DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN MOVIE

But much of the rest of the movie is devoted to the courtship between Helen and her blue-collar Prince Charming, Orlando, played by former The Young and the Restless stud Shemar Moore with cornrows and a headband. And unlike Helen’s mild, elderly, deeply religious mama, played by Cicely Tyson, Madea believes in being a mad black woman.Īll Madea’s scenes are howls-they puncture the sanctimony. In his eyes you see the coming-together of mankind, and the nuclear explosion that could blow it to smithereens.Īnd here’s where Diary of a Mad Black Woman swerves from heavy-handed melodrama into screamingly funny drag-sitcom territory: Perry’s grandma Madea is a gun-toting, chainsaw-wielding hurricane bent on justice for all black women. My favorite is Machacek as the hapless Franka, a misfit with the noblest intentions but few inner resources to be able to resist the hypnotic pull of his white-supremacist soccer culture. This is the first film I’ve seen by the prolific Jan Hrebejk, not yet 40, born in Prague the year the Soviet tanks moved in and clearly a thrilling talent: a Tarantino with a social conscience, and a graceful director of actors. By the time the movie winds up, we have a gut sense of what a deeply unstable and dangerous society this is: a world of pickpockets, human traffickers, black marketers racist soccer-fan skinheads and tides of dark immigrants and an intelligentsia that doesn’t begin to have a handle on this bubbling, soon-to-boil-over brew.

The strands coalesce, some naturally, some unnaturally, some scarily, some extremely amusingly. Up and Down is lumpy, unwieldy, overlong in spots, but endlessly engaging: It tickles and discomfits in equal measure. After a few racist insults, they abandon the illegal immigrants in the forest-only to discover that a sick woman has inadvertently left a newborn baby in the back of their truck. The pair turns out to be smuggling human cargo-”dark races”-into the Czech Republic. The film opens with two truckers engaged in intense conversation, very Tarantino-esque, about eating deep-fried bats in Thailand.

The narrative is like a passed baton, with one or two jarring leaps that are more or less accounted for later. The title refers to the movie’s bifurcated structure: one part underclass to one part haut bourgeoisie. It’s a uniquely Czech-ered mix, and it keeps you off-guard-never quite fearing for the characters’ safety, but never sanguine about their future. Tarantino with a social conscience: Unlike the fatally disjunctive picture below, the Czech ensemble comedy Up and Down (Sony Pictures Classics) is a wholly successful piece of schizoid storytelling, in which fairy-tale sentiment sits easily beside the harsh reality of crime and racism in suddenly Soviet-less Eastern Europe.

Diary of a mad black woman