Tyler Perry Film No. 1 for Second Weekend
“It was one of those rare Oscar weekends when not one nominated movie made it into the top 10,” R. Kinsey Lowe noted today in the Los Angeles Times.
“Neither the Academy Award hopefuls nor the four wide releases entering the market did enough business to dislodge Tyler Perry’s ‘Madea’s Family Reunion’ from first place. ‘Madea’s’ took in an estimated $13 million, bringing its two-weekend total to about $48.1 million.”
That’s by and large without benefit of the “mainstream media,” which mostly didn’t seem to get what was happening. Same with Perry’s previous film, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.”
“Lions Gate is opening the film on 2,194 screens, compared to Diary’s 1,483, and has set up interviews for Perry, but did not release Madea’s to [the] press ahead of time, perhaps due to the sound drubbing Diary received from critics,” Kim Voynarhttp wrote on the blog Cinematical as the film opened Feb. 25. “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” grossed $50 million after being made for $5.5 million, she wrote.
“What made Diary so unexpectedly successful? Not white people, many of whom had never even heard of Perry before Diary, even though his plays were selling out to largely black audiences. In large part, the success of Diary was Perry himself, who marketed his film to his target audience – hardworking, Christian black women – through his website, ads on black radio stations, and directly to large African-American churches. Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris – who is black and blasted the film – found himself attacked as a racist by Perry fans, who accused him of being white.”
The New York Times dispensed with “Madea” with a 371-word review by Anita Gates on Feb. 25.
The Chicago Tribune gave it 563 words from arts critic Chris Jones, who acknowledged, “Few characters have been more critically underestimated than Madea, a work of comic brilliance. When seen live. Had she been white, she’d have been on Broadway by now.”
The Los Angeles Times allocated 278 words to a review by a non-Times writer, Gene Seymour of Newsday, though it earlier ran a feature by Lorenza Muñoz, “The Hollywood Gospel According to Tyler Perry: He’s rich, religious – and he’s proved studio execs wrong about the black movie audience.”
Marcia Davis, in the Washington Post, explained what apparently was lost elsewhere: “Let’s get this straight, first. No one should go to a Tyler Perry movie – including ‘Madea’s Family Reunion,’ just released yesterday – looking for complex story lines, layered characters or panoramic cinematography that steals your breath away.
“To put words in the mouth of his outsized, truth-telling, gun-toting, sixty-something Madea (Perry in a dress, wig and really big-breasted fat suit), ‘That really ain’t what this thing is about.’
“‘Family Reunion’ is a cultural phenomenon, much more than a movie.
“The plots in ‘Reunion’ may not be complex, but there are several of them, and they have power in the way they resonate within the fault lines of modern-day African American life. Madea confronts everything from psychic, physical and sexual abuse to the frightening numbers of children left parentless – by drugs, by prison or just downright triflingness – who must fend for themselves in foster care.”
Voynar said as much in her blog entry: “Critic Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, who saw Madea’s at its premiere, has an interesting take: it doesn’t matter what a bunch of white film journalists think about this film, because, like Diary, Madea’s is going to be a hit with its target African-American audience regardless. Wells argues that it’s ‘beside the point for a mildly snobby existentialist white-guy journalist’ like himself to put down the film, because he is irrelevant – with the right crowd, Wells says, the film works.”
- Kimberly Nordyke, Hollywood Reporter: Perry turns focus to TV, plans comedy
- “News and Notes” with Ed Gordon: Tyler Perry’s Top-Grossing ‘Family Reunion’ (National Public Radio)
- Pamela K. Johnson, Essence: Diary of a Brilliant Black Man
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Columnists Put Fingers on Oscar Winners
Two African American columnists used their last entries before the Academy Awards to extol what turned out to be Oscar winners, and a third did the same on the radio.
“I think ‘Crash’ puts the issue of race in our faces, something I’ve been accused of doing with this column,” metro columnist Eugene Kane wrote Saturday in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “That’s also the reason ‘Crash’ stands out as a singularly powerful film and why I believe there are plenty of readers unafraid of an honest discussion about race.”
“Crash” was a surprise winner for best picture. Even Kane, who recalled what he called local “Crash” moments for his Milwaukee readers, wasn’t expecting it. “I predict ‘Crash’ will be snubbed in favor of ‘Brokeback’ for the most of the major Oscars,” the onetime movie critic wrote, speaking of “Brokeback Mountain.” “But the film does have an outside chance for best picture if only because it’s the kind of socially ‘important’ movie Hollywood would like to do more often but usually doesn’t.”
Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page also endorsed the movie in a commentary Thursday on National Public Radio’s “News and Notes with Ed Gordon.” “I like all the Oscar finalists this year. That’s got to be a first, but ‘Crash’ is my picture of the year because of what it tells us about the year and the times,” Page said. “Good movies try to tell us about how we live now. ‘Crash’ tells us with the bold full throttle frankness that we seldom hear in real life even when we should.”
In a Newsday column headlined, “How Real Can an Actor Get?,” Les Payne wrote of Philip Seymour Hoffman, best actor nominee for his portrayal of author Truman Capote.
