EW review: Gonzo 'Diary' fills void
By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- The gonzo soap opera "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" is a bad movie so over-the-top that at moments it's almost good -- or, at least, more arresting than it has any right to be.
At the beginning, Helen (Kimberly Elise), who is sprightly and angel-faced and has been married for 18 years, gets kicked out of her home in the Atlanta suburbs.
To state that basic fact doesn't begin to describe the deranged spectacle of the event. The house is no mere house: It's a stone mansion bigger than Wayne Manor or Gosford Park. That house is the film's way of saying, This is not your father's movin'-on-up assimilation daydream.
You'd imagine the lord of the manor might be some sort of multinational CEO, but no: Charles McCarter (Steve Harris), Helen's husband, is merely an attorney, albeit a very prominent one.
He is also a rat bastard, a heartless and conniving philanderer who has two children with his mistress (Lisa Marcos).
After informing Helen that their marriage is over, he hits the point home by literally dragging her out the door, as the (notably light-skinned) bitch-mistress looks on.
At least one thing is wrong with this picture: If Charles is supposed to be such a poshly pretentious, imperiously self-interested customer, it seems highly unlikely that he'd go out of his way to make a scene in which he behaves like a low-dog pimp. Yet that's all part of the shameless trash-fantasy broadness that gives "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" its crudely rousing tent-show juice.
The film, directed by music-video vet Darren Grant, was written by Tyler Perry, a playwright and burlesque character actor who's developed a major following on stage (he plays three roles in the film), and he pumps his clichés so full of hot air that they stay aloft even as you're laughing at their brazenness.
Tossed out on her own, without a penny of Charles' fortune (she had signed a prenup), Helen is like the heroine of "An Unmarried Woman" abandoned into a world of pulp retribution and princess romance.
Charles, you'd better believe, gets exactly what's coming to him, but Helen also meets a too-good-to-be-true suitor, a steel-factory worker named Orlando (Shemar Moore), who, with his cornrows and soft manner, is like a hip-hop Ken doll. (He actually says, ''I want to be your knight in shining armor.'')
Kimberly Elise, who has been featured in such films as "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Beloved" and was the star of "Woman Thou Art Loosed" (which was earlier a play by Perry), has a face that's all sexy, winsome curlicues. She's as beautiful as Michelle Pfeiffer, and she's got range: She can glow adoringly one moment and rage, with a dash of hellfire, the next.
Aiding Helen at every turn is Madea, her rascally, big-bottomed, gun-totin' ancient giantess of a grandma -- played, by Perry himself, in a drag act that would look even more outrageous if Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence hadn't gotten there first.
Madea, who is Perry's most popular stage character, schools Helen in the art of payback, as in the scene where they rip up the mistress' clothes. ''This is for every black woman who ever had a problem with a black man!'' whoops Madea, and she might be speaking for the entire film, which is presented as a kind of passion play for black women.
Helen, the saintly housewife scorned, never transcends being an archetype, yet she's offered up as a soulful super-martyr for every sister in the audience to project onto. She's a walking one-woman "Waiting to Exhale," and "Diary" could end up rousing its audience in a similar way.
One of the most insidious lies in Hollywood is that its decision makers don't care about black or white -- that the only color that matters to them is green. This has always been a fashionably cynical way of explaining why there aren't more black films, yet what it does, in effect, is to blame African-American audiences for the racial blinders of the film industry.
Where were all the black chick flicks that were supposed to follow the success of "Waiting to Exhale"? (There was "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and then ... not much.)
If Hollywood were doing its job, there'd be no need for -- or defense of -- a movie as outsize in its melodrama as "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," yet it's Tyler Perry's belief that he isn't just telling a story, he's telling the story, that kept me watching.
The climactic gospel number, ''I Want to Be Free,'' seems to let loose all the pent-up emotion of the characters' trials and dreams. "Diary" is a crock, all right, but a crock made with conviction.
EW Grade: B-
More from Entertainment Weekly: All about Kimberly Elise
'Sky Blue'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Ecoban only sounds like the name of a hybrid car a West Coast celebrity might drive to a Kabbalah lecture.
