Madea's Family Reunion (2006)

Now, if you see the case for this, it reads comedy 100%, it sounds like it's going to be a whacky fun romp. It is not. This movie is a drama, first and foremost. It does not advertise itself as such, if it had, I probably would never have watched it. But it's not even a good drama. And for a movie titled "Madea's Family reunion", it really doesn't show much of that reunion. It takes up about five minutes of the whole two hour movie. The comedy is not funny. It is forced. Some of it is juvenile. There are distasteful fart jokes in the middle of this dramatic web of family troubles.This movie contains abuse by a man, condoned by the mother of the victim, but then plays beating a child for laughs. This movie contains a woman in fear of a relationship with a man because of a very traumatic past experience her mother put her through, her horrible mother who does not seem to get any punishment in the end. There are many unnecessary characters and subplots, and Madea, the title character, is hardly even in the movie. Then it just decends into some kind of cliched romance. People sing at one point for some reason? It gets a bit muddy. I would not reccommend it.

I LOVE Tylor Perry's make on his movies, what he tries to gift humanity with morality and values, starting at the home front where families deal with issues TOGETHER, through care and LOVE. It conveys the deeper message that we don't have to love a person 100% (perfect) . If they're a bit messed up and we can only love the 40% good they give, then that love still has the power to move a family through RESTORATION. This movie brought up all sorts of feelings and made it a truly enjoyable time to watch. This is what real families do, they work together. I was born & placed in foster homes, adopted and lived in an extended family that knew nothing about this sort of love. In every family there will always be a story, it will be based on CONDITIONS (as mine was) or on strength and COURAGE. Family is what we make it to be, ideally its our strongest foundation. The reason I didn't give this a 10 is because some of it seems 'repeat' from his other move - Diary of a Mad Black Woman, another excellent movie of his.

I'm a Black man living in a predominantly Black city. That being said, I have some major misgivings about Tyler Perry's work. I realize that some people out there feel the need to praise him, because he's Black and trying to portray a positive image about the culture. But, I honestly do believe that, were Perry White, this film would have had the NAACP, Al Sharpton, and Jessie Jackson all over his ass.I have been forced to watch this movie one whole hell of a lot recently and each repeated viewing makes my blood boil. The characters are poorly written and acted. The jokes are so bad, I have to actually be told something is supposed to be funny. I'm just going to break this big pile of sh-t down.Madea=suck. The character may have had some appeal, but it doesn't anymore. When the only thing she ever seems to do is smack around children and threaten adults with violence she is less than useless. She is unnecessary.The situation with the wife beating fiancé was horsesh-t. If a woman was so scared to death of her husband, why would she try to run away when he's sleeping in bed. Wouldn't it have made more sense for her to leave when he was at work. At any rate, the characters in this arc were so annoying and overbearing that I hoped he would throw her off the balcony and was royally ticked when he didn't.Then there are the two lovebirds. A bus driver asks a woman out by harassing her while he's making his rounds. I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe when she agreed to go out with him even more. But, what takes the cake is that a grown man was reduced to tossing pebbles at a window and passing notes like a ten year old by a castrating mega bitch. I don't use this term lightly, but that woman only had two modes. Morose victim and psycho momma. No matter which of these two faces she showed, however, there was one constant. The bus driver wasn't going to get any. He even married her without sampling the goods--WTF! Then there's the family reunion scene. Here we've got the mother load which includes implied incestual taboos, grinding for the sake of grinding, shirtless, overly musclebound, b-ball, plus the great taste of Maya Angelou. When those babes dragged their butts outside and called a meeting, was I wrong to wish that the oldest of them was claimed by a heart attack. All this crap is going on at the reunion, in laughably easy to separate groups, and then they ring a bell. When they do, everyone drops what they're doing and heads on over for a stern talking too, just like a pack of Pavlov's doggies--WTF!! Then you have the final five minutes of the film. In it we see the abusive fiancé get manhandled by his longtime victim and all around bad actress. There is an impromptu wedding where Black people are dressed like angels and are hanging from the ceiling--WTF!!! The only reason to watch it this far, besides testing your threshold for pain, is the hope that the second villain of this story gets her ass handed to her as well. Guess what, it doesn't happen. Instead, Perry takes the testicularly challenged way out and plays it safe, ending the movie on a tone of forgiveness--WTF!! I'm pretty sure that, if given a day , I could probably write a doctoral dissertation on all the ways this movie sucks. Don't even get me started on the rest of Tyler Perry's films. I'm just going to say this. In my opinion, as a Black guy, D.W. Griffith's legacy lives on. The irony is that it is doing so through a Black man who will be praised for doing what Birth of a Nation did, selling us down the river. I only wish Perry's films were dudes so I could kick them in the nuts. Thanks a lot, dude!! What are you going to follow this up with in 2009, a comedy about the raping and savage beating of slaves in Colonial America?

Last night, in a fit of baby-induced insomnia, I watched "Madea's Family Reunion," which my mother-in-law had given to us on DVD. Considering the fact that Molly's entire family has adopted several Madea-speak phrases into their family lexicon (specifically, that Molly's mother is "diabetical"), I expected a somewhat silly parody of modern African-American life. I expected a bunch of scenes similar to the family scenes in those Eddie Murray movies ("Hercules! Hercules!").Instead, the movie is about two love stories, centered around Medea's nieces (sisters). One was a young woman in an abusive relationship, where her rich, socially-accepted Investment Banker fiancée beat her and emotionally abused her. The second was a romance the other sister developed with the bus driver who takes her home from work every day, a relationship complicated by the fact that, having some personal issues, she was not willing to have a physical relationship until marriage.By themselves, those stories were interesting and somewhat compelling. The psyche of an abused woman, and an abusive man, is a fascinating place. Thank God that I have never been there, but the struggle to overcome that abuse is, excuse the repetition, compelling. Relationships that are out of the norm of pop culture relationships - gasp! no sex after the first date or any other dates! How Biblical! - are interesting, although I would have likely enjoyed seeing some of their family dynamic develop a little bit more. (She has two children from two different fathers - how modern - and he has one child.) Where the movie breaks down - and becomes considerably less than it could have been - is in the myriad sub-plots and alternative story threads that are thrown into the picture. This movie, in one hour and fifty minutes, attempts to address every major issue that affects African-American culture in 2006, and the movie falls short in addressing every single one of them.Sub-plots (hopefully, I'll get them all): Madea starts the movie in court because she violated the house-arrest anklet (how'd she get that? I didn't see "Diary of a Mad Black Woman"). She has a foster child forced on her - a truly obnoxious teenage girl that Madea "beats into submission." No mention is made of any of her struggles - except that they exist - nor how she overcame them. This girl suddenly figures out her social issues and school issues without anyone's help and turns her life around, simply by being close to Madea. There's a rape subplot involving the sister dating the bus driver & one of her step-fathers - the father of the other sister. The mother becomes an enabler of the abusive relationship, and we discover that the abusive fiancée is helping her steal money from the trust fund his fiancée. (This plot is never developed past its reveal.) In addition, at the family reunion, a speech is given by one of the clan elders which will, apparently, keep the young black men with their families, make the young black women dress respectfully and become "more than they are," and keep this black family - having been started by former slaves - learning the lessons of the past and staying together to help one another.This could have been a good movie. Not a great one, as the real plot topics have been covered, better, by others. But, this movie tried to do so much and failed at most of it.