D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Reviews of Military Intelligence and You!, Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, and Shutter

By attempting to comment on our current foreign adventures while ridiculing an aspect of past ones, Military Intelligence and You! (2.5* in limited release locally at the E St. Cinema) is a movie possessed with, at best, charms as modest as its minimal running time.

Writer-director Dale Kutzera has cut together new footage with World War II-era army training films (most notably Resisting Enemy Interrogation—a rather notorious one that shows up on Turner Classics every so often) to make a parody pastiche with too few laughs spread over its barely feature-length running time. Or maybe it is just too difficult to see the humor by harkening back to the time when the United States was the country that did not torture prisoners, stage pre-emptive invasions of other countries, and create propaganda campaigns based on a constantly shifting series of lies.

A narrator makes flailing attempts to connect the two main stories while most of the newly-filmed dialogue apes the typical canned chatter that passed for the witty banter and significant writing during Hollywood’s golden age. But the total effect of the ham-fisted commentary on our current endless war is rarely more than cloddish. While preaching the truth to the choir, one could use more wit.

At least the movie is only 78 minutes long. Unfortunately that is about 50 minutes longer than the filmmaker’s wit and the material can sustain… which leads us to the strange case of Tyler Perry.

The central question begged by the film career of Tyler Perry is, “does a minstrel show become less offensive if it uses black actors instead of white ones in black face?”

Perry started out as a playwright working the “chitlin’ circuit” with a series of plays reputed to be of the “grandma on the couch” genre in which comedy-spiced melodramas play out with young people driving the plot and an elder providing commentary and a third-act solution—usually involving a trip to church. The touring productions were filmed and sold on video and then are redone as regular movies often with Mr. Perry acting, writing, directing, and producing a series of movies remarkable only for how much better the cast is than the material. Mr. Perry is also responsible for a television series, House of Payne, generously termed unwatchable. Still, he deserves points for honesty if not spelling.

The latest of Mr. Perry’s morality tales, Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (2* in nationwide release) stars Angela Bassett as Brenda, a Chicago single mom stretched to the limit and beyond by her three kids, no support from any of the “baby daddies,” and the sudden closing of the factory where she works. A temporary stay comes in the form on an invite to the funeral of the father she never knew. Georgia-bound bus tickets allow her and the brood to meet the Browns, a screechy bunch of caterwauling clichés described politely as country clowns, jealous cousins, and spiteful gossips… in other words, typical extended family.

In predictable Perry fashion, troubles mount beyond the point of endurance (and believability) and are dismissed with unlikely ease, lectures are delivered, sensible partners are found for the virtuously unmated, evildoers are humiliated, and we have just enough time for a group hug before the credits roll. One of the clumsier subplots involves Brenda’s eldest, a budding high school basketball star. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect much knowledge of the way professional sports work from someone whose greatest artistic contributions have been made wearing women’s clothes, but perhaps Mr. Perry could have picked up a copy of Sports Illustrated or else had the lad being sought by the fashion institute. In a pinch he might have asked male lead Rick Fox, formerly of the National Basketball Association and here delivering a likeable performance as the “good man.”

Mr. Perry’s running character, Madea (no comment on classical literature, just that “charming” Southern linguistic corruption of “my dear”), makes a cameo to set up his next feature release. Armed (sometimes literally) with a garish wardrobe, wig, blowsy manner, and line delivery set on permanent shriek, I have long suspected that there seems to be something else going on with Mr. Perry’s transvestism. One cannot help but wonder that if our society had a more welcoming and embracing view towards alternative lifestyles, Mr. Perry could work out his fetishes on his own rather than inflicting them on audiences.

With more generous budgets that success has gained him, Mr. Perry is able to make his movies look increasingly better and certainly experience has made him a more fluid filmmaker. However, the writing has evolved not at all. His inadequacies as a writer without nuance or cleverness whose only laughs are of the burlesque variety seem destined to never change. Possibly he just does not have it in him to exceed the merely formulaic. Or perhaps with no financial incentive to risk change, TP just lacks faith that his loyal audiences would not follow him if he wrote something for the three-digit IQ set.

And while we are on the subject of things I do not get, there is the new release Shutter, a remake of a Thai film with an American cast, Tokyo setting, and cast and crew with assorted credits from The Grudge series. Since I find Asian horror movies only slightly less insufferable than the average American one, I certainly find myself unable to appreciate. This Ring cycle of manga to screenplay to Asian production to American remake (with graphic novelization tie-in has quickly become one of the least imaginative and unrewarding sub-genres since the cookie-cutter slasher movies hit theaters 30 years ago.

Newlywed couple Jane (Rachel Taylor) and Ben (Joshua Jackson) barely has time to conclude their New York City nuptials before he starts his new job in Tokyo as an advertising photographer. While driving one night, Jane is surprised by a girl suddenly standing in the road. She hits her and then a tree, but the police can find on trace of the body. And all their photographs have development flaws (dude, go digital), a particular problem for a photographer trying to impress the new bosses. Apparitions continue and it quickly (well maybe not quickly) becomes apparent that the couple has a stalker from beyond the grave. Or could it be something else?

Part of my problem may be ghosts in general. Whiny bastards imposing themselves in a world that no longer wants them, they think just because they have all the time in the world that they can just waste the time of the living instead of just delivering their message and buggering the hell off. If the afterlife consists of hanging around a party long after everyone wants you to leave, you can count me out.

Of course maybe that is expecting too much from someone who is literally brain dead. However, that alone does make ghosts the most appropriate audience for movies like Shutter.