[Peter T Chattaway]

Link to our thread on Diary of a Mad Black Woman (which included some comments on Madea's Family Reunion).

FWIW, I mentioned at my blog yesterday that this film was opening without any press screenings, which prompted a comment from Brandon Fibbs to the effect that the film IS being screened in New York. This is weird, because Madea's Family Reunion was screened in Canada but not in the United States, whereas this film is apparently being screened in the United States but not in Canada, and yet the two films have the same distributor and seem to be targetting the same basic demographic. (And in-between, there was Daddy's Little Girls, which AFAIK wasn't screened in advance for critics on EITHER side of the border.)

Oh, and for the search engine: Tyler Perry.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Hmmm... Brandon said this film WAS being screened in advance for critics in New York, yet Lou Lumenick of the New York Post says it WASN'T... and as I note at my blog post linked above, the Variety and Hollywood Reporter and New York Times reviews all ran AFTER the movie had opened to the public, instead of concurrent with that opening (or even before that opening, which is what they usually do). I did spot a few small-fry critics at RottenTomatoes.com who had apparently not only seen the film before it opened, but had posted their reviews the day before the film came out ... but I find it peculiar that some of the biggest and most-likely-to-publish-early outlets were apparently denied this chance.

In any case, the film -- which will apparently be #1 for the weekend -- isn't even PLAYING in my city.

[David Smedberg]

This movie was so popular at my theater that although we had two prints on Saturday night we interlocked one of the prints so that it could show in two theaters at once. We waited until we sold out the 7:20 (at about 4:00), then added a "7:21", and sold that out too within about an hour and a half. I was working at Guest Services and thus answering the phone, and I was handling calls literally every 10-20 seconds for extended periods of time, all asking roughly the same questions - when is the movie, is it sold out yet, can I buy advance tickets over the phone. (This due to the the deadly combination of an extremely popular movie with an audience which has less-than-average rates of internet penetration.) For whatever reason, it slowed down significantly on Sunday - is that because everyone wanted to see it when it opened, thus foretelling a steep drop, or because the typical audience for Tyler Perry is Christian and thus less likely to venture to the theater on Sunday?

This post has been edited by David Smedberg: 15 October 2007 - 09:25 PM

[Christian]

Nice update, David. I'd guess the Sunday dropoff is due to church attendance, although Perry's movies do have a history of dropping quickly, don't they? Still, they make boatloads.

FWIW, I'm not so sure the "Perry Movie Gets Overlooked by Entertainment Press" meme is due to religion so much as race. I don't have stat's to back this up, but in my experience, most movie writers are white and just don't have a clue as to what goes on in African-American culture.

However, that doesn't explain why high-profile action or comedy vehicles starring Jamie Foxx or Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock get noticed, does it? Maybe it is religion that makes the difference here. Hmmm...

[SDG]

GetReligion

We have, in recent years, seen an ocean of ink poured out on the subject of Hollywood’s attempts to reach the pew people who turned out to see The Passion of the Christ. Now, that movie pulled in large numbers of Hispanics and blacks, but everyone thought of it as a white megachurch blockbuster. The question, for me, is whether Perry is actually starting to reach an audience that can be defined more in terms of subject material than skin color.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Christian wrote:
: FWIW, I'm not so sure the "Perry Movie Gets Overlooked by Entertainment Press" meme is due to religion so much as race. I don't have stat's to back this up, but in my experience, most movie writers are white and just don't have a clue as to what goes on in African-American culture.

FWIW, Studio Briefing today asserted that "Perry's films appeal mostly to older black churchgoers" -- none of which are demographics that get much attention from the mainstream studios, apart from condescending or badly-made "niche" films. (Then again, Perry's films are badly-made too, to judge from the one film I have seen and all that has been written about the other films -- so there's obviously got to be some OTHER factor that explains his success. That other factor, I assume, would be the fact that his films typically start out as stage plays and the straight-to-video adaptations thereof; Tyler Perry HIMSELF is what the "niche" is built on; he is a BRAND that encompasses several media, and film is just one of them.)

: However, that doesn't explain why high-profile action or comedy vehicles starring Jamie Foxx or Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock get noticed, does it? Maybe it is religion that makes the difference here. Hmmm...

