Tyler Perry is bad at math

Nope, this is not just an opportunity to take an easy potshot at a sometimes easy target.

In fact, I'm going to start today's post by praising Madea's Big Happy Family, the latest entry in Tyler Perry's series of Madea movies. A movie I pilloried in this space based on my perception of self-loathing in its catchphrase "Good afternoont" (see post here) was actually one of the most purely entertaining Perry movies I've seen. In fact, the Madea character herself, who has frequently caused me fits, may have been my favorite thing about it. Best use of the character yet, I say.

I wasn't planning to fit this movie in before my year-end rankings close (January 24th), but I happened across it at the library and needed something to watch at the gym. I'm glad to say that it did one better than helping me get through my exercise -- I was actually laughing, regularly, and when not laughing, I was enjoying the drama surrounding social issues. (Perry is known for alternating wildly between tones in his movies, and this one was no exception.) The cast was uniformly strong, but the character that made me laugh the most was the spiteful "baby mama" of Bow Wow's character, played by Teyana Taylor. Whenever Taylor says his name -- Byron -- she draws out the last syllable for the next ten seconds:

"By-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(breath)

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(breath)

eeeeeeeeeeeeeen."

I don't know, it just made me laugh.

(For the record, Bow Wow is now crediting himself as Shad "Bow Wow" Moss.)

However, I do have some nits to pick about Perry's ability with numbers, especially when he's casting actors to fill out the seemingly limitless branches of Madea's family tree. Specifically the ages of the actors, and the likelihood that they could be parents and children to each other.

I'm looking at two relationships in the movie in particular, and before I go on, I'll give you a spoiler alert, since not everything about the nature of these relationships is known at the beginning of the movie.

There. Have all the Tyler Perry fans who haven't yet seen this movie left the room?

The biggest surprise reveal in the movie is that Byron and what he thought was his sister Kimberley (Shannon Kane) are actually mother and son. She got pregnant when she was 13, so her mother (the great Loretta Devine) raised the baby as her own baby.

The thing is, The Artist Formerly Known as Bow Wow (and Lil Bow Wow before that) is 24, while Kane is only 25.

It's one thing to say that baby-faced Shad Moss can play younger than his age, which is nothing new for actors. Hell, Michael J. Fox was still playing teenagers when he was 40. But this movie doesn't present Byron as a teenager -- he's definitely in the workforce, or at least trying to be (he loses his job at one point during the movie). And so it's quite another thing to tell a beautiful actress like Kane that she can play ten years older than she really is. That kind of thing doesn't usually go over well with actresses -- or anyone in the movie business, come to think of it.

But that's probably not the strangest parent-child age relationship in the movie. The movie also features a mostly separate plot about a character who just goes by the name Brown (David Mann) and the character who is allegedly his daughter, Cora (played by gospel singer Tamela Mann). ("Allegedly" because this parentage is not straightforward either.)

There are three very strange things about having these characters play father and daughter:

1) Both actors are exactly 45 years old.

2) For reasons known only to Perry, Cora's age is actually given in the movie, and she is supposed to be 58 years old. So not only is she also playing at least ten years older than she actually is, but that means that David Mann is playing 30 years older than he actually is, if you average out the potential ages he was when he fathered her, erring on the side of making him younger, and call him 20.

3) David Mann and Tamela Mann are actually married in real life, which is probably part of the reason Perry did it, as an inside joke.

Of course, Perry himself is only 42, and his Madea character is supposed to be in at least her mid-70s, seeing as how she's Cora's mother.

Now, if we are going to proceed from the assumption that Perry was trying to be at least somewhat realistic, there are two things we can conclude:

1) There is a somewhat crude if ultimately complimentary saying about black people, which is "Black don't crack." Which, unpacked, is supposed to indicate that African Americans don't show signs of aging as quickly as those from other races -- their skin does not "crack." If you are to believe this notion, you could say that Perry is either using this notion to his advantage to cast by skill set rather than age appropriateness, or simply making fun of the notion.

2) Perry's movies are all about uncovering the pernicious underbelly of the African American experience in the United States -- when they're not all about broad physical humor, that is -- so the young age at which many African American girls become mothers could be one of the notions he's trying to wrestle with. Actors really can be close in age to each other, and play parent and child, if that parent him or herself was only a child when he or she became a parent.