In fact, in the coldly beautiful Korean anime feature "Sky Blue," Ecoban is the name of a rotting biosphere -- an enclosed City of Tomorrow (somewhere on the same anime coordinate grid as "Ghost in the Shell" and "Appleseed" and just down the sci-fi highway from "The Road Warrior") that, by the year 2142, has become a dystopia of haves and have-nots.
The elites live in comfort; the masses slave in the city's bowels, breathing the noxious fumes of a postapocalyptic police state, the by-product of war and pollution.
The only way to clear the air, literally, and get back to the condition of the movie's title is to blow up the joint, and Shua (voiced with a Keanu Reeves-influenced whispery neutrality by Marc Worden) is just the brave, handsome rebel to advance the revolution.
What are the odds that the fearless, comely, disillusioned captain of the Ecoban security force is Shua's long-lost love, Jay (Catherine Cavadini), a sleek, smart heroine who thinks her childhood sweetheart has died long ago?
"Sky Blue," a feature debut by commercial director Moon Sang Kim from a genre-standard script by Kim, Jun Young Park and Sunmin Park, scans the familiar terrain of dead-eyed futurism with genre-standard efficiency of scene change and intricate background detail.
A bland cast of caricature bad guys, semi-bad guys and innocent kids (including an orphan boy and a blind girl) do their work as if invented by an anime-plot software program.
But there are also haunting images of casually stunning complexity. Jay talks to her boss (who wears his shock of prematurely white hair in a Karl Lagerfeld ponytail and is also her jealous lover) in a triple-difficulty long shot of a windowed environment that not only encompasses the people, the room, and the view out to the claustrophobic Ecoban landscape but is also filmed through a fish tank.
When a brilliant fish wriggles by, even a less than ardent anime viewer will want to freeze the frame and gape.
EW Grade: B-
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'Bigger Than the Sky'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
A huge pile of horsefeathers is being peddled as fairy dust in "Bigger Than the Sky."
The giant thing that crowds out the heavens in the title of this uniquely bogus, fancily well-marketed indie isn't a star a billion times larger than our sun: It's an urge, absolutely primal, with which the folk of the Portland Community Theater (Which Portland? Pick one) devote themselves to being theater folk, with all the hysteria, heartache, bed-hopping, vanity, pathos, mysterious illness, alcohol, backstage antics and bad dialogue that attend such a sacred calling.
(Even "Waiting for Guffman's" peerless Corky St. Clair would have found this company too twee for the room.)
By the laws of Rodney Vaccaro's impossibly dewdropped script, wishing and innocence make dreams come true. That's how Peter (relative newcomer Marcus Thomas) changes his dull, sad, lonely life by trying out, on the spur of the moment, for a part in a local production of "Cyrano de Bergerac."
It's Peter's lucky night: The show's madcap director (British stage dignitary Clare Higgins) is daft enough to give the eloquent, proboscis-challenged title role to the novice who delivered the worst audition. And so it's ... showtime!
Under the why-not-me direction of first-timer Al Corley (best known for playing Steven Carrington on "Dynasty"), the rest of the curiously overqualified cast appear to be doing their own version of community theater.
John Corbett, Amy Smart, Sean Astin, Patty Duke and Greg Germann enter and exit doing hammy versions of ham roles, and "Topsy-Turvy's" Allan Corduner goes over the top and through the stratosphere as that great, great (ailing) local theater legend, Kippy. This still leaves the mystery of casting the deeply colorless Thomas in the central role, though.
Are the filmmakers making meta use of a bland, uncharismatic actor to play a bland, uncharismatic actor who plays one of the theater's most memorable men? Nah, thinking like that requires panache.
EW Grade: F
More from Entertainment Weekly: All about Amy Smart and John Corbett
'Up and Down'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
As he demonstrated four years ago in the superb, Oscar-nominated period piece "Divided We Fall," filmmaker Jan Hrebejk has a fine talent for dramatizing the Czech flair for standing erect on insecure moral and political ground.
The rollicking social comedy "Up and Down" continues the director's interest in adaptability and its discontents, then ups the ante by setting the story in the shape-shifting post-Communist present.
Everyone in Hrebejk's deft fable is busy snapping up opportunities while scaling down hopes.
