TylerPerry Tagged Articles at Cinematical

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.

Look who wants to fight Oprah over an illiterate, overweight African-American girl: Harvey Weinstein. Actually, Harvey isn't fighting Oprah Winfrey directly; The Weinstein Company (TWC) and Lionsgate filed lawsuits against each other yesterday, both claiming the right to distribute Sundance award-winner Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire, according to indieWIRE.

On the surface, this is patently absurd. We're not talking about a sure-fire box office smash, are we? The premise of Push (not to be confused, of course, with the super-powered action movie opening tomorrow) is so "unsettling and bleak that no one would blame you if you didn't want to see it:." That's how Eric D. Snider began his review from Sundance. Even with Oprah and Tyler Perry getting behind the release, Push sounds like a tough sell. So why is Harvey suing?

His lawyer claims it's because a deal was in place with sales agent Cinetic Media, who went "behind their backs" to make a better deal with Lionsgate. Cinetic says that a deal with TWC was not in place. Beyond the 'he said, she said' legal disagreements, David Poland commented: "Unlike Lionsgate, TWC is NOT a company with a strong history of releasing films for black audiences. On the other hand, they now have Tom Ortenberg, who was probably drooling at the opportunity to top Lionsgate with TWC's first real urban film."

One of the minor eyebrow-raisers at this year's Sundance Film Festival was that the fest ended without its most acclaimed film being picked up by a distributor. That would be Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire (not to be confused with that Chris Evans/Dakota Fanning super-power thing coming out this week), the harrowing drama that won both the grand jury prize AND the audience award -- a rare feat. Would it languish in obscurity and go straight to DVD, despite its critical and popular acclaim?

No! It won't! And as usual, we have Oprah to thank. Her production company and Tyler Perry's company will help finance distribution of the film, which has been officially purchased by Lionsgate. Lionsgate tends to be frugal in its marketing (at least in comparison with the bigger studios), hence the need for partners. Plus, the film is a hard sell: It's about an obese, illiterate Harlem teen who's pregnant for the second time by her father and who lives with her abusive mother. It's not the usual Lionsgate product (i.e., a Saw sequel) and not the kind of thing that will have a $20 million opening weekend.

But Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Perry evidently recognize its value, and don't worry -- since the film is already done, it's too late for either of them to mess it up. (Had Perry made the film, surely he would have played the overweight teenage girl himself.)

My rave review for Cinematical can be found here. But if my word and the words of Oprah and Madea aren't enough to convince you, look at what Variety, Film School Rejects, IndieWire, and the New York Post said about it. Lionsgate hasn't said when they plan to release it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they wait until fall and give it a push for awards season.

So very often, we here at Cinematical field comments that are directed specifically to whoever a post was about -- as if Star X or Director Y were reporting about themselves, or as if we hoard e-mail information for any given celebrity and pass word on with great frequency. Having written just one review, though, of a Tyler Perry movie, none of my other posts have yet to have so many remarks addressed directly to the writer-director-producer-star-caterer than that one.

Still, so long as Tyler Perry and his filmed plays are around, we'll have posters and trailers that demonstrate just how ungainly his blend of broad slapstick and gospel-laced melodrama is over the course of a mere two minutes, let alone two hours. Case in point: next February's Madea Goes to Jail. On the one hand, we have the poster (click below to enlarge), with the risible imagery of a dove made out of smoke framing the face of Madea (Perry in drag), a character known primarily for being racuous, shrill, anything but saintly. On the other, we have this trailer by way of Yahoo! Movies, which runs the gamut from Madea bickering with Dr. Phil and sticking it to noxious honkies to straight-up preaching to prostitutes in prison.

For some people, it's everything that they hope for out of a Tyler Perry offering. For others, it's everything that they dread. Madea Goes to Jail on Feburary 20th, and I just wanted you to know, Mr. Perry, that I'll try to find my own "Get Out of Jail Free" card by then.

To state that The Family That Preys is Tyler Perry's most accomplished screen effort to date doesn't change the fact that it's still exactly the kind of preachy, pandering, tone-shifting, gospel-laced soap opera that he's served up time and time again to his dedicated audience. However, in the grand scheme of things, his skills as a writer-director have been honed just well enough to make one wish that Perry would trust someone else to polish his rough spots at the script stage, so that his cast might play at something a bit more substantial than petty drama and broad sermons, and so that his critical reputation as a filmmaker might grow (well, recover) from the shrill likes of his trademark Madea character.