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    ‘Mea Culpa’ Review: Who’s Really to Blame, and for What?

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    The tagline of Tyler Perry’s new movie is “everyone’s guilty of something,” but the responsibility for this willfully steamy, decidedly silly thriller is all his.Is creating a guilty pleasure something a director can — or even should — aim for? That’s one of the questions wafting over the writer-director Tyler Perry’s willfully steamy thriller “Mea Culpa.”Cast for sizzle, the movie stars the singer-actor Kelly Rowland as Mea Harper, a Chicago defense attorney, and Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”) as a successful painter accused of killing his girlfriend. Her body has yet to been found, but there were skull fragments in one of his paintings.The assistant district attorney Ray Hawthorne (Nick Sagar) hopes to leverage the case for a mayoral run. He’s also Mea’s brother-in-law. In the firm clutches of the matriarch Azalia (Kerry O’Malley), the Hawthornes are an ambitious clan who appear to have borrowed much of their dialogue from the daytime soaps of yore. Among Mea’s reasons for taking this case is the Hawthorne family’s condescension and the excessive deference her husband, Kal, (Sean Sagar) shows his mother. (In case the family isn’t close enough, the actors Sean and Nick Sagar are brothers).Rowland commits to the thankless task of playing a smart woman gone stupid. Rhodes can’t do much with Zyair, whose affect is more flat than seductive. Or, as Mea’s private investigator and friend Jimmy (RonReaco Lee, a bright spot) quips: Zyair’s either a great liar or a psychopath.While the movie teases with its “is he or isn’t he a murderer?” quandary, the soundtrack boasts killer tunes, including Isaac Hayes’s cover of “Walk on By,” playing like a caution the first time Mea visits Zyair’s loft. The warning goes unheeded, and the two embark on a possibly dangerous and decidedly silly liaison, one that taps into spousal angst and features plenty of soft-core intrigue.Mea CulpaRated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language, some violence and drug use. Running time: 2 hours. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Norman Lear Reshaped How America Saw Black Families

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      “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford and Son” brought a wave of Black characters to TV, even as the shows opened up tensions over stereotypes.As a birthday present for Tyler Perry last year, a mutual acquaintance arranged for him to meet one of his heroes, Norman Lear. Perry grew up watching Lear’s groundbreaking television shows, and was awed by how several presented a fuller version of Black lives onto American television screens for the first time.Long ago, Perry had hoped to have a storied career that would emulate a speck of what Lear’s shows such as “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” displayed: that Black people can share opinions, fall in love, laugh and be fearful just like anyone else.“Had it not been for Norman, there wouldn’t have been a path for me,” said Perry, whose film and TV empire has made him one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood. “It was him bringing Black people to television and showing the world that there’s an audience for us.”Perry departed his meeting with Lear, who was 100 years old at the time, with a deeper appreciation for the craftsmanship of the pioneering television writer and producer who died at 101 on Tuesday. The reality of Lear, a white man, being responsible for bringing a fuller picture of Black lives to American TV screens was a product of the era, when most doors were still closed to Black producers and creators. Some characters in his shows were the source of flare-ups, particularly when some Black cast members complained about stereotypical portrayals, which are still debated today.Yet despite those tensions, it’s hard to find anyone in the medium of television who is held in such high regard, including by many Black writers and showrunners now creating and running today’s shows.“It’s like asking someone who played basketball if Michael Jordan influenced them,” said Kenya Barris, the creator of “black-ish.” “He changed the way contemporary storytelling was told in the genre that I was doing it in.”Barris said that Lear was an early champion of “black-ish” and even visited its writers’ room in 2016.