INTO THE UNKNOWN: WELCOME TO THE TERRYDOME

Enjoy the funniest, most self-aware part of this movie: the poster.

A friend of mine recently told me about how she had never seen a Harry Potter movie (or read the books), but wound up seeing the latest installment while visiting home this Thanksgiving. We discussed how confusing, boring, and ridiculous a movie series can seem when you see them out of the context from the rest. Hearing the audience react with gasps and laughter at a characters slightest movement sounds over-the-top to the unconverted.

This is how I walked into Tyler Perry Presents: Madea's Big Happy Family, a total noob. Wanting to know what Ty-P's cottage industry was all about. I walked away, still unconverted. But let me back up, and tell you everything I knew about Tyler Perry before I walked into MBHF:

-Tyler Perry is a one-man entertainment branding kingpin for largely ignored black conservative moviegoers. I read a profile piece in the New Yorker on Perry (like a true god-fearing white person), who made Perry out to be a workaholic media-producing machine, like one of those "Write Your Movie In A Week" seminars programmed into a robot. He wakes up, goes to the gym, pounds out fifteen script pages, attends a meeting about his TV shows, shoots his current movie from 1 o'clock to 8 o'clock, gets dinner, and goes to bed, plugged into his dream stenographer, typing out his unconscious to be reviewed for possible script fodder.

-The TV show House of Payne has characters from the Medea universe in the episodes, and they will refer to Medea, although she does not actually appear on the show, like some weird canonical Marvel comic spin-off .

-Medea is played by Perry in drag, and pronounces certain words like Ludacris. ("Thank yer")

It was with this basically clean slate that I walked into the theater. I was hoping to either 1) Be charmed by the cast and story, and go away being happy that people where into something positive, or 2) have it be wildly awful, which is a fun thing to write a review of! What I got instead was joltingly constructed, yet boring tug of war between turgid drama and broad comedy. It was like watching someone changing channels between a filmed Mary Worth comic and a community theater putting on an episode of Good Times.

Here is how I imagine the skeletal run-down of Tyler Perry's script:

CASTING NOTES:

Any male under 45: Noble, well spoken, varying degrees of domination under shrewish women, varying degrees of goatees.

Any female 18-45: Shrill, bossy, shrewish, great hair.

Any female 45-65: Angelic.

Any female under 18: Ho.

Any cast member over 45 dressed up to be 85: Cartoon character.

Madea: T.D. Jakes in drag, re-enacting his favorite scenes from Falling Down.

(PRODUCTION NOTE: DO NOT USE MORE THAN TWO CAMERAS TO COVER EACH SCENE. CAMERAS COST MONEY, AND TRICKY, ARTSY EFFECTS LIKE "PANNING" OR "MOVEMENT" TAKE AWAY VALUABLE "MEET THE BROWNS" STORY SESSION TIME)

EXT: A HUGE, BEAUTIFUL HOUSE.

INT: A HUGE, BEAUTIFUL LIVING ROOM or DINING ROOM

A woman is yelling at a man. The woman is unaware of how terrible and hollow her life has become, a problem that would go away if the man would just tell her to sit down, shut up, and raise their children right. Scene should end when the man says something like: "At least one of us does." Then the man walks out. The woman rolls her eyes OR a tear rolls down her face, and is hastily wiped away.

EXT: A HUGE, BEAUTIFUL HOUSE.

INT: A HUGE, BEAUTIFUL LIVING ROOM or DINING ROOM

40-something actors made up with fright wigs and stage make-up bug their eyes out, fall down and berate each other in a comical manner. Repeat the same jokes two or three times in a row, so if people were laughing too hard they can properly hear the line.

(REPEAT PATTERN FOR ONE HOUR TWENTY MINUTES)

The living saint of a mother dies of cancer. (Note from ZD: This is NOT a spoiler. We are told from literally the first second of film that she is going to die of cancer. It is the gun introduced in the first act that will die of cancer in the third act. The mom spends most of the film trying to tell her family that she has cancer at a family dinner, but they always interrupt her by fighting with each other. You would think that maybe she could just yell over THEM: "Hey, idiots, I have CANCER", and that would certainly shut them up, and end a lot of in-fighting. Or maybe she could just call them, individually, on the phone. She really feels this is the perfect way to tell her family about her terminal illness, I guess! When this woman gets an idea in her head, she's like a dog with an old sock, just won't let go!)

EXT: A HUGE, BEAUTIFUL HOUSE.

INT: A HUGE, BEAUTIFUL DINING ROOM, FOLLOWED BY A LIVING ROOM

Medea calls everyone into the dining room, like the end of a murder mystery. But instead of solving a mystery, she solves everyone's problems! If they are a woman, she tells them to shut up. If they're a man, she tells them to "be the man". If they are a child, she beats them with her fists.

(PRODUCTION NOTE: THE SECOND AFTER MEDEA SOLVES EVERYONE'S LIFE, TURN THE CAMERAS OFF. CAMERAS COST MONEY!)

Roll the blooper reel, where Perry looks super bored with it all.

Thank Yer!