“Those who knew Capote well claim that Hoffman has captured the complex man in full,” Payne wrote. “This was the trick Jamie Foxx pulled off last year in winning the Academy Award for portraying Ray Charles. So exactingly powerful was Foxx’s portrayal that when the real Ray Charles was shown at the end of the film, the audience didn’t buy it. They stuck with the ersatz as opposed to the real in a case of art reincarnating life.”
Meanwhile, the awards had local resonance for Memphis news media. “Pimps up, cowboys down,” began the Oscar story this morning by John Beifuss in the Commercial Appeal. “That’s one way to summarize Sunday night’s 78th annual Academy Awards, in which a trio of Memphis rappers took home an Oscar while favorite ‘Brokeback Mountain’ lost the Best Picture award to spoiler ‘Crash.’
“The Memphians at the Oscars were ecstatic.”
“I guess if anybody wants to know if greatness has returned to Memphis, look no further than the Academy Awards,” Craig Brewer, producer of the Memphis-set “Hustle & Flow,” said in the story. “It’s a great night for us, standing on Isaac Hayes‘ shoulders.”
The story noted that “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was “the first Memphis song to be honored with an Academy Award since Hayes’ ‘Theme from Shaft’ in 1972.
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Journalist Finds Parents of Slain Korean Student
A reporter for the Los Angeles-based Korea Daily newspaper located the Korean parents of a Penn State University student Thursday and notified them on behalf of police that their only son had been bludgeoned to death.
Andy Chung, who had been reporting the story, said State College, Pa., police asked him to find the parents because police in Seoul, South Korea, had no one who spoke English and State College police had no one who spoke Korean.
It’s not an uncommon request, said Chung, 32. “We help the detectives in Los Angeles a lot to help locate the victims’ families” when they are Korean.
“They were so shocked; they didn’t even know,” Chung said of the Penn State student’s parents. “They couldn’t say a word at all. They kept saying, ‘Is it true?’ ‘Is it true?’ I told them the State College police want to reach them. I gave them the phone numbers, and gave the State College police the victim’s families cell phone numbers.”
Visas are being arranged for parents Kooho Park and Seunghee Park to travel to State College, police Sgt. Mark Argiro said in the Centre Daily Times in State College.
Youngcheol Park, “an undergraduate studying aerospace engineering, died Feb. 23 in a house at 224 Nimitz Ave. from multiple blows to the right side of his head. Andrew Rogers, 28, the occupant of the residence, has been charged with first- and third-degree murder,” Friday’s story by Chris Rosenblum and Ivonne D’Amato explained.
“Rogers described a brawl over cocaine and money with Park, an apparent poker buddy, and a third man, identified only as ‘Sweet.’ Rogers also confessed to striking Park several times with a baseball bat and a rolling pin, police said.”
Friday’s editions of the 200,000-circulation, nationally distributed Korean Daily, which publishes in Korean, included Chung’s interview with the parents.
Chung said police gave him the parents’ address and he located them using the Internet. The parents said their son, a senior, had planned to return to Korea after graduation.
- Sarah Goldfarb, Daily Collegian: Cocaine plays role in death
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Columnists Attempt to Light Fires on Immigration
“It’s not the Mexicans we should worry about. Or the Guatemalans, Colombians or Salvadorans,” columnist Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote Sunday. “Waves of laborers – legal and illegal – from south of the border don’t constitute the grave threat to national security or economic stability that the anti-immigrant hysteria would suggest.
“If you want to worry about the future, look to China. Or to India. Those countries are producing millions of well-educated young people who are already taking jobs from American workers – and are poised to take more. While Congress and state legislatures busy themselves with meaningless bills aimed at undocumented workers pouring over our southern borders, they’re ignoring the real threat to U.S. economic hegemony.”
Tucker was just one columnist trying to light fires under Congress on immigration.
Albor Ruiz wrote Sunday in the New York Daily News: “It is as ironic as it is sad: In New York, the quintessential immigrant city, 40% of its residents that are foreign-born have encountered only silence from its two senators about an issue of life-altering consequences for them – immigration reform.
“While a Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain, found the time to come to New York to discuss the matter with immigrant workers, church representatives, community leaders and several elected officials, our own Democratic senators, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, have not uttered a peep about immigration reform.”
On the West Coast, Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union Tribune analyzed the bills in the Senate hopper Sunday and pronounced one from Arlen Specter, R-Pa., a good beginning.
“Specter wants to (1) create a temporary guest worker program that would allow hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs in the United States for up to six years and (2) allow millions of illegal immigrants who are already here to remain indefinitely, provided they register with the Department of Homeland Security, pay back taxes, abide by the law and remain employed,” Navarrette explained.
- Cindy Rodriguez, Denver Post: Teen moves to new beat: immigration
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Questions on Makeover for L.A. Anchor’s Home
“An anchor at KTLA-TV received a customized dining-room makeover worth more than $10,000 for her own home, in what a local furniture merchant says was meant to be a swap of free goods and services in exchange for favorable coverage on the station’s ‘Morning News,’ Scott Collins of the Los Angeles Times wrote today on his blog, “Channel Island.”
