Review of Meet the Browns (2008) by Chads. — 25 Mar 2008

Filmmaker Tyler Perry is the Kurt Cobain of American cinema. Like "Nevermind", Perry's films perform beyond the niche market it was intended for. 2002 became the year "black film" broke, when "Diary of a Mad, Black Woman" grossed over fifty-million dollars, a then-unprecednted sum for a black independent film.

Perry's movies are mainstream, but make no mistake about it, "Meet the Browns" is a "cult film" at its core, like Nirvana was an "alternative" band, who suddenly became wildly popular.

While other indies enjoy wide-release success, the Perry oeuvre differs in this very important respect: The audience that Perry caters to is often a disenfranchised one. We're talking about African-American women.

"Meet the Browns" is a black chick-flick. In the last six years, Perry has created his own private Hollywood by being a blaxploitation director who makes respectable films for a middle-brow audience.

With "Meet the Browns", Perry alienates the fanbase, in a scene, in which the oldest son of the family patriarch refers to his father's women as "hos", in a naked attempt to be all things to all people.

Being black himself, Brown should realize that no respectable "gangsta" would be caught dead at "Meet the Browns", so why rankle the converted with a street lexicon? In another scene, Madea is being chased by a convoy of police squad vehicles and excitedly proclaims, "I'm going to be on "Cops"!" This is Chapelle-lite.

This is like Wayne Brady's performance as a gangbanger on "The Dave Chapelle Show". Perry is satirizing his own "vanilla" image by being an outlaw. But gangsta rap and incarceration infringes on the fantasy aspect of a single mother of three who goes to Georgia and lives happily-ever-after.

That's not what the audience paid for.