When a Shy White Gay Kid Sees His First Tyler Perry Movie...

Time for full disclosure, there's no secrets here.  I've never seen a Tyler Perry movie before.  Not that I was purposely avoiding the career of the multi-hynenate wunderkind, what with his endless collection of titles that come stampeding into multiplexes several times a year.  Sure I've read articles and reviews- some positive, mostly negative, but that has nothing to do with it-- I freely admit I see tons of trashy movies every year, and while I fully disclose that I'm not likely the ideal demographic for Mr. Perry's output...I would like to think I give everything a chance, at the very least.  Well, I did see For Colored Girls (2010), the filmmakers big flourish outside his wheelhouse, but that's not exactly a Tyler Perry film, it was a cluttered, strangely alluring adaptation of Ntozake Shange's play.  Oooh and I did see Precious of course, but he merely produced the Lee Daniels melodrama.  So I began my Tyler Perry proper experience with his latest, succinctly titled gem Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, and how...

The cherry popped experience is over, but I'm afraid there's still some collateral damage.  Temptation on the outset tells the simple tale of a young woman named Judith (Jurnee Smollett-Bell, an arresting and natural performer), a bright, educated and attractive woman who aspires to be a marriage counselor.  She met her one and only-- the handsome, if not entirely ambitious Brice (Lance Gross)-- as a child; they met adorably so, while in church in their Deep South middle of nowhere town.  In young adulthood, Judith is floundering as an in-house therapist for a high end dating service owned by Janice (Vanessa Williams, displaying a random but audience awakening Pepe Le Pew accent) whilst dreaming of starting her own practice.  As a curio or something or other, Judith is pestered by her lack of wardrobe style by workmate Kim Kardashian, whose job is that of office tart, I presume.  Trouble saunters in the office one day when Harley (Robbie Jones), a social media billionaire dude enters the picture with intentions of investing in the company.  However, it becomes obvious within mere flashes he's more interested in investing in Judith...

The temptation is, whether Judith will give up her stable (if boring) marriage and good old Christian values and succumb to Harley and all his passionate something or other he feels he would add to her life.  Temptation is a clumsily melodramatic soap opera that would be derided as disposable trash if it weren't quite so offensive, ugly and judgmental.  To whom you might ask?  Well I suppose an argument could be made on behalf of everyone with a pulse, but we should start with Judith herself.  She's begins a seemingly happily married woman, but unsettled by a job she isn't passionate about and a marriage that's becoming more than a little stale-- he's even forgotten her own birthday two years running now!  She begins a relationship with this hotshot dude, whose clearly full of b.s., but also hot and good in bed.  The problem is Temptation isn't in an way a meaningful or honest exploration of fidelity-- it's a condemnation of it, but furthermore a condemnation of a bright woman trying to find happiness, or even pursue options.  Judith does a bad thing, but Perry tortures her for it, first by a string of over-the-top behavior, and then further ridicules her when the consequences outweigh the crime.  An affair doesn't lead to drug abuse or necessitate an STD scare.  I ask, was it because Judith was driven...was that her crime?

The feat de resistance comes through in a demeaning, sermonizing and outwardly offensive sequence in which Mr. Perry's nearly literally depicts Hell.  Once Judith is deemed practically in need of an exorcism by her minister mother Sarah (Ella Joyce), she enters a hellion, nearly Sodom and Gomorrah-like party hosted by Harley.  There might as well be literal hellfire, what with the lurid setting and the alcoholism...and the drug use...and the well dressed men conversing casually with other well dressed men...good grief!  I may be a novice to Mr. Perry's oeuvre but I felt I wasn't welcomed from the start.  The flat scenes, limp pacing and distracting establishing shots (shot oddly toward the end of the film) prove faulty filmmaking, the depressing, reductive and insulting sexual politics at play still need some explaining.  D-    

Room 237

Obsessing about movies is healthy.  I hope so at the very least.  But then there are some who take this natural and quite healthy obsession into uncharted territories.  Room 237, a playfully insane rumination of the hidden codes and agendas of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, goes well and above the realm of uncharted obsessiveness.  It's easy to get hooked, especially coupled with the sparsest of backstory of the famed auteur and his storied reputation.  Kubrick was a stylist, innovator and a meticulous showman whose exacting visual prowess pervades all of his work-- there could never for once be something in his films that was a mistake, right?  And on the surface of things, The Shining was his most linear work-- an adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller starring Jack Nicholson-- made and financed with the pretense of mainstream accessibility a few years after Kubrick threw everything to the wall for the ambitious, if lowly attended, period drama Barry Lyndon.  One piece of commentary that Room 237 articulates with clarity and verve is a sense that perhaps Kubrick was drained, or furthermore, even bored with filmmaking as he approached The Shining, and he just wanted to make the whole thing more interesting for himself.  And theories abound as to how we are supposed to read the whole damn thing.

