Gloveless in the biting cold, my mother decides to buy some bootleg DVDs down on Lafayette before we hop on the train for home and central heating. They are five for a dollar: American Gangster, No Country for Old Men, This Christmas, Enchanted and, for me, Why Did I Get Married. She deliberates for eons over whether she would really like to watch such a depressing film as No Country for Old Men. I am motivated by opinion and temperature and deliver an impassioned endorsement – it is the greatest film I have ever seen, it is quiet and sad but delivers beautiful truths about life, the Coen Brothers are a force to be reckoned with, the acting is fucking bananaicals, come on mama I am getting frostbite in my cartilege. Getting nowhere – my nose is of no concern to her delicate moviewatching sensibilites – I remind her Javier Bardem is the star. She loves Javier Bardem. Who doesn’t. “I’ll take it.”
Home, we try to watch the family film “Enchanted,” but must turn it off on account of it would insult the intelligence of an infant child. It would make the newborn baby Jesus, wet and mewling in a bale of hay under the north star, feel condescended to. We are glad we did not give Disney $22 to see it for real.
Why Did I Get Married, though, was the replacement, and deserves real paid-for-theater tickets, so Tyler Perry can continue building his black filmmaking empire in Atlanta and give Jill Scott, Janet Jackson, and the sublime Tasha Smith regular work until the Mayan apocalypse. I haven’t seen a good relationship ensemble-drama like this since maybe Closer, only this one is far less nihilistic and has a realistically happy ending and is funny, because Tyler Perry is a faithful Christian who makes it his life goal to uplift, while Closer writer Patrick Marber is a Nietzschean Dr. Phil.
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