Well, Foxx and Murphy and Rock all proved themselves as stand-up comics and TV stars before making the switch to feature films. They followed the normal pathways to success as movie stars. You might say they spent their early careers getting themselves on the radar of the entertainment press. Perry, on the other hand, did not.

[Christian]

Well, Foxx and Murphy and Rock all proved themselves as stand-up comics and TV stars before making the switch to feature films. They followed the normal pathways to success as movie stars. You might say they spent their early careers getting themselves on the radar of the entertainment press. Perry, on the other hand, did not.

Wasn't Perry very well established in African-American culture, though, through his plays? Again, not something folks outside of that culture would be clued in to, but I don't see how he remained under the radar for so long.

I write all this realizing that I'm part of the problem. I'd never heard of this guy until Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and I continue to be surprised at the potent box-office appeal of his films.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Christian wrote:
: Wasn't Perry very well established in African-American culture, though, through his plays?

Yes, that is the point I was making. Murphy and Rock were cast members on Saturday Night Live and got mainstream exposure which they parlayed into top-selling stand-up acts and mainstream movies (and note how Murphy got his start co-starring with white actors like Nick Nolte in 48 Hrs. and fellow SNL vet Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places, before moving to leading-man status with Beverly Hills Cop; for his part, Chris Rock's first major film post-SNL may have been Lethal Weapon 4, which also introduced mainstream American audiences to Jet Li). Jamie Foxx, meanwhile, had In Living Color -- a more "black" kind of show, but one that was a hit with white critics and hipsters -- and while he may have toiled away in the blaxploitation market with movies like Booty Call and The Players Club, he did eventually hook up with Oliver Stone on Any Given Sunday and Michael Mann on Ali, and the rest, as they say, is history. The question now is whether Foxx really IS a major movie star, or whether he only seemed like one when he did a Tom Cruise movie and a Ray Charles biopic back-to-back three years ago. Stealth, Jarhead, Miami Vice and The Kingdom have all underperformed to one degree or another, and even Dreamgirls is regarded as a bit of a box-office disappointment (certainly an awards disappointment), I think.

In contrast to all of that, Tyler Perry has been writing and starring in his own plays, and building up a fan base built around those plays. He hasn't been trying to find a place within the system, the way that Foxx and Murphy and Rock did. He's been creating his OWN system.

: Again, not something folks outside of that culture would be clued in to, but I don't see how he remained under the radar for so long.

How familiar are movie critics with plays and straight-to-DVD releases at the best of times? How familiar are they with such products when they are produced specifically for a narrow demographic that the critics themselves do not belong to?

The IMDb has no credits for Perry prior to 2002. And between 2002 and 2005, which is when the theatrical-film version of Diary of a Mad Black Woman came out, all he produced was these straight-to-video adaptations of his plays. I don't see why any film critic should have been expected to stay on top of that.

: I write all this realizing that I'm part of the problem.

No, you're not. The fact that you were unaware of non-film items that were produced for a community not your own is not a problem (or if it is, it is not YOUR problem). And the fact that the FILMS based on these productions are routinely withheld from film critics is also not your problem.

Personally, I don't think you or I should feel any more guilt over not seeing Perry's films than we do over not seeing the horror flicks produced by Screen Gems (which regular shuts critics out) -- or, for that matter, the horror flicks produced by Lionsgate, which is the studio that Perry has been working with so far. When people choose to stay under the radar, except among their hardcore fans, there is no obligation on the non-fans to pick them up.

[Christian]

I saw this, my third Tyler Perry movie, and thought it was ho-hum. One thing that threw me: the first act ends just before the 60-minute mark!

I'm no slave to the three-act structure, but I'm now wondering if I understand how that traditional structure works in most films. I had thought most "acts" ran about 40 minutes -- that most studio product featured a first act that built to a conclusion about a third of the way through.

Plays are a different matter, though. I've seen several plays where the first act is nearly an hour, and often much longer than subsequent acts. But those are plays.

This movie is based on a stage play, which got me thinking: Do most movie adaptations of stage plays condense the first acts to conform to the "rule" I mentioned earlier, but which I may have gotten totally wrong?

The three-act structure of movies has become a subconscious thing for me. I'm not a screenwriter, and I often don't care too much about plot development. But when I see something like this film, where the first act clearly has an end point, I can't help but notice. Part of the reason is that the movie simply stalls out around the 30-minute mark. It's OK to extend things for a while, but I actually looked at my wife at around the 56-minute mark and declared, based on the running time printed on the DVD, "This movie has an hour to go!" She laughed, also astonished as was I, because the film was coasting, with nothing to propel it, storywise, for another hour.