But really, this level of analysis is probably not necessary at all. Cinema is all about illusion, and these days, actors can play a lot older than they are (through makeup) or younger than they are (through digital enhancement) in a way they couldn't in the past. Why be limited by age considerations if you know you have an actor who is right for the part? As long as the viewer isn't distracted, you're in the clear.

I guess I was distracted -- enough to write this post, anyway. But I still liked the movie plenty well. I went in with my arms crossed, and I came out with them open.

Before I leave you for this Friday, I do have one final question:

What the hell am I supposed to call this movie?

I am currently listing it as Madea's Big Happy Family in my Most Recently Seen section to the right. However, there's ample evidence that the official title is Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, and that's how I first listed it when I updated my blog last night after seeing it.

What a tongue twister. It's terrible to have those two words with apostrophes right next to each other, but it is in keeping with the naming convention for the last however-many Perry movies. The last two I saw before this I refer to as Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns. But that apostrophe situation gave me pause this time around, and I chose to use an earlier naming convention for this one. Namely, when Madea's Family Reunion came out back in 2006, Perry's name was not part of the title, either officially or unofficially. At some point along the way, however, he took a lesson from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and got on board with full authorship as part of the title.

Since I really don't want to include his name in the title this time around (because of the grammatical awkwardness), I'm seeking any excuse not to. However, most sources do seem to list it as Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, while Madea's Big Happy Family is the name of the stage play that inspired the movie. To confuse matters, the wikipedia entry for the movie is listed under Madea's Big Happy Family, but the first sentence of the entry calls it Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family.

Don't be surprised if I've changed my mind again by the time you read this.

Madea's big unhappy self-loathing

There are a lot of haters of Tyler Perry movies out there.

I am not one of them. With most creative talents who have achieved a certain level of success, I like some of their stuff and dislike some of their stuff. Perry is no exception.

I've seen a good half-dozen (of the 42 or so) Tyler Perry movies as a result of my role as a critic. The informal rule I've come up with is that if they feature a sizeable dose of his Madea character, they are not very good. If Madea appears in small doses or is not present at all, they are much better.

I've only seen one Perry movie with the word "Madea" in the title -- Madea's Family Reunion -- and it's my least favorite Perry movie. It's probably why I avoided Madea Goes to Jail, Madea Goes to Camp, and Madea Scared Stupid.

The movies without so much Madea? Not half bad. One of the best Perry movies I've seen is The Family That Preys, and it has zero Madea in it. It's not high art and it engages in its share of proselytizing, but I liked it.

I also liked Meet the Browns, the movie most responsible for helping me formulate this Madea/non-Madea theory. See, Meet the Browns has almost no Madea in it -- and the one Madea scene is entirely out of left field, having nothing to do with the rest of the plot. Meet the Browns is a fairly typical Perry movie in terms of its agenda, where a family of big-city folks (Angela Bassett and her two kids) find their roots and a family they didn't know they had in rural Georgia, where she develops a love interest in former basketball player Rick Fox. There's plenty of heartfelt stuff, as well as plenty of comedy in the form of Bassett's eccentric extended family. However, for some reason -- marketing -- Perry shoehorns in this random scene in which Madea and her brother Joe (also played by Perry) are involved in a high-speed car chase with the police. Madea's character hasn't been previously introduced (at least not in this movie) and the action doesn't even take place where any of the other characters are -- it's just a total anomaly. This one scene is so ludicrous and over-the-top, not to mention such a violation of the traditional rules of screenplay structure, that it curdled my positive impressions of Meet the Browns from a solid thumbs up to a marginal thumbs up.

It's strange to say this because Madea is clearly the "face of the franchise," to the extent that Perry's movies constitute a franchise. Very few of these movies actually have anything to do with each other, overtly, in terms of their plot. But Madea is in almost all of them, and it's certainly this gun-toting grandma -- Perry dressed in drag -- who's responsible for putting asses in the seats. Sad but true.

Even sadder because she reinforces so many of the stereotypes ascribed to black comics, and by extension, to black audiences.

