A Madea homecoming

I thought I'd slide this one in under the wire for Black History Month, though I don't know if the conclusions I reach will feel particularly empowering.

You might look at this post and say "You're slipping, Vance. Just using the name of a new movie as the subject matter of your post, in its entirety? You can do better than that."

The more observant of you will notice, though, that this is not what I'm doing. If I were putting a title in the subject of my post, the words would all be capitalized, and there would be italics. 

In this case, the homecoming to Madea in my Sunday night viewing of A Madea Homecoming is a personal one. And I don't even need to italicize the word "Madea" because it is the name of a franchise. I don't italicize casual references to "Batman" and "Star Wars," unless I am talking about 1989's Batman or 1977's Star Wars. With a whopping dozen titles in its extended universe over 17 years, there are now more Madea movies than there are either Batman or Star Wars movies (only just). 

It's a homecoming for me because I used to watch most of these movies. I saw five of the first seven, starting with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005. I saw Madea's Family Reunion and Meet the Browns before missing my first, which was Madea Goes to Jail. I also missed I Can Do Bad All By Myself before I was back on board for the next two, Madea's Big Happy Family and Madea's Witness Protection. Tyler Perry has been a busy man, as there have been a number of films he's directed since 2005 that are only Madea adjacent, some of which I have also seen (The Family That Preys, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor and A Fall From Grace, while I've missed such films as Daddy's Little Girls, Why Did I Get Married? and its dubiously titled sequel, Why Did I Get Married Too?). 

I suppose calling them "Madea adjacent" is not fully accurate, since if there were an explicit connection to Perry's drag matriarch, they would be part of the extended universe on Wikipedia. I think of them as Madea adjacent, I suppose, simply because they involve Perry. That's how prominent this character has been for him. 

But I haven't seen any of the Madea movies -- A Madea Christmas, Boo! A Madea Halloween, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween and A Madea Family Funeral -- since I moved to Australia, which is probably not a coincidence. Before these movies started debuting on Netflix -- A Madea Homecoming is the second to do so -- you had to either see them in the theater (something I still don't think I've ever done) or rent them. Suffice it to say that movies that specifically examine the experience of Black people in America, that aren't also critically acclaimed, have only belatedly become available in Australia in any real way. If the latest Madea movie had a theatrical debut, I doubt it would actually play in Australian theaters, even today. For the distributor, I imagine it is a simple cost-benefit analysis, and they've determined that the cost to advertise and distribute Madea movies in Australia is not justified by the historically paltry benefit of expected ticket sales.

But I always wanted to watch these movies, not because I thought a) I'm the target audience for them, or b) I had any real chance to enjoy them as much as Perry hoped I would. In truth, I have enjoyed a number of them, and if I hadn't started out impressed by Diary of a Mad Black Woman -- impressed with reservations, I should note -- then maybe I never would have continued. It's sort of a miracle I did, considering how much I hated Madea's Family Reunion. 

No, I wanted to watch them for the film critic idealism of giving every widely released film an equal opportunity (loaded phrase there) to be reviewed. And also for the attempt to use Roger Ebert's empathy machine -- that's what he called cinema -- to put myself in the perspective of the people who were its target audience. Even if Madea's hijinks are a tad to broad for me personally, I thought I could figure out how to judge them on their own terms, and decide what worked and what didn't work within that specific context. Plus there was also a melodramatic story in each of these that was running parallel to the Madea hijinks, with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in particular establishing that template. Just because I'm calling it melodrama -- even Perry would probably call it melodrama -- doesn't mean I'm undercutting it, as some of that material is quite effective.

I did review a handful of these for AllMovie, where I was writing back in the 2000s, including each of the first three -- though probably none after that, given how I wound down writing for that site in 2011. Mission accomplished I suppose.

Now in 2022, on the last day of Black History Month, I am trying to decide whether I will review A Madea Homecoming.

For one thing there is the whole Australian audience thing I alluded to earlier. I'm pretty sure that my largely hipster audience on ReelGood is not going to care that much, if at all, about the latest Madea movie. It's what the distributors decided ages ago when they decided against an incursion into Australia. It's not these hipsters' fault; they just weren't raised on it. And they rightly identify a lowest common denominator aspect to it that keeps them away, even if they are trying to be more woke. They might read a Madea review as a way to gawk at it and see what I'd say about it, but not because of any actual interest in seeing the movie.

Or maybe they identify the thing that I've identified over the years that make me hesitant to even watch these movies: 

How negative can I be about them before it starts to seem like I'm engaged in a sort of race-based cruelty, or at the very least, like I'm tone deaf and uncharitable?

