the difference), but $24 million was more than enough for first place on a low-key weekend.

Interesting that first second and third place this week went to films by Lionsgate, Focus and the Weinstein Co., respectively. Second place went to Focus's 9, which opened on Wednesday to mixed reviews and around $15 million for the five days; the distributor aimed low, with a 1600 screen release, and the film did probably as well as it could have, despite that spectacular trailer. Inglourious Basterds, still holding up pretty well, took third and crossed the $100 million mark.

Further down the list we see a weird glut of late-summer horror: Whiteout and Sorority Row opened against each other, just a couple weeks after The Final Destination and Halloween II opened against each other. Both of this week's openers wound up with about $5 million to show for it; given that neither is a brand name or particularly distinctive, they probably didn't lose much. Halloween II sank out of the top 10, while The Final Destination hung around and is now the top-grossing movie in the franchise with $58 million.

The top ten films after the jump.

The latest movie from writer-director Tyler Perry, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, may strike you as being another comedy featuring Perry's big bad old lady Madea. However, Madea has only a small role as comic relief in this melodrama/morality play. The credits tell us that the movie is based on Perry's 2000 play of the same name, but after reading summaries of the play, the two seem to have little in common apart from the title and a moral awakening on the part of the lead characters.

April (Taraji P. Henson) is a mess -- a nightclub singer who rarely sees the light of day, an alcoholic, a woman heavily involved with a married man (Brian White) who pays all her bills. Suddenly, she has three children foisted upon her -- caught trying to break into Madea's house, they confess that the grandmother who has been raising them has gone missing. Madea sends them to Aunt April, who is unwilling to take them but can't find another option. In the meantime, the local church sends April a handyman to help fix her crumbling old house in return for room and board, the optimistic and caring Sandino (Adam Rodriguez). How will April deal with these disruptive people in her life?

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which is due to hit theaters on September 11. Perry definitely has an army of supporters in his target audience -- African-American, female, and religious -- and I Can Do Bad All by Myself sounds like more of the same. Three delinquent children loot the home of the lovable-but-firm Madea (Perry), and she takes matters into her own hands. She delivers them into the care of their only relative, the hard-drinking, nightclub-singing April, played by Academy Award-nominated Taraji P. Henson. Aunt April sponges off her married boyfriend and wants nothing to do with the kids, but things start to change when a good-looking Mexican immigrant (Adam Rodriguez) moves into her basement.

In a funny marketing twist for folks outside Perry's usual target audience, the poster references a vastly different movie: Sam Peckinpah's controversial, violent home invasion thriller Straw Dogs, starring Dustin Hoffman. It may be a little obscure for mainstream audiences, but I think it's pretty clever when you consider it in light of the Rod Lurie remake that is due out next year, which will be set in the deep South -- Perry country! Check out the above poster and the original Straw Dogs poster side-by-side, as well as the full version of the new Tyler Perry movie poster, in the gallery below.

Meanwhile, Tyler Perry fans can check out the trailer for I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which just debuted at Fandango.

Friday the 13th
Marcus Nispel directs a rebooted version of the venerable series, which borrows elements from the first four films and adds precious few of its own. I'm tempted to say "skip it," based on my own review, but those first 20-25 minutes are pretty ferocious, and the "Extended Killer Cut" promises more of everything. Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

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Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail
Tyler Perry has grown his beloved character Madea "into a larger-than-life force of nature that is genuinely funny," wrote Eric D. Snider. He noted the writer/director's "tendency toward oversimplification," however, and commented: "Maybe if someone would do a better job of making films targeted at a black, female Christian audience, Perry's half-baked didacticism would suffer in comparison. In the meantime, this is the best there is, so it's nice that Perry is improving, albeit in small increments." Rent it.

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Ghostbusters
The comedy classic with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Sigourney Weaver stands ready to imprint itself upon your memory once again, in a new Blu-ray edition. One word to keep in mind before buying, however: grain. "Surprisingly heavy," says DVD Beaver; "heavy wash of grain that never quite dissipates," per IGN; "features plenty of the swirly stuff in most every scene," according to Blu-ray.com. Other than that important factor, which is claimed to reflect the original source print, reviews have been positive. Rent it.

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Also out: What Goes Up, Morning Light, Sword of the Stranger, and a boatload of TV series (a list of the latter at TV Squad).

After the jump: Indies on DVD, more Blu-ray, and Collector's Corner.

Imagine if Zack Snyder wasn't the director behind the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Watchmen, and Warner Bros. instead decided to go with someone like ... Woody Allen. Slate put together a pretty hilarious slideshow of what they think Watchmen would've looked like had the property been placed in someone else's hands. For example, as a Quentin Tarantino movie (see above), Slate notes: "As Jackie Brown was a tribute to '70s blaxploitation, Kill Bill was a tribute to '70s kung fu, and Death Proof was a tribute to '70s grindhouse, so Quentin Tarantino makes Watchmen a tribute to the fourth in his canon of formative aesthetic influences: '70s Hanna-Barbera cartoons."

Other directors with re-imagined Watchmen films included on Slate's list are Judd Apatow, Woody Allen, Sophia Coppola and Tyler Perry (their image of Rorschach as Madea made me do a serious LOL). And in case you're wondering, these fantastic images (a couple of which we highlighted below) come from Ashley Quigg. All kidding aside, though, something like this does make you think. I mean, what would a Watchmen film look like in someone else's hands? Did Zack Snyder do the comic justice, or is there another director who would've delivered a better product.

Check out a couple of Slate's images below, then definitely skip on over to their slideshow ... it's hysterical.