The "big black man in drag" has always been a bit of a hurtful element of comedy directed at African Americans, which other comedies have tried to lampoon (for example, 30 Rock in its usage of Tracy Morgan). However, that's not really what I want to talk about today. (Thought I wouldn't get there?)

What's got bees in my bonnet today is a simple two-word phrase:

"Good afternoont."

About three weeks ago I first noticed, on a bus stop ad for Madea's Big Happy Family (which releases today), that "Good afternoont" was being pushed as the catchphrase from this movie.

I don't know where to start with the problems I've got with this, but let's try to do it numerically in order from least to most important:

1) It's a pretty dubious practice to promote a movie by one of its catchphrases, especially when the movie hasn't even come out yet, meaning people don't yet know the catchphrase. And it doesn't have to be a bad movie for me to have this problem with it. I remember seeing billboards for Inglourious Basterds, where "That's a bingo!" was being promoted as a catchphrase. I guess that's sort of a funny moment in the movie, but it's not even approaching any kind of summary of the many-splendored glory that is Inglourious Basterds. I say, leave it out of the advertising altogether.

2) "Good afternoont" is not particularly funny -- er, funny at all. The entire joke is that she (we assume it's Madea) says the word "afternoon" with an extra "t" grafted on to the end.

3) And this one kind of relates to #2 -- if that is the only reason it's supposed to be funny, doesn't that mean we are being invited to laugh at dumb black people who can't speak English correctly?

Talk about hurtful stereotypes that have persisted down through time.

Look, I have to admit that I find language-related humor funny. Any sign that's poorly translated from Japanese to English (the entirety of the website www.engrish.com) makes me laugh hysterically. I don't even mind if the joke is related to a black person. I think it's really funny when people do their Mike Tyson impersonations, and they use an impressive four-syllable word in the wrong context. Tyson totally does that. (One of the funniest things about the documentary Tyson, which I otherwise found kind of boring, is that he uses the word "skullduggery" not once, but twice.)

But in the case of Tyson, it's someone misusing a big vocabulary word. Knowing the word in the first place denotes a certain level of intelligence. Who among us can't admit to using words incorrectly from time to time? Even though I'm aware of the problem, my mind still tells me to say "appraise" when I mean to say "apprise." "I'll keep you appraised of my progress." It happens.

But "Good afternoont"? What is it supposed to say about Madea that she says this simple word with an unnecessary additional consonant sound on the end?

More importantly: What does it say about the movie that we are invited to ridicule her and laugh at her for this, and that could be the movie's "best joke"?

Oh, I should tell you -- "Good afternoont" is not the only bad-language catchphrase that's being used to advertise this movie. Some of the outdoor advertisements for Madea's Big Happy Family also have the following catchphrase:

"Hallelujer!"

Urban Dictionary defines this as "the Ebonics version of 'Hallelujah,'" and credits it to Perry and Madea.

Okay, so this one has been around longer -- the Urban Dictionary entry is from 2008. But that doesn't change the fact that it's trying to make hay from a character saying a word wrong. To me it seems to represent not only self-loathing on a fundamental level, but desperation in terms of the the actual content they have on their hands.

Okay, okay, time out to catch my breath and see reason a bit. Perry's defenders would say it's all harmless fun. If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? Very little about Madea is meant to be taken seriously. Are we really supposed to believe she's carrying a gun around and constantly getting into scrapes with the law? Doubtful. Are we really supposed to believe she thinks being physically violent to children is the only way to "learn 'em"? Let's hope not. Does she really think the word "afternoon" has a "t" on the end? No, of course she doesn't.

Then let's just scale back the argument a bit, and look at that poster up there. If you're driving by a bus stop and you see this movie advertised, and the only thing it gives you other than the title and Madea's smiling face is the phrase "GOOD AFTERNOONT.", do you really want to see that movie?

If I, as a white person, am offended by this, I have to assume there are plenty of black people out there who think that Madea sets them back decades.

Keep making movies, Perry. You have things to say and you make lots of money -- a good combination if you're a filmmaker. It's just time to stop using Madea -- and all the hurtful associations she represents -- as your crutch.

Some people may not agree with me on this, Perry, but you're better than that.