Aye, there's the rub. Because Perry's Madea movies are made specifically with the least discerning potential audience members in mind -- audience members who are drawn to the broadness and ability to laugh at themselves unselfconsciously -- they rarely make for truly accomplished cinema. Perry randomly throws in a few attempts at creative scene transitions, but they stick out for how indiscriminately they are used, calling attention to the attempt to be something that these movies clearly aren't. 

When you are accustomed to judging something according to relatively high standards for use of the tools of cinema, it's hard to engage with a film that doesn't care about that at all -- especially when it's made by someone demographically different than yourself. 

It's an issue I keep returning to on this blog: how to engage with art made by creators of other genders, races, sexual orientations or gender identities, and say you dislike the work without it seeming like a function of your constitutional inability to relate to it.

If I do review the movie -- and I really need the content this week, which is why I chose to watch it on Sunday -- I know there is no chance I will give it any more than two stars, which translates to 4/10 on ReelGood's rating system. I'll give you a couple reasons why, after a SPOILER warning.

The film opens with one of the broadest sequences I have seen in any of these movies. The recurring character played by David Mann, Mr. Brown, is preparing a BBQ for his son's visit, in celebration of his son being named valedictorian of his class. Madea and her perpetually incorrect brother, Joe (also Perry), are watching these preparations with bemusement. Brown is overwhelming the BBQ with lighter fluid, finishing up one bottle and going on to the next. He goes through about three normal sized lighter fluid bottles this way, then moves on to the sort of gas can you keep in the back of your car if you run out of gas and have to walk to a gas station, complete with the long nozzle. He continues this activity despite Joe finally coming out to tell him he's put on too much. 

Of course he's put on too much. An infant would know he'd put on too much. But he keeps going. For like five minutes.

When he finally lights the match, he immediately goes up in flames and runs around the yard. For like five minutes. Okay maybe one minute. As if discounting the possibility that he could burn to death, neither Madea nor Joe does much to help. Madea "hilariously" fills up a tea cup of water to try to douse him. When that has little effect, she tries the hose, only to find its stream to be piddly. Finally she gets Joe to trip Brown so his own body contact with the ground will douse the flames, something Brown might have figured out himself if he weren't in an (understandable) state of total panic. Of course, neither would this probably really work. 

As you might guess, Brown only has a few burnt piece of clothing, notably the ass missing from his pants. Otherwise he's fine. 

I have no idea if a Black audience finds this funny. I did not find it funny. The whole scene is ill-conceived and makes everyone in it look bad. 

Fortunately, there's nothing else quite this broad in the movie.

For me, Madea movies have always been saved, if they were saved, by the plot that does not directly involve Madea. There are some movies in the Madea cinematic universe -- like Meet the Browns -- that only feature her tangentially, like one broad comic scene, usually involving her toting a gun, that is at odds with the rest of the movie, but is shoehorned in for audiences who just came to see Madea. Madea is best used like a spice, in small rather than overwhelming quantities.

This implies that most of these movies are up to something different and often socially progressive, which is the real saving grace of the Madea series. These movies have tackled domestic abuse and other serious topics over the years.

A Madea Homecoming gets off on the right foot in this regard. After the broad opening, we meet Brown's son Tim (Brandon Black) and his "friend" Davi (Isha Blaaker). (I don't actually know if we "meet" Tim or if he was in other movies that I haven't seen.) You'll see why I use those quotation marks on "friend" in a moment. They're driving home and talking about how Tim really wants to come out to his family, and how Davi is encouraging him but is reluctant to do the same himself. It is heavily implied that these two are lovers, and some physical contact they make further invites that interpretation.

This is very promising. The Black community has struggled with its acceptance of homosexuality, which would be a politically prudent venture as Blacks and gays both have a friend in the Democratic party. Perry wants to tackle this and confront the audiences who may love Madea but not love gays.

Except then he backs off. Rather incredibly, it is revealed that Davi is not lovers with Tim, but rather, has been carrying on an affair with Tim's mother, Laura (Gabrielle Dennis). See, I told you it was melodramatic. At first we think Tim is so shocked at this revelation because Davi has been simultaneously carrying on an affair with him and his own mother, which would raise a lot of questions indeed. I mean, we're sure, based on what the film has told us, that Tim and Davi are dating. As it turns out, he's just mad because Davi didn't tell him, and because it's weird for Tim's best friend to be dating his own mother, meaning Davi could potentially become Tim's stepfather. 

So instead of confronting audiences with two gay men in love on screen, Perry gives us only one gay man who is not seen in a sexual context whatsoever. Baby steps, I guess. But this is a rather shocking form of purposeless misdirection, and I'm almost tempted to watch it again just to determine how bogus it really is, how heavily the film implied, if not outright stated, that Tim and Davi are in a relationship.

So how can I write a review of A Madea Homecoming without saying that the film bungles both the broad Madea scenes and the positive social messaging?

