Review of Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys (2008) by Chads. — 15 Sep 2008
Check the dogma, if your aesthetics is based in theology, then double-check, for the soul of your fictive characters, and your fiction. In "The Family That Preys", as a road trip shared by two women winds down, Alice Pratt(Alfre Woodard) stops the car near a river where baptismal are being performed by a minister.
Charlotte Cartwright(Kathy Bates) resists, but her best friend insists, so it comes to be that the matriarch and magnate of a powerful family accepts Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. Unbeknownst at the time, the filmmaker sentences his creation to eternal damnation.
Check the dogma. Ironically, uncannily, and accidentally, he repeats the same mistake as D.W. Griffith in "The Birth of a Nation". When a 500-ft. Jesus materializes at the end of the influential, but controversial film, Flora's escape from Gus' clutches on the highlands' precipice, ceases to exist in a vacuum, as the Christian iconography capitulates the scared woman's hasty decision in a way that Griffith never intended.
He didn't check the dogma. The cross-purposes at work in "The Family That Preys" shows signs of a filmmaker who grafted on the church to appease his base, in a film that literally takes a time out from being "Dynasty", so it can let down its hair and be the unofficial sequel to "Bonneville".
"The Family That Preys" is like two films in one, starring two Kathy Bates, whose Charlotte takes code-switching to the brink of multiple-personalities. But miracle of miracles, this film works as an integrated soap opera, despite its piecemeal components(the film has the potential to evoke John Sayles' "Passion Fish", too).
Andrea(Sanaa Lathan) is so bitchy, so utterly transgressive; when she's finally knocked off her high-horse, it's unsatisfying, because she's replaced by Jillian(Kadee Strickland), by the status quo of the filmic universe.
"The Family That Preys" is not a good film exactly, but it's a conversation-starter, and worth checking out.
This review of Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys (2008) was written by Chads. on 15 Sep 2008.
Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys has generally received positive reviews.
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