3/28, regarding Tyler Perry

He has a savvy business model, I've got to hand it to him. And I guess a good message, from some people's perspectives. I'm a liberal agnostic leaning towards atheism, so I don't really get off on the core message he's going for, but he seems genuine enough about it that I'm not going to hold it against him any more than I hate Dirty Harry for being sorta right-wing. And I love Dirty Harry.

The problem is simply that his movies are bad. They're only slightly worse than most Hollywood "comedies with a heart," in that the shifts from lowbrow humor to sappy melodrama are more awkward and forced. But that's pretty bad, for one of the most prolific financially successful filmmakers working a the moment (especially for somebody who mostly works outside the Hollywood establishment). He manages to maintain a huge, devoted audience by reiterating more or less the same mediocre formula time after time, like Adam Sandler with a clumsily-handled evangelical subtext. It is strange to me that he's one of the handful of well-known black filmmakers out there, and probably the only one who's become a consistently lucrative Name Brand.

I just don't understand how somebody so inadequate as a filmmaker--his character development is cliche as hell when it exists at all, his plots are always generic and formulaic, his direction is what you expect when you think of plays being turned into films, his acting is too broad to work well on screen--can be so successful. I guess he's just an exploitation filmmaker like Russ Meyer or Herschell Gordon Lewis, but offering cheap sentiment instead of sex or gore. Either way he's artlessly delivering a commodity he knows his audience will buy over and over again. Maybe that makes him admirable as a businessman. Whatever. But as a filmmaker? Since I am unfortunately the sort of person who lives in a bubble with the music and movies I like--only acknowledging the world at large when I have to--I have trouble feeling any sort of respect for this kind of unabashed hackwork.