“It’s about as impactful in modern media as a legacy could be,” Barris said of Lear’s body of work that made him a defining figure of ’70s TV.Lear’s shows touched on hot-button issues such as civil rights activism, alcoholism and abortion, going far beyond the one-dimensional existence that Black characters were previously relegated to. His shows depicted television’s first two-parent Black family, an upwardly mobile Black family and the other side of the coin to his most famous character, “All in the Family’s” Archie Bunker, in Redd Foxx’s portrayal of the oft-bigoted Fred Sanford in “Sanford and Son.”This full-rounded view of Black life in America — through characters who had failures and triumphs, struggles and aspirations — helped usher in what historians call the era of “social relevance” in television, in which TV shows and sitcoms offered more authentic depictions of Americans’ lives, said Adrien Sebro, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Scratchin’ and Survivin’: Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions,” a book about Lear’s many television productions.Redd Foxx, left, and Desmond Wilson on “Sanford and Son.”NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesBeverly McIver, an artist and professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University, remembers watching Lear’s shows every week as a child. Growing up in a housing project in Greensboro, N.C., she identified with J.J. Evans, the teenage aspiring artist who grows up in Chicago public housing, portrayed by Jimmie Walker on “Good Times.”“These shows gave me hope that I could rise out of the project, not continue the cycle of poverty, and that I could be an artist,” she said.Walker, in an interview, said Lear always looked to deliver a message through his shows, which initially threw Walker.“Norman, if you want to deliver a message, go work for Western Union,” Walker, 76, recalled telling Lear. “I’m here to work. I’m here to have fun, baby. I’m here to do comedy.”But Walker eventually grew to appreciate Lear’s stance in delivering social commentary through comedy.“He wasn’t a funny-joke writer guy,” Walker said. “He believed that both sides needed to be heard.”Fresh from the Civil Rights era, Hollywood had yet to open itself to Black shows, let alone Black showrunners.“There wasn’t a Black person who could have made that happen,” Perry said of the fuller portrayal of Black life onscreen. “It had to be Norman Lear.”He added: “It had to be a person who understands humanity and people and who we all are at our core and the things we all appreciate and care about, which are family and love and that we all feel pain.”Lear and other producers held tight to creative control of the series. As groundbreaking as the shows centering Black characters were, the creative decisions were still being made by white people who did not share the experiences of the cast onscreen.Two Black writers, Eric Monte and Mike Evans, are credited with creating “Good Times,” but have struggled to receive recognition for their contributions. Monte also argued that Lear stole his idea for “The Jeffersons.” He received a $1 million settlement and said he was eventually blacklisted from Hollywood.“Everything they wrote was stereotypic,” Monte told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006.But many who worked with Lear credited him with changing their lives.”I’ve had a very interesting life being on ‘Good Times,’” said BernNadette Stanis, who played Thelma Evans. “My whole life as an adult has been attached to ‘Good Times.’”Other actors who worked on Lear’s shows recalled him extending an open ear to their ideas and thoughts. Marla Gibbs once asked Lear why he seldom showed up on the set of “The Jeffersons.” Gibbs recalled Lear saying that the cast and show were doing just fine without him.But if she ever needed him, Lear added, he’d be there.Gibbs, who played the Jeffersons’ wisecracking maid, Florence Johnston, requested him shortly after. The show’s actors lobbied Lear for a more rounded depiction of the Willises, portrayed by Roxie Roker and Franklin Cover as television’s first interracial marriage between Black and white partners. As a result, the pair exchanged a kiss in a landmark 1974 episode.From left, Marla Gibbs, Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley in “The Jeffersons.” CBS, via Getty ImagesBeginning in 1972, NBC aired Lear’s “Sanford and Son,” which starred Foxx and Demond Wilson as a father and son in Los Angeles, and in 1974 CBS aired “Good Times,” which focused on the Evanses — the first time a Black nuclear family appeared on television.The show was originally envisioned as starring a one-parent matriarchal household, but Esther Rolle, argued that her character, Florida Evans, should be married. Stanis recalled Lear listening to Rolle and, soon after, hiring John Amos to play her husband, James.“He was lenient in that way,” Stanis said.With Rolle’s backing, Stanis talked to Lear and the show’s other producers and writers about establishing more of a voice for Thelma, the daughter of the household.“We were the first Black family show,” Stanis said. “You would have 50-, 60-year-old Caucasian men writing for a teenager and they didn’t have much to say about me.”She added: “Norman was there, the producers and the writers, all of them, the director, everybody was there. They received my viewpoint very well.”That was not the case with every conflict. A 1975 article in Ebony magazine titled “Bad Times on the ‘Good Times’ Set” described a “continuing battle among the cast members to keep the comedic flavor of the program from becoming so outlandish as to be embarrassing to Blacks.”The actors grew particularly frustrated with the outsized role of Walker’s J.J. as the loud and often lazy son with the famous catchphrase of “dyn-o-mite!” who became enormously popular with audiences.Cast members believed the performance portrayed Black Americans in a stereotypical lens. Despite these concerns, the show’s writers transformed J.J. from a minor character into one of the show’s central figures.