A woman desperate for a child (her husband's arrest for soccer hooliganism precludes adopting) buys a baby left behind in an immigrant-smuggler's truck. A professor's illness forces a meeting of his bourgeois present (he lives with a pretty, younger woman and their well-bred daughter) and his scrappier Communist-era past (he left a bitter wife, Vera, and an estranged, now middle-aged son).
"Up and Down" captures Prague life with a fervor that's comical but a longing that's serious; no one is easy to pigeonhole: A glimpse of Vera, vibrant in a smoky pub, compacts a thousand words into a single picture.
It takes an artist like Hrebejk to know when to point and shoot.
EW Grade: A-
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'Cinèvardaphoto'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Agnes Varda's celebrated 1962 French new-wave film, "Cleo From 5 to 7," followed an anxious young singer as she wandered around Paris waiting for the results of a medical exam.
In the years since, Varda herself has never stopped wandering. Now in her late 70s, she makes movies by following her impulses, going where caprice takes her, creating a risky and nimble, hit-or-miss aesthetic of impromptu documentary meditation.
"Cinèvardaphoto," her latest offering, is actually three short films linked by their obsession with the mystery of photographs. Only one of the films is new (it's about memory, the Holocaust ... and teddy bears), and one, made in 1963, is a startlingly exultant and wide-eyed celebration of the Cuban revolution.
What lights "Cinèvardaphoto" is Varda's ageless ability to merge her spirit with that of the images she shows us.
In the new short, "Ydessa, the Bears and Etc.," Varda explores a gargantuan exhibit of early-20th-century portrait stills, each of which includes a prominently placed teddy bear.
The curator, however, couldn't be less cuddly: Ydessa Hendeles, the child of Holocaust survivors, suggests a flaming-haired, sunken-cheeked Morticia Addams as she describes amassing these photos of the near-Victorian past as a surrogate for her own destroyed family history. The teddy bears become a creepy totem of withered innocence, and resilience too.
The second short, "Ulysses," made in 1982, is a bit of a dud, as it laboriously deconstructs an image shot by Varda on a beach in the mid-'50s.
But then we're plunged into "Salut les Cubains," a rapid-fire essay -- it's like "Life" magazine gone kaleidoscopic -- composed of shots of Cuba in the first era after the revolution. Musicians and dancers, doctors and tobacco workers, Fidel and Che: All are triumphant, united in their vision of a socialist utopia.
It's easy, in hindsight, to drop your jaw at the sentimental leftist naïveté of Varda's narration, except that what we're seeing can't be denied -- the Marxist dream, perhaps, but also the glory of Cuba before it sank under the weight of Castro's ego.
EW Grade: B
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'Turtles Can Fly'
It's understandable that "Turtles Can Fly," set in Kurdistan on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, has been greeted less as a movie than as a bulletin from a fraught global corner.
If only it weren't such a patchy mess of a movie.
The director, Bahman Ghobadi ("A Time for Drunken Horses"), strings together shots of life in a refugee village with such random, rhythmless vagueness that it's easy to think of him as a poet of ''quiet'' devastation.
Except that the central figure, a 13-year-old boy who goes by the nickname of "Satellite" (Soran Ebrahim), blares out every line of dialogue at the exact same megaphonic level.
Ghobadi casts one child performer whose arms have been blown off by land mines, but lacerating as that is to behold, "Turtles Can Fly" lacks grace, coherence and a surface vivid enough to make it an alarm that many will hear.
EW Grade: C-
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'Bad Guy'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
What are we to make of the brooding central hooligan in "Bad Guy"?
His name is Han-gi (Cho Je-Hyun), and he starts out by sexually assaulting a willowy college student (Seo Won) and then forcing her to work at a brothel.
Once there, she sits alongside the other, hardened hookers at a windowed facade and forlornly takes customers, while Han-gi, in secret, views her activities from behind a one-way mirror.
Despite its sleazy setup, the movie is punishingly sexless and diffuse. That's a surprise, too, coming from the South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, whose "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring" was enlightened enough to confront the violent -- and erotic -- side of a monk's progress.
In "Bad Guy," which was actually made in 2001, Han-gi's victim despises what she's doing, and so, apparently, does Han-gi, as he stares at her degradation in impotent agony.
Really, who needs a bad guy who's this guilty about being bad?
EW Grade: C-
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