Unlike a lot of black folk, I’ve never been a big fan of Tyler Perry. Well I’m not sure that’s really accurate because in order to decide whether or not you are a fan, you would have to have seen the person in question’s work. But I dunno…all the commercials for his Madea movies left me feeling that they were just more coonery that I could do without. I mean, after all, I remember when way back in the 80s, Shelly Garrett got blacks to start going to plays with his over the top silliness, Beauty Shop, the very definition of foolishness:
I have had years of watching black people look foolish on large and small screens. From JJ in Good Times to Martin Lawrence in everything, it just was too much. After a certain point in my life, I just had to stop watching. It was killing my brain cells and wounding my soul. No more for me, thankyouverymuch.
But then I heard about Tyler Perry’s more serious movie, Why Did I Get Married? I thought to myself, how bad could it be? It’s got Janet Jackson, my girl Jill Scott and even Malik Yoba who we haven’t seen in a while. Even the trailer didn’t look that bad:
So the movie is about four married couples who travel annually somewhere for a week of discussion and marriage strengthening exercises under the tutelage of Janet, the therapist. All I can say is that if these people have been doing these exercises for years, then as a therapist Janet sucks. These folks got issues.
There’s the constantly fighting couple, Angela and Marcus, with Angela as the loud, alcoholic, neck rolling, extremely grating stereotypical sista-gurl who is supposed to have an advanced degree, but sounds like she just came off the block. Yet she is the instigator for much of the movie and does have her funny moments. Her hot bodied husband Marcus (yeah that was his yummy form in the trailer) has one good line:
Her: I’ll drink to that!
Him: You’ll drink to nouns.
Tyler Perry and Sharon Leal are the uptight power couple. He’s a pediatrician and she’s a partner at a law firm. He wants another kid and is pissed that they don’t have sex. She’s really busy and doesn’t want another kid. Can we say failure to communicate?
Janet and Malik are mourning the loss of their child. Honestly, they were the most believable and balanced couple in the movie. I’ll just leave them alone.
And then there was Mike and Sheila (Jill Scott), or I should say Mike and Sheila and Trina. Where do I begin with this group? OK, perhaps I should start at the part of the movie where AdoringHusband and I dropped our jaws in unison. And that would be at the beginning.
Mike, played nastily by Richard T Jones, Sheila and Trina are boarding the plane to Colorado to travel to this retreat. Mike insists on sitting next to Trina, instead of his wife Sheila and Sheila takes the middle seat in the row in front. Unfortunately Sheila is fat and has FOS (fat overhang syndrome) such that the person in the next seat ends up encroached on. The passenger complains and the flight attendant comes and tells her that people of her size must buy two seats, but since the flight is full, she is out of luck. So what does dear Mike do for his wife? Tells her that he told her that she was too damn fat and that he’s not paying for an extra seat. He says that he and Trina will fly on ahead, but she should just drive by herself. He gives her some money to cover the costs. And meekly Sheila slinks off the plane.
All I could say was that there was no pit in hell too hot for the likes of Mike.
Mike shows up at the lodge with his mistress while his wife is driving hundreds of miles alone through a snowstorm and he doesn’t even give a damn. And what do his college buddies say? Two of them give him a little crap about whether he’s “hittin’ dat” but basically they feel, that’s Mike.
My husband, on the other hand, almost had a coronary watching this movie. “What the hell is that?! He’s bringing his mistress in there and nobody says anything?! I’d be like, ‘You take your girlfriend to a hotel, but you aren’t staying here with her!’ I want to hit him with a bat!”
Yay, hubby!
After dating such an amazing series of losers for so long, sometimes I am just stunned to realize that my husband is a nice guy who respects his wife and doesn’t understand how other men don’t feel similarly about their partners. I know that by now I shouldn’t still be stunned, but I did date an amazing array of jerks. (Like my second fiance who ignored me for 600 miles on a cross country road trip because I looked at him the wrong way when he asked for the shampoo.)
So we sat through the movie until the end. I. was. not. happy. What horrific images of the women in the film. Irrational, hysterical, demanding, high-maintenance, and selfish…except for Sheila, who was battered, abused, and in denial. Also after all the stuff that went down, why was it that the women had to make amends to the men, but the men offered no amends to their wives? And hello…why was the only repercussion for the extremely noxious and reprehensible waste of oxygen that was Mike that he ended up married to chickenhead Trina who is “burning up his Amex” and “not cooking or cleaning the house.” That’s it?! That’s all that happens to a man who laughed hysterically in his wife’s face when she tried to please him by wearing a pretty nightgown (suggested to her by Trina)? Why didn’t he end up miserable and castrated? How about married to a serial killer? Shanked by a she-male he picked up? All of those would have been much more fitting consequences for Mike.
AdoringHusband was so frequently appalled and angered that he chose to tune out and visit the flashlight forums on his laptop (yes, he’s a geek). But every time I thought he wasn’t listening, I’d hear another, “I just want to bust him with a bat!” directed at Mike, and I’d know that it was still getting on his nerves.
So the net of this pathetic movie review is no more Tyler Perry in the C/S household. We don’t need that much escalation of our blood pressure. (Shit, I even dreamed about ways to torture Mike.) This weekend I’ll probably watch the movie version of the saddest book ever…Atonement.
Tito, pass me the tissues…