“I thought too much emphasis was being put on J.J. and his chicken hat and saying ‘dy-no-mite’ every third page,” Amos said in a 2014 interview with the Television Academy. He added that producers resolved the conflict by getting rid of Amos’s character. “So they said, ‘Tell you what? Why don’t we kill him off and we’ll all get on with our lives?’”In addition to Amos’s firing, Rolle also left the show for a season before returning.“When we found out that John wouldn’t be back, we read the script and I thought it was mistaken identity,” Stanis said, adding that when Rolle, who died in 1998, briefly left, “I don’t think that she was very happy with having to leave the show the way it was designed.”In his 2014 autobiography, “Even This I Get to Experience,” Lear wrote that members of the Black Panthers came to his office to complain that “Good Times” perpetuated stereotypes about Black poverty. Lear responded with “The Jeffersons,” which debuted on CBS in 1975. The show featured Sherman Hemsley as George Jefferson, a Black man with a successful dry-cleaning business and a luxury apartment in Manhattan, and Isabel Sanford as his beleaguered wife, Louise.Gibbs broke out as Florence before going on to a long career that included roles on series like “227” and “The Hughleys.” When she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2021, Lear accompanied her to the ceremony. She remembered him saying that laughter adds years to one’s life and thanked her for adding years to his.“I’d say without Norman, people would not know my name,” said Gibbs, 92. “He hired me and because of the affiliation, everybody knows Marla Gibbs and they know Florence, so I’d say he definitely added years to my life.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ Review: Tyler Perry Revisits a Jim Crow-Era Romance

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      The writer-director returns to his first screenplay — a dark melodrama with soulful musical numbers — after two decades.“A Jazzman’s Blues,” Tyler Perry’s melodrama about ill-fated teenagers who fall in love in rural Georgia, marks the writer-director-studio head’s return to his first screenplay, w‌hich he wrote in 1995. In the meantime, he broke through with a slew of Madea comedies, and whetted the skills required to deliver the faceted beauty of Bayou — his richest male character to date — with dramas like 2010’s “For Colored Girls.”It helps, too, that he has found a perfect portrayer in Joshua Boone (“Premature”). Bayou, who is embodied with a luminous sincerity by Boone, offers a touching take on the kind of compassionate man a so-called mama’s boy might become.The movie begins in 1987. An elderly version of Hattie Mae Boyd (Daphne Maxwell Reid) paces around her home, listening to a white political candidate (Brent Antonello) being interviewed on television. He blathers about his family’s civic legacy. When he begins nattering on about not being racist, she shuts off the TV. Then, in short order, she arrives at the candidate’s office with a stack of love letters — proof, she says, of her son’s killing in 1947. As the man begins reading the letters, the movie shifts to the past, where it stays for much of the star-crossed, racism-infused romance.Amirah Vann (in a bulwark turn) portrays the younger version of Hattie Mae, the loving mama of Bayou and his brother, Willie Earl (Austin Scott). Solea Pfeiffer, in a promising onscreen debut, is Leanne, the intended recipient of Bayou’s missives.From the get-go, Bayou and Leanne recognize in each other something wounded, yet also sheltering. But their clandestine affection is upended when Leanne’s mother, Ethel (Lana Young), bent on passing for white, wrenches her daughter away. The romance is briefly rekindled when a war injury sends Bayou home to his mother’s juke joint outside Hopewell, Ga., and Leanne arrives, newly wed to a scion of the town’s reigning family.With this turn, the movie might have collapsed under the weight of its twists or drowned in the sentimentality of Aaron Zigman’s score. A volatile scene between Leanne and her childhood-friend-turned housekeeper, Citsy (played with fierce sensitivity by Milauna Jemai Jackson), helps shore it up.When Bayou leaves, this time to avoid a lynching, he heads with Willie Earl and his brother’s music manager, Ira (Ryan Eggold), to Chicago. There, Ira lands a nightclub gig for Bayou, a honey-voiced singer, and his trumpet-playing, heroin-shooting brother. (It is here that the composer Terence Blanchard, who wrote songs for the film, and the choreographer Debbie Allen create some of its most exuberant musical numbers.)“A Jazzman’s Blues” is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes. The relationship of antisemitism to white supremacy gets a significant nod. And while addiction, domestic abuse and rape have in the past been Perry staples — and appear here as well — they’re now in the service of a more expansive, chastising saga.A Jazzman’s BluesRated R for scenes of substance abuse, violence, rape, brief lovemaking and cruel language. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming’ Review: Tyler’s Hard Lemonade

