Tyler Perry’s exploding plastic inevitable

November 14, 2007, 06:35 p.m. EST

by Trevor Seigler ( Contact / Staff Bio )

Some shit is about to go down.

submitted

You know it’s a slow night when you can’t turn away from a crappy movie on TBS. The crappy movie in question was Tyler Perry’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.” The night was slow because the Rockies had already swept the Angels (before getting swept themselves a week later by Boston), and I felt like scripting my own movie based on the experience (“Diary of a Bored White Guy”, maybe).

But I came away from the experience a little wiser about Mr. Perry’s modus operandi: the guy has watched a lot of movies, and dammit it all if he ain’t gonna steal from all of them for his own films.

You’ve heard the term “cliché” no doubt, but I think it doesn’t begin to describe the events in the last 10 minutes of “Black Woman.” I think we need a new term.

I’ve always been fond of the phrase “exploding plastic inevitable” (used by Andy Warhol in the ’60s when he was promoting the Velvet Underground), and I think it can be applied to what goes on in “Black Woman” at the end. People who don’t want spoilers, read no further Although, just to be an ass, at the end of “Titanic” the boat sinks. Did not see that one coming.

Anyway, it all takes place in a church, where all the principal characters have just happened to assemble themselves, and the preacher starts bellowing at the congregation while the choir (with a twelve-year-old soloist) soars in the background. This all compels the Mad Black Woman’s husband (a real jerk in the first half who gets shot in the back and nearly crippled) to get up and start walking without aid to the front. You know what’s coming next, of course: Mad Black Woman starts crying. Meanwhile, Tyler Perry, not in drag (I can’t remember the character’s name, but he’s fairly stiff and unemotive) is sitting there (his daughter is the soloist), when his formerly drug-addled wife comes in and starts singing herself. Cut to a happy family dinner, where suddenly Mad Black Woman decides to go get her man (obviously not Asshole Husband), and the film rips off “An Officer and a Gentleman” complete with steel-workers and swelling music as Mad Black Woman and her new man walk off into the distance of the north exit of the factory. (All it needed was a Homer Simpson-esque “I won’t be back for the next ten minutes.”)

I laughed because this was piling on an already melodramatic idea. (I’ve known many Mad Black Women, Mad White Women, all sorts of Mad Women, and most of them don’t do half the stuff that was in this movie.) You have to admire Perry’s balls in ripping off every worn-out cliché and making it somehow brand new. And so, Mr. Perry, feel free to use the term “exploding plastic inevitable.” Your movie was explosively overdone, plastic in terms of emotions, and inevitable in its abuse of old standbys to convey character growth or change. Hell, the man’s much richer than I am, he must be onto something. Maybe the next time he goes to Blockbuster for his next movie idea, he can rent a Kevin Smith film and throw in a pot-smoking foulmouthed white guy. I’m pretty sure he’s mined the Richard Gere filmography for all it’s worth.

Comments

Post a comment

Commenting requires free bootlegontheweb.com registration .