“Instead, the arrangement soured when the story never ran, leaving the Tribune Co.-owned station scrambling late this week to right a tangled situation that could raise new questions about its ethical practices.
“Anchor Michaela Pereira volunteered her Pasadena home for the ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’-style story, which was taped in September with the cooperation of Los Angeles-area furniture retailer IdentityCraft.”
Today’s report follows others about the station.
“Amid growing criticism, the executive producer of KTLA-TV’s ‘Morning News’ defended the show’s decision last week to accept free accommodations in exchange for broadcasting its morning program from the newly renovated Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel & Spa in Pasadena,” Martin Miller reported Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times.
“Rich Goldner acknowledged Tuesday that three of his four anchors – Michaela Pereira, Sam Rubin and Carlos Amezcua – were given free rooms the night before broadcasting live from the posh hotel, but said there was no breach of journalistic ethics as suggested by a local newspaper. The fourth anchor, weatherman Mark Kriski, did not stay at the hotel.”
- Gene Maddaus, Pasadena Star-News: Weighing anchors’ antics
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Watts Is “Over There, Where the Smoke Is”
The Washington Post’s obituary of Otis Chandler, “the swashbuckling former publisher of the Los Angeles Times credited with rescuing his family’s newspaper from mediocrity and establishing it as a nationally respected media voice,” included this passage:
“Although the paper won a 1966 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watts neighborhood race riots in Los Angeles, Mr. Chandler was not always as socially conscious.
“According to one story, the black journalist and civil rights activist Louis Lomax met with Mr. Chandler at the time of the riots, and the publisher said he didn’t know where Watts is. ‘Over there, where the smoke is,’ Lomax said. ‘That’s where Watts is.’
“On other fronts, Mr. Chandler was far more impressive,” Adam Bernstein wrote. Chandler died Feb. 27 at age 78.
[Added March 7: About 900 people attended Chandler’s funeral Monday, Mitchell Landsberg reported Tuesday in Chandler’s newspaper.
[Big Willie Robinson, “a 6-foot, 6-inch, 305-pound drag racer in camouflage clothing and a biker-style leather vest, leaped to his feet midway through the service at All Saints Church in Pasadena, strode up the center aisle and announced, quite unscripted: ‘Excuse me, everybody. It’s very important that I speak to you all, because Otis Chandler meant a lot to me.’
[Among other remarks, he “credited Chandler with interceding with then-Mayor Richard Riordan after the 1992 riots to allow a drag-racing program at Terminal Island, where young people could race instead of fight.”]
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Short Takes:
- “Madison Avenue’s white management ranks are about to be exposed in public hearings on ad agencies’ minority-hiring practices that could drag industry stars such as Andrew Robertson, Kevin Roberts and Shelly Lazarus – and their clients – into an unflattering spotlight,” Lisa Sanders reported today for Advertising Age.
- Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson wrote Saturday that “I received a letter from Senator Elizabeth Dole, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairwoman, to join the Republican Senatorial Inner Circle. Her letter praises me for my ‘remarkable support of President Bush’s agenda.’ . . .The Republicans talk about a big-tent party, but this is ridiculous. Even if this letter had come from a Democratic senatorial inner circle, it would have been laughable. I am a registered Democrat who often criticizes the party’s wishy-washy capitulations.”
- “TV One is presently in nearly 26 million households in 39 of the top 50 African American markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Cleveland, and Detroit,” Deardra Shuler wrote today for TheBlackWorldToday.com. ” New York recently joined the TV One roster.” She profiled CEO Johnathan Rodgers.
- “The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe has combined its tribal newspaper with a contemporary artist gallery to create one of the newest American Indian businesses in downtown Rapid City,” Jomay Steen wrote today in the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal. “The Dakota/Lakota Journal has moved its office downtown from the Rushmore Business Park in eastern Rapid City and now showcases contemporary Indian artwork, crafts, jewelry and music in the new Our Nation’s Center and Gift Shop.”
- “The Law Society of Kenya has appointed three advocates to commence legal proceedings against the Government over Thursday’s commando raid” at the Standard Group news media offices, the East African Standard in Nairobi reported today. On Friday, the Nation in Nairobi said the Cabinet “appeared split wide open over the police raid that took KTN off the air and saw bundles of The Standard newspaper burnt as they came off the press.”
- Michael Cottman, BlackAmericaWeb.com senior political writer for national affairs, is offering political commentary and news analysis on three national radio talk shows recently created by Radio One: those hosted by the Revs. Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson, and “Urban Legends” with Keith Murphy on “The Power,” XM’s only black-talk network. Cottman, formerly a reporter at the Washington Post and Newsday, is also an adjunct professor at Howard University.
- Thomas Cashman Avila was named deputy executive director of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, overseeing NLGJAâ??s work in training and educating journalists on fair and accurate coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. Avila, staff director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, will be the first candidate to serve in this new NLGJA role, the organization announced last week.
- Timothy J. McNulty, the Chicago Tribune’s associate managing editor for foreign news, was named the paper’s public editor Friday, succeeding Don Wycliff, who is leaving to join the University of Notre Dame as associate vice president for news and information, the Tribune reported on Saturday.