It's interesting to note that The Shining, now regarded as a modern horror classic, received very mixed. if not down right, bad notes upon its release-- it even received two Razzie Nominations in their inaugural year including one for, shutter to think, Worst Director.  The puzzle and mystery of The Shining, an obsessive-worthy film if ever there was one, is that on most respects, the film isn't exactly scary, but an endlessly fascinating and utterly loopy labyrinth of a picture that twists itself in so many directions that had it not been so endlessly fascinating, likely would have completely fallen astray.  Stephen King was famously not pleased with the adaptation, which fair to say shares only the barest backbone of the novel.  Room 237 as a documentary is intended mostly as a lark, I assume.  Director Rodney Ascher assembles a rotation of talking heads who decipher and read the hidden clues and meanings of the film, but those heads are never seen.  It's all voice-over as segments of The Shining are played (usually ultra-slow, frame by frame); it plays like a warped and thoroughly entertaining, conspiracy theory-laden special episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  It doesn't much matter that the commentators themselves feel mostly anonymous, the film powerfully plays to a cinema-obsessed cult of geeks and weirdos whose impression is left as nerds freeze framing their well worn VCR cassettes in their parents basements.

What's fascinating is what they come up with.  Kubrick, allegedly, took a great interest in the visual cues of suggestion that were commonly used by advertisers in the late seventies and early eighties, which may have signaled playful gags and setups of subliminal messaging.  Something like this certainly feels valid when you consider the mastery filmmaker at work, often for years at a time.  Every motif, hung piece of art work, color scheme, character movement must have been exactly choreographed.  Right on...I'm on board that Stuart Ullman walks in front of his desk to greet Jack Torrance and an exactly positioned paper weight on his desk gives the impression that he has a hard-on.  Well played.  The trick and thrill and allure of Room 237 is the way it sucks you in on the onset, just as the madness ups the ante.

Perhaps The Shining really was a grand metaphor for the genocide of the Native Americans, or a pointed commentary of the Holocaust (a subject that Kubrick apparently wanted to tackle as a subject for a film dead-on, but never did.)  Or best of all, and this where the full-tilt warped mechanics of Room 237 go all in, is the theory that The Shining was Kubrick's apologia for staging the moon landing.  It's the sort of conspiracy theorist gone batshit, aha moment that makes for grand entertainment.  The trick and further allure of Room 237 is that the arguments are compelling and crazy enough that you turn your head and buy into it, just for the quick quivering moment you might start to think...could this all really be true?

Of course, rational sense comes back shortly thereafter, but that's it's trick, it's odd Kubrickian Da Vinci Code power-- an idea transfixing and out-of-this-world enough that it can tease your senses into accepting it as reality.  Some of the commentators in Room 237 may well be certifiable, but that it's so easy to accept their seductive theories makes a case in the hopeful evolved status of film geekdom.  For one thing that is an absolute certain after an experience like Room 237-- The Shining is a nutty movie...it makes no sense and it is almost a necessity to bring whatever you would like to the table as there isn't quite a wrong answer.  And while many of its peculiarities may well be simple continuity errors, or such mundane things like that, what would be the fun in that.  Room 237 is a nuthouse, funhouse celebration of cinema, and obsessive-worthy in its own right.  A

Room 237 is currently playing in New York and will expand throughout the coming weeks.  It is also available on VOD and iTunes.     

The Best Part of Oz: The Great & Powerful

It may be a little late, but I've saved you a few bucks...here's the best part of Oz: The Great & Powerful.  A magical and beautifully put together black and white title sequence that has all the spark, the fire, brains and courage that the film sadly does not.

