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| Director
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Tyler Perry
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| Starring
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Tyler Perry, Blair Underwood,
Lynn Whitfield |
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| The plot of
Madea's Family Reunion |
While planning her family reunion, a pistol-packing
grandma (Perry) must contend with the other dramas
on her plate, including the runaway who has been
placed under her care, and her love-troubled nieces. |
Madea's
Family Reunion Movie Review
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Review by Adam
Nayman:
Madea's Family Reunion
is a movie to angry up the blood. It condemns spousal
abuse, but plays child abuse for laughs. It protests
the objectification of women while leering for a small
eternity at a nubile girl's posterior. It has the gall
to lecture the audience about dignity and respect even
as it panders to every low impulse imaginable.Such tactics
have made writer-director-star Tyler Perry a rich man.
His similarly risible Diary of a Mad Black Woman was
a surprise hit last year. Both films revolve around
the character of Madea, a domineering senior played
by Perry in drag. She's a homily-dispensing machine
whose solution is to cluck, gesture broadly and counsel
violence. Consider, please, the implications of a male
writer-director who must make himself ridiculous in
order to portray a feminist viewpoint. The plot involves
Madea helping her niece (Rochelle Aytes) to break free
from her violent fiancé (Blair Underwood), while
also planning the titular reunion..more..
Review By Travis Mackenzie Hoover:
Tyler Perry must be stopped. The multitasking director/writer/performer
ranks up there as the most hypocritical, least aesthetic
filmmaker in America today. He’s a man who has
no compunction about leering at half-clad women then
lecturing that they shouldn’t dress that way,
or damning the practice of spousal abuse while extolling
the virtues of child abuse.But that’s the way
of Madea’s Family Reunion, in which Perry’s
titular drag creation offers dubious advice, while a
pair of sisters are torn apart by their greedy mother
and her desire to push one into marriage with an abusive
investment banker. Oh, and there’s a romance between
a sister and a hunky Christian bus driver that culminates
in a song called “The Courage to be Loved.”The
film is fascinated by the very things it tries to decry;
Madea is countered by her husband Joe (Perry again),
who says all of the grotesquely misogynist things so
as to balance the pseudo-feminist caterwauling of Madea.
And the film never recovers from the uncertainty clouding
what the hell it’s trying to say.Of course, it
might help if Perry knew how to write dialogue or shoot
a scene attractively, but he’s completely inept
on both counts, meaning there’s no escape from
the thesis-statement speechifying and ludicrous logic
jumps. You start by snickering and by the end you’re
crawling out of your skin; the film’s horrible
exploitation of various forms of abuse and casual espousal
of atrocious behaviour sit rather badly with the final
Cicely Tyson-Maya Angelou tag team speech..More..
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