Um, first of all, I LOVE Angela Bassett. She is so pretty. Did you
guys know she’s 49 years old!? HYAH!!! It’s true! If Angela Bassett had
any work done (which she must have, right? have you seen her
29-year-old face?), then her plastic surgeon is the best plastic
surgeon in the history of cutting people’s faces apart and then
putting them back together again only better. I would pay that dude big
bucks to make me a new face, and I’m already totally satisfied
with my regular face! But seriously. (Did you know she’s married to
Courtney B. Vance? And they coauthored a book called Friends: A Love
Story? ADORABLESVILLE.)
In Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns—based, weakly and
obviously, on Perry’s stage play of the same name—Bassett plays
Brenda, a single mom just gettin’ by in the projects of Chicago.
Perry packs the clichés in tight—so tight that it’s
alarming. Brenda was forced to drop out of school and get a series of
dead-end jobs just to make ends meet (“I ended up having to drop out of
school, working a bunch of dead-end jobs just to make ends meet!”).
Brenda gets the mail: “These ain’t nothin’ but bills!” Her best friend
is a sassy Latina named Cheryl (“Cheryl, why are you so crazy?” “Ay, mami! Because eet’s FUN, because I LAAIK EET!”), and her son is a
basketball star tempted by the old “dope game” (“Mom, I’m not trying to
die to get to heaven—I want mine here on earth!”). The pair is
wooed by a mysterious basketball recruiter, in the form of Rick Fox’s
zombie eyes and miniature beard.
When Brenda gets a letter inviting her to visit the family of her
estranged late father, it’s off to Georgia, where the hayseeds are
shrill and fat: “Chicago! That’s where them big buildings is, ain’t
it?” And, thank god, fucking hilarious. How can Tyler Perry be so
good and so unforgivably TERRIBLE at the same time? The comic
scenes—wherein the Browns, especially Leroy Brown (David Mann, my
FAVORITE) and Vera (Jenifer Lewis) are free to scold and shriek and get
the vapors—are a brilliant, manic mess. And then, just like that,
Perry gives us this bullshit: “If some of these fathers don’t take care
of these babies then us single mothers gotta stick together.” Wow. I
guess I never thought about it like that before.
There’s something satisfying about a balls-out melodrama, and
something comforting in hearing simple stories told and retold. But
that’s not what this is. This is just shitty. This is Tyler
Perry’s Send Me Your Cashdollars. This is Tyler Perry’s
America’s Cashdollars, Meet the Inside of Tyler Perry’s Golden Money
Clip. Bullshit. 
