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UK Daily Telegraph gives WDIGM2 a really BAD review


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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/dvd-reviews/8264347/Why-Did-I-Get-Married-Too-DVD-review.html

By Ed Cumming 2:00PM GMT 17 Jan 20111 Comment

12A cert, Lionsgate, £15.99 (WTF?? I paid £10.99 for mine mellow.gif)

For the past decade, British audiences have mainly been spared the entertainments of the 42-year-old American writer, actor and all-round mogul Tyler Perry. In part this is because he's doing fine without us. Last year he was estimated to be the sixth best-paid man in Hollywood, and in total his films have grossed more than $400m.

It's also because his films are so precisely tailored to their audience. Strongly endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, they are all riffs on a theme; exploring the relationships of black American couples through low comedy and high melodrama. They do this in a scarcely recognisable America in which nigh-on every single person in front of the camera, extras and all, is black. Through stilted dialogue shot in primary-school pastels, broad-outlined caricatures work their way through a number of long-telegraphed and much-laboured bits of plot, leading invariably to a happy ending and a redemptive, simplistic moral.

Why Did I Get Married Too? has been granted a British DVD release, however. It is far from welcome. Though the weakness of the title ought to be a warning, no number of labels on the box could prepare you for the horror of the film within. The sequel to the 2007 US-only movie Why Did I Get Married?, it is both exemplary and a nadir of this sort of film-making. Perry himself stars as Terry, who with wife Dianne (Sharon Leal) comprises one of four couples experiencing various stages of marital strife and happiness. In the first half of the film the eight of them go on a couples' retreat to the Bahamas. The tone is comic, in the most generous sense of the term. As the four guys "banter" robotically on a beach, straddling jetskis and opening beers, they convey the powerful impression that not only are they unfamiliar with wit, but with human contact in general.

The second half descends into an over-seasoned emotional stew, replete with Janet Jackson (as self-help author Patricia) trashing a house with a golf-club, and alcoholic Angela (Tasha Smith) confronting her husband Marcus (Michael Jai White) on live TV. All of the men appear lazy and lecherous, the women appear long-suffering and big-hearted. By the end, we wonder if reality might just be the other way around. If it sounds unsophisticated, that's because it is, and I was gnawing my fist long before the credits showed clemency and rolled.

None of this will affect Perry, of course. He clearly knows his audience (I would say niche, but Why Did I Get Married Too? grossed more than $60m at the box office in the States), and no doubt there will be more where this came from. If they are anything like this dangerously bad film, however, we must hope they are halted long before they reach our cinemas and homes.

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well until there is a version without her in it, we honestly cant say, lol

Well that kinda proves my point lol...if you liked it, you liked it regardless if Janet was in it. If Patty was played by a different actress, the film pretty much stays the same.

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