Admission

In the featherweight comic drama Admission, Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University.  A steadfast, intelligent, independent and motherless woman who is a part of the team of officials you decide the fates of young men and women in hopes of entering higher education at one of the most illustrious campuses this country has to offer.  Portia, a stickler for details and perhaps a tad anal retentive, is still in the very traditional sense a Tina Fey role, what with her warmly infused sense of irony, awkward stumbling of well versed words and hidden radiance and hotness under her conservative attire.  Fey radiates a simultaneous intelligence and exasperation that's ever gracious and nearly always welcome.  It's somewhat unfortunate that Admission, directed by Paul Weitz, inhabits Fey by trying to keep Portia down so much of the time.  In the sense that a strong independent and successfully career-minded woman, even in the finicky sociopolitical climate of 2013, still must be burdened and bridled by the archaic standard of having it all.  On the onset Admission is not too much unlike a star vehicle that Katharine Hepburn might have played many moons ago-- that of a savvy and sharp woman who must be brought down a few pegs in the nature of seeming "womanly" and thus, appealing.

It's a shame because Fey is absolutely appealing, whether lampooning Sarah Palin or shading the absurdities of singleton Liz Lemon, and furthermore she is appealing here, adroitly shading Portia with a reserve fitted around a freak flag desperate to shine through.  Admission gives Fey the most "dramatic" part she's ever played, perhaps suggesting, albeit subtly, that if that was a direction she wanted to turn to, Fey, the actor not the comic, might rise to that occasion someday.  Weitz and screenwriter Karen Croner (adapting the novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz) sod the edges of that drama in favor of a over-saturated film, one that's stuffed a bit too much, and nourished a bit too little.  The broader comic moments hit bigger, namely because the cast includes some of the brightest actors working, all of whom have a knowing sense on how to sell the jokes and gags no matter what.  For the reason that Admission tries to be too much, it takes away the slight pleasures that bring the whole film to a soft landing to begin with.

Firstly, it's presented as a lightly satiric jab at the admission process itself, an anarchic selection of pedigree, academics and social awareness.  It's a pageant that Portia thrives on, even as she slinks by during campus tours, and stridently advices would-be candidates to just, "be themselves."  There's even some friendly caddishness backstage as dueling admission officers Portia and Corinne (played by a wonderful, if under-utilized Gloria Reuben) compete for the affections of boss Clarence (Wallace Shawn) in the hopes of usurping his job.  A novel and refreshing take on false sisterhood in the attempts of rising above advances Admission a smidgeon, if only the parting shots.  This however is but lowest of priorities as the gradually convoluted television-ready plot contrivances start to top one another.

Secondly, the film is a romantic comedy.  This becomes apparent when Good Samaritan John Pressman (Paul Rudd) makes a plea to Portia to visit his progressive, unorthodox school in the hopes of finding Princetonian potential in one of his prodigal soon-to-be graduates-- a shaggy, haired awkwardly groomed book worm named Jeremiah (Nat Wolff.)  From the start of the meet-cute shenanigans of the pleasingly matched Fey and Rudd, it seems a given that the two will give it a go, especially since John is a noble, hippie who circulates the globe healing those in need; he even adopted a young Ugandan boy.

But first a bit of feminine rampaging must occur as Portia is involved with the selfish lout of an English professor (played to the hilt by Michael Sheen, who, by the way, once played an ill-fitted suitor to Liz Lemon)-- the film gets a lot better once he's cleared away, and Portia realizes both her freak flag and becomes more "womanly." Admission has a strange view of it's leading lady, but again it must be stressed that even the fickle sexual politicizing are soothed by Fey, and especially more so by the entrance of her mother, Susannah, a spirited feminist and novelist played by a luminous and stingingly insightful Lily Tomlin.  One almost wishes that Weitz had diverged from the text completely and just ran off with the movie as a mother-daughter project for Tina Fey and Lily Tomlin.  Their scenes have a bite, a fire and a spark that's too unsteady for the easy-listening refinement that Admission is going for.

I bring up Susannah because the third prong of Admission is that of motherhood.  The twist of the film-- not so much because it's revealed in the trailer for gosh darnit, and well, not a particularly novel twist in its own right-- is that Jeremiah, the odd young man with Ivy league potential, if not breeding, may or may not be the child that Portia gave up for adoption sixteen years prior.  And while this gesture, like all of the rest is all pleasant in going down, there is a big strike for the first and the third plot threads of Admission that asks, in the films most dramatic scene, if a hard broiled woman like Portia would vouch for the merits of admission to a case like Jeremiah without the hint of parentage?  It's not the most compelling question, nor a particularly strong reason to see a film like Admission, but there's a sense that the filmmakers were perhaps a little too afraid of a really strong woman to deal with as reason alone.  C+ 

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: Cannes Poster