How indeed. And I'm still trying to decide whether I will.

I can't artificially inflate the grade. I could talk myself into a 4/10, but this film is really more of a 3/10 at best. I didn't really laugh -- again, not the target demographic -- and I didn't get the feels from anything the film was trying to do politically. 

So what value does it serve for me to review this film for a bunch of Australian hipsters who wouldn't watch it anyway, for whom my low rating is basically a confirmation of the bias they already bring into it? 

It's like when someone is behaving like a jackass on the road, and when you finally pass them, you can't resist the urge to look over and see who it was. This is almost always a fraught activity. You are effectively trying to figure out if the driving confirms some sort of pre-existing bias in yourself. The only time it wouldn't confirm that is if the person in the other car looked exactly like you.

I don't watch Madea movies to confirm biases, either my own or anyone else's. But I'm not in the habit of censoring myself either.

Stay tuned to see if this pops up in my reviews to the right. This could be a thorny one. 

Unperrying a Tyler Perry movie

 
Peeples is the Tyler Perry movie Tyler Perry wants me to see.

Me, a white guy who is almost 40.

That's the only conclusion I can draw from the utter absence of the man's name from the advertising, especially when Perry's name is usually all over the advertisements for his movies. In fact, normally Peeples would be called Tyler Perry's Peeples, wouldn't it?

Yet here, his name is visible only in the most modest of skinny movie poster fonts above the title, reading "Tyler Perry Presents" -- though only if you squint real hard to read it.

Okay, okay, Perry isn't even the director here. The writer-director is a woman named Tina Gordon Chism. Turns out she also wrote ATL and Drumline, both of which I enjoyed quite a bit.

Usually, though, whatever Perry's involvement was, it would be played up. If he attended a test screening, they would somehow work that into the movie's advertising campaign.

However, this movie is clearly not directed at Perry's usual audience.

Want to know our first indication of that fact?

Craig Robinson.

Now, no one's calling Craig Robinson an Uncle Tom, or less legitimately black than any one else in any way. However, he has made a career thus far of being the token black dude in movies and TV shows starring mostly whites, and aimed at that same audience. He's been conspicuously absent from the African-American ensemble movies that are Perry's bread and butter.

Let's look at how most of us first became aware of him: The Office. He's played Darryl Philbin -- or really just "Darryl," because they use his last name so rarely that I had to look it up on IMDB just now to figure out what it was. He was originally a surly member of the warehouse staff before being promoted to the white collar (note that) area of the building to give the show more color. He's a valued member of the ensemble and one of the show's best characters, not merely an instance of tokenism. However, you can't escape the fact that he's being offered to us as a touch of soul that legitimizes all the white folks.

His relationship with the Judd Apatow posse has kept getting him roles that more or less recreate that dynamic. He appeared in Knocked Up. He appeared in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. He appeared in Pineapple Express and Zach and Miri Make a Porno. He's also the only black guy in this summer's This is the End. If Seth Rogen or Paul Rudd or John C. Reilly has made a movie, he's been in it.

So my first reaction upon seeing him in a movie with two other black leads (David Alan Grier and Kerry Washington) was "Craig Robinson's in ... a black movie?"

Then again, Grier and Washington also have plenty of crossover appeal. Sure, Grier became known to us as a member of a primarily black comedic troupe (In Living Color), but he's skewed a bit more white in his choices ever since then. He even appeared in one of the most conservative-leaning films of the last five years in An American Carol, which relentlessly skewered Michael Moore and liberalism. Washington has a more diverse career -- she's worked with Perry previously (For Colored Girls), as well as Spike Lee (She Hate Me) and Chris Rock (I Think I Love My Wife) -- but she may be most famous to us as having appeared in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. (Though I guess Quentin does have a fair amount of soul for a white guy.)

This post is by no means intended as a test for these people to "prove how black they are," but I do think these were probably conscious casting choices, so the movie would not appear to be designed exclusively for its black audiences.

Will we see that small box office uptick this weekend, the result of a few extra white viewers?

That's hard to say. The Great Gatsby is also opening, and with a glamorized vision of the 1920s and Leonardo DiCaprio -- not to mention 3D -- it's right in white people's wheelhouses. (Including this white guy, who's been waiting for this movie for over a year and will surely try to schedule it for early next week.)

Jurnee Smollett's pregnant lip

It seems at least somewhat unlikely that Jurneee Smollett (now Jurnee Smollett-Bell) actually posed for this photo.

But the pregnant lip in question is supposed to belong to her character, a marriage counselor considering infidelity, who's the main character in Tyler Perry's Temptation (or Tyler Perry's Temptation -- I go back and forth about whether his name is actually part of the titles of his movies).

And damn if it isn't a near perfect single-image encapsulation of repressed desire.