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Tyler Perry is undeniably an enormous cash cow for Lionsgate. His films are inexpensive to produce (though no doubt Perry himself is commanding a steadily bigger paycheck with every film), and the least of them (the non-Madea-related Daddy's Little Girls) grossed $30 million; Madea's Family Reunion made upwards of $60. As a pure brand-name draw, I thought Perry might be fading a bit; his two 2008 offerings, one of which featured the profane, drag-tastic powerhouse Madea, both ended up toward the bottom of his filmography. Nothing doing. Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail made an eye-popping $41 million on a slow weekend, handily toppling the previous Perry opening record held by Family Reunion. Has there ever been another film (or set of films) with such niche popularity (in this case: African-American, Christian) but such minimal crossover appeal?

(By the way: I haven't seen any of Perry's films, but I find the photo that accompanies this post so inexplicably funny I'm almost tempted to go watch this one.)

Screen Gems' Fired Up!, the only other film to go wide this weekend (perhaps as part of a conspiracy to make people watch the Oscars) made $6 million and landed in 9th place, which actually isn't wretched for the cheap, low-expectations release.

The other notable story from the charts is Friday the 13th, which lost an awesome 81% of its opening-weekend gross and dropped from first place to sixth. Horror films with big openings are notoriously susceptible to big second-weekend drops, but 81% is almost unprecedented -- the only wide release this decade to suffer worse is the infamous Gigli. Among horror films, only Captivity (77% in 2007) came close.

Next week, we'll see what kind of "Oscar bump" Slumdog Millionare gets, but it doesn't need much help: with a slight screen count boost, it rose to #5 this weekend and is almost at $100 million.

The full top 10 after the jump.

Heaven help me, this Madea character is starting to grow on me. In Madea Goes to Jail, Tyler Perry's latest adaptation of one of his innumerable stage plays, his giant, pistol-packing alter ego finally runs afoul of the law one too many times and finds herself in the big house (not Big Momma's House, the big house). As a character, Madea felt randomly assembled in Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea's Family Reunion, but now Perry has grown her into a larger-than-life force of nature that is genuinely funny.

Madea Goes to Jail would be a lot better, in fact, if it were actually about Madea going to jail, or about Madea at all. But she's merely a supporting character in the film, which is really about a young lawyer and his shrewish fiancee dealing with elements from his past, with light Christian themes baked into the crust. In other words, it's more or less the same movie Perry has been making all along, with one-dimensional villains, catty women, and cringe-inducing melodrama. The addition of Rudy Huxtable as a crack whore certainly raises my interest level, though.

That'd be Keshia Knight Pulliam, who is 29 years old now, if you can believe that. She plays Candy, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks -- someone actually uses that figure of speech -- who's now hooked on the junk and turning tricks on the streets of Atlanta. Our dashing hero lawyer, Josh (Derek Luke), a prosecutor in the D.A.'s office, grew up in the same ghetto and is astonished to be reunited with her after she's arrested. But his purely platonic desire to help her is hampered by his wealthy fiancee, Linda (Ion Overman), who sees no reason to reach out to "those people" when it's Candy's own damn fault she's so messed up.

Just a couple of weeks back, it seemed that only film bloggers could bring themselves to crack jokes about how Dakota Fanning's super-power sub-performer Push might get confused with the award-winning and far-from-fantasy Sundance title Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire -- and lo, most did.

Well, hopefully, they've gotten that out of their system, because attached today to the release of Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail is a trailer that now refers to it as Precious: Based on a Novel by Sapphire, after the protagonist's preferred nickname.

Having not seen the film -- which our Eric D. Snider referred to as "unsettling and bleak," though "ultimately triumphant and hopeful" -- I can't help but think that the change not only avoids confusion with that other film's eventual DVD release (an admittedly unlikely scenario), but it adds a sense of the personal that was lacking before (having seen the trailer, which is not yet online, I still wouldn't know what "Push" referred to). Wouldn't you rather want to know who this Precious is exactly and what she's about?

Better yet, the very word itself lends a hint of the positive, which could very well make the difference between some Academy voter either picking it up or passing it over in their mounting pile of screeners in favor of something a bit more obvious like So The Holocaust Kinda Sucked.

New Line insists on "reimagining," but from reading the reviews I take it nobody's buying.

Anyway. Friday the 13th set a horror remake opening weekend record, grossing $40.7 million over the three days and $45.2 including President's Day Monday. That beats Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake by more than $12 million. It's also roughly the second best President's Day weekend opening ever, behind only Ghost Rider and just about tied with 50 First Dates and Daredevil.

Confessions of a Shopaholic opened to a halfway decent $17.3 million, while The International more or less flopped with $10.7 million; the marketing for the latter really pushed the evil bank concept, complete with a shot of an ATM offering "murder" "corruption" and "extortion" as options instead of "withdrawal" "deposit" and "check balance." Maybe people thought it was a comedy.

It was another good weekend for holdovers, with Taken, Coraline and -- once again -- Paul Blart: Mall Cop all doing well. Taken's $81-million-and-counting is really remarkable. $120 million is assured at this point, with more possible. "Sleek, preposterous and breathlessly entertaining" appears to be a good formula. Meanwhile, maybe if I stop mentioning Paul Blart in these posts, it'll go away? Seems unlikely.

Leading up to the Oscars, Slumdog Millionare should be close to $100 million by the big night. The Reader also saw a late bump this weekend; a Kate Winslet win on Sunday can't hurt.

The full 4-day top 10 after the jump.