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      Tyler Perry revives his signature character — this time for Netflix — in a fast, nonsensical new Madea movie.Midway through “Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming,” there’s a gag that captures the humor of Perry’s multimedia Madea franchise. Perry halts the plot for a black-and-white flashback where his short-tempered, unfiltered titular matriarch tells the story of how she kick-started the Civil Rights movement by threatening her man’s mistress, Rosa Parks, who then took sanctuary on a Montgomery bus. As proof, Madea brandishes a photo she took in the moment on her smartphone. “My aPhone,” she says, “because they didn’t have iPhone back then — it was A before I.” It’s unapologetic, irreverent nonsense — but it should get a laugh, so why not? Perry, who claimed that he would retire his signature character after 2019’s “A Madea Family Funeral,” has resurrected Madea, it seems, in that same spirit: simply because he can.This installment finds Madea hosting her great-grandson’s (Brandon Black) college graduation party. The event is really a pretext for a dozen family members to bust each other’s chops; to cackle when Mr. Brown (David Mann) sets himself on fire. It also gives Madea an audience to which she can voice her conflicting feelings about the Black Lives Matter movement: She’s annoyed that her granddaughter Ellie (Candace Maxwell) became a police officer, threatening Madea’s weed stash, but she’s equally irked at the idea that protesters could burn down her corner liquor store.The script has plot twists so cuckoo they make soap operas look cowardly. Perry has even worked in a visit from his across-the-pond cross-dressing counterpart, the Irish comic actor Brendan O’Carroll, who plays the bosomy Agnes Brown on the Irish sitcom “Mrs. Brown’s Boys.” As the film speeds to a slapdash resolution, you might miss Perry’s one good speech about love — “Stop building them walls and build you some fences” — which can’t counterbalance a half-dozen hopelessly ridiculous ones. He’s apparently in a rush to get to the end credits sequence, where he changes into short-shorts and a blonde wig to lampoon the 2019 Beyoncé concert film “Homecoming.” Is there a reason this happens? Probably just because he can.Tyler Perry’s A Madea HomecomingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Tyler Perry Speaks Against Hate in Moving Oscars Speech

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      Special-achievement Oscars are seemingly straightforward. Film industry person gets gold-plated bronze dude for doing notable thing.Beneath the surface, however, more is usually going on than meets the eye.The academy sometimes uses them to right wrongs, as when Debbie Reynolds was awarded one in 2015. She was ostensibly recognized for founding a mental-health charity. But it was also a way for the academy to apologize for ignoring her pleas for help in preserving costumes from Hollywood’s golden age. She also never won a competitive Oscar despite appearing in films for seven decades.Since the #OscarsSoWhite debacles of 2015 and 2016, honorary Oscars have gone to Spike Lee, Cicely Tyson, Jackie Chan, the Indigenous actor Wes Studi and other people of color. Geena Davis was recognized in 2019 for her continuing effort to correct gender inequality in Hollywood.In selecting Tyler Perry to receive a special-achievement Oscar this year, the academy cited a “cultural influence extending far beyond his work as a filmmaker.” Some people saw the academy’s move as a corrective — a tacit apology for looking down its nose all those years at the lowbrow Madea and thus, Perry’s fan base.No matter. Perry spoke movingly in his speech on Sunday night, saying, “When I set out to help someone, it is my intention to do just that. I’m not trying to do anything other than meet somebody at their humanity.”He continued:“My mother taught me to refuse hate. She taught me to refuse blanket judgment. And in this time, and with all of the internet and social media and algorithms and everything that wants us to think a certain way, the 24-hour news cycle, it is my hope that all of us will teach our kids … just refuse hate. Don’t hate anybody.“I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are Black or white or LGBTQ. I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer. I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian. I would hope that we would refuse hate.“And I want to take this Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and dedicate it to anyone who wants to stand in the middle, no matter what’s around the walls. Stand in the middle, because that’s where healing happens. That’s where conversation happens. That’s where change happens. It happens in the middle So anyone who wants to meet me in the middle, to refuse hate, to refuse blanket judgment, and to help lift someone’s feet off the ground, this one is for you, too.“God bless you, and thank you, academy. I appreciate it, thank you.”Perry started his entertainment career as a playwright. Since ending his popular “Madea” film series in 2019, Perry has focused on making television shows like “Bruh,” “Sistahs” and “The Oval” for BET. He owns a studio in Atlanta. He is also developing a “Madea” prequel for Showtime called “Mabel” that is set in the 1970s. More