The lip is, as I've suggested, damn near pregnant with desire, a desire that can't quite manifest. You could say it's the lips, but it's really that lower lip that's bulging, that's nearly dripping with lust. The teeth are biting back that lust as a basically futile effort to keep it from birthing into existence.

On the one hand, you could look at this poster and dismiss it as carrying the trappings of soft core eroticism. The poster's deep reds, and especially that title font, would support your claim. But that would be unjust. This poster is doing something that we rarely see posters do anymore. It's telling you what the story is about through a close-up of a small detail -- not through generic pictures of the two stars looking longingly at each other.

In that sense, I suppose it's good that Jurnee Smollett and the object of her lust, an actor named Robbie Jones, are not bigger stars, because then that might have been how they composed the poster. This way is much better.

Really, every time I see this poster, I'm drawn into it, and I look at it as long as I can. (So I'm glad I'm mostly seeing it on billboards, when the momentum of my car keeps me from just staring at it forever.)

The reasons are probably not that surprising. Lips have long been among the most sensual of body parts, and by themselves they can make a statement that other body parts can't. The Rolling Stones are just one entity that has used the iconic power of lips to help create and expand a brand.

Whether Temptations: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (that's the full title, meaning that Perry's name definitely should not be affixed to the front) will attain any kind of iconic status as a result of this poster remains to be seen, but since Perry's movies come out at a pace of two per year, it doesn't seem likely.

However, it is likely that I will see this movie on video, since I've been seeing about half of Perry's films for the past couple years. Not to mention the fact that I do like Smollett, who will probably smolder here, to make an obvious play on her name.

This movie also has a chance to exceed the usual audience for a Perry movie for one interesting reason: It contains at least one full scene in which Kim Kardashian acts. The trailers will naturally play up her involvement, because she continues to fascinate despite ample evidence that she probably shouldn't. But from the scenes of her in the trailer I saw, it's not clear whether she's actually in more than one scene.

And speaking of pregnancies (real or metaphorical), Kardashian probably can't wait to see this movie hit theaters as a reminder of what she looked like before the tabloids started jumping down her throat for gaining too much weight during her pregnancy.

So it'll be Smollett's pregnant lip vs. Kardashian's pregnant booty. 

Yes, that Tyler Perry

I'm thinking there's a reason this poster features a huge silhouette of a recognizable Matthew Fox looming over a smaller, unrecognizable figure who appears to be African-American.

It's probably because Summit Entertainment has no idea how to market the latest Tyler Perry movie, releasing tomorrow.

Yes, that Tyler Perry.

What? Madea is going to start tracking down serial killers now?

Not exactly. In fact, Alex Cross is not even a comedic take on the detective thriller. From the trailers, it seems to be a deathly serious continuation of the on-screen adventures of the title character from James Patterson's series of novels, who first appeared in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider.

Then he was played by Morgan Freeman. Now he's played by a man who gained most of his fame doing pratfalls in drag.

And to be honest, I think it looks kind of awesome.

Here's that trailer if you want to judge for yourself:



He looks totally equal to the task, doesn't he? Serious and imposing and ready/able to kick some ass.

With the caveat that I don't see commercials as much as I did five years ago, I haven't seen this trailer anywhere except online, when someone specifically directed me to it months ago. In fact, the only way I even knew it was opening tomorrow was that I happened to see it leading the list of opening movies on IMDB.

Which tells me that yeah, Summit is not really sure what to do with Tyler Perry as an action hero.

It should be a no brainer. Perry's movies make money hand over fist with the target demographic, African Americans. And African Americans certainly like action movies. Plus, Alex Cross has the rare opportunity to go way beyond Perry's usual demographic and get a large stake of the white audience.

And perhaps that really gets at Summit's hesitation in this ad campaign. It's not that they think that Perry's Madea audience won't show; it's that they worry the white audience won't show if they know it stars Madea.

If I get out to the theater this weekend, I will prove them wrong. That is, if I don't see Argo. And I really need to see Argo.

Speaking of playing against type ... it's interesting that someone finally realized Matthew Fox might make a good bad guy. Cast as a hero throughout his career, Fox has always had that way of looking so intensely, bitterly indignant when he's pissed off. The "I can't believe you're suggesting that" expression is one Fox has mastered. It's a pretty short road to go from put-upon hero to psycho pushed past the breaking point, and it looks like Fox may have walked that road successfully in Alex Cross.

As for Perry, it'll be interesting to see if this is the beginning of a full crossover career for him. Perhaps he thinks he's done all there is to do in his corner of the cinematic universe, albeit a massively successful corner. If your ambition is to be one of the biggest stars in the world, you have to make people start seeing you as someone other than a gun-toting grandma.

So Alex Cross might be an interesting crossroads for Perry ... so to speak.

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.