Not two minutes later, there was a dinner-table scene in which several shoes dropped -- not just one plot avenue, but numerous ones, leading to a crescendo of sorts that the film then resolves over the next hour.

The movie's OK. I appreciated some of the themes, and the overt religion. But the movie doesn't have the warmth or humor of Meet the Browns, or the raucous moments of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the second Perry film I watched, and one that I'd place somewhere between the other two, although closer to Why Did I Get Married?

As for Perry, he's been the focal point for another stupid attack by Spike Lee, who can't seem to shut up when it comes to attacking other filmmakers. Karina piles on in her description by referring to Perry as a "master of the modern minstrel show," which is just outrageous. (Am I reading that correctly? She wrote those words, and isn't paraphrasing Lee, right?)

Part of this is personal. This post follows up on my earlier rave of Meet the Browns and reveals my own lack of enthusiasm for Perry's other films. But to see him branded as unworthy by Spike Lee is a flashback to all the things I don't like about Lee, even as I count myself a fan of many of his films, and some of his rhetoric. This tendency to bad-mouth other films and filmmakers looks bad when he goes after white filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, but it's more sensitive when he attacks other blacks. Anytime someone succeeds, it's a threat to Lee -- and a sure sign, in his eyes, that the filmmaker has sold out to the broader (read: white) audience. But in this case, Perry's appeal is almost entirely to the black community! So I don't get the disparagement. Isn't Spike indirectly attacking other African Americans for their taste?

[Peter T Chattaway]

Christian wrote:
: I'm no slave to the three-act structure, but I'm now wondering if I understand how that traditional structure works in most films. I had thought most "acts" ran about 40 minutes -- that most studio product featured a first act that built to a conclusion about a third of the way through.

Not quite. The traditional, Syd Field-esque screenplay structure brings the first act to an end about 30 minutes in, and the third act -- or at least the great movement towards the film's climax -- begins about 15 minutes before the end. (In Star Wars, Luke's uncle and aunt are killed, compelling him to finally leave Tatooine, about half-an-hour into the movie; and the Death Star battle, of course, begins about 15 minutes before the end.) The second act can easily be an hour or more, but it has to have a certain number of twists, etc.

: Plays are a different matter, though. I've seen several plays where the first act is nearly an hour, and often much longer than subsequent acts. But those are plays.

I haven't gone to many plays, but most of them, in my experience, have had only two acts, with one intermission slightly more than halfway into the play. Or maybe, technically, there are more "acts" within each half of the play, but I only notice the gap in the middle because that's when I get to stand up, walk around, buy a refreshment, go to the bathroom ...

[Christian]

Thanks, Peter. Had I thought to Google "three act structure," I would've found that answer and been able to pretend I understood it all along:

Three-act Structure

Syd Field, author of Screenplay and The Screen Writer's Workbook, has outlined a paradigm that most screenplays follow. A paradigm is a conceptual scheme. This paradigm is the structure that holds screenplays together. According to Field, screenplays follow a three-act structure, meaning the standard screenplay can be divided into three parts: Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution.

Act I comprises the first quarter of the screenplay. (For a two hour movie, Act I would last approximately 30 minutes.)

Act II comprises the next two quarters of the film. (For a two hour movie, Act II would last approximately 60 minutes.)

Act III comprises the final quarter of the film. (For a two hour movie, Act III would be the final 30 minutes.)

-- I wonder how many movies I have enjoyed have violated these rules. But I stand by the reaction I had to Why Did I Get Married?, which stood out in a bad way.

FWIW, Stephen J. Cannell:

Every great movie, book or play that has stood the test of time has a solid Three-Act structure. (Elizabethan Dramas were five act plays, but still had a strictly prescribed structure.) The only place where this is not the case is in a one-act play, where "slice of life" writing is the rule.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Janet Jackson gets 'Married' again
Janet Jackson will reprise her role in Tyler Perry's comedy sequel "Why Did I Get Married Too."
The thesp will again portray a successful author and psychologist who prefers to analyze other's relationship problems rather than deal with her own marriage.
Variety, June 25