Paranormal Activity: The Madea Files

amadeaxmasPATMO

(Very light spoilage ahead. However, if you’ve seen a Madea movie or a previous Paranormal Activity–you probably have a strong idea how these movies end.)

So, I saw two bad movies. Thankfully, not in the same day. In both movies, characters are not friends with logic and the plot is not there to make sense–just to set-up scenes that the audience will (hopefully) enjoy.

A Madea Christmas, a comedy, is pretty good at setting up scenes that pay off in laughter. “Smart” characters do stupid things and viewers can see the consequences of bad decisions coming a mile away. However, the dramatic conflicts set up lots of opportunities for Tyler Perry, Larry (The Cable Guy) and Kathy Najimy to trade jokes. It’s not always knee slapping funny (and stereotypes for everyone!), but they are good for a chuckle.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is a movie that I walked out on after about an hour. I understand from other folks that the ending was this super awesome thing but I just didn’t care. It would have been a lot easier to like if there were some decent scares along the way to the finale. When you are sitting in a horror movie bored, faults that you would usually gloss over become too big to ignore. And beg to be mocked.

For example, this is Jesse, our main character and marked one, when he meets a girl at a party:

Hey, girl.  Let’s go back to my house. Oh, wait, my grandma’s not in bed. Let’s go downstairs to the apartment where a woman rumored to be a witch was murdered a few days ago. A condom?* Oh, snap! Let me run off and get one and leave you here in this dead witch’s place–by the way, her killer is still at large. What could go wrong? Be right back!

 And they communicate with the evil force through this:

simon

Yeah. I’m sure I’ll watch the rest of The Marked Ones one day. Whenever it comes on tv and I can dvr it – and fast forward.

Conclusion: The people behind the Paranormal Activity franchise should tap Tyler Perry to write the screenplay for an upcoming chapter in the series. In fact, I think I’d like to see Madea and Jesse’s grandma (she knows Simon is evil!) team up in a movie to tackle a haunted house or a demon possessed mom-to-be.

*If nothing else, I was happy to see the young lady insist on a condom. Somebody in this movie had some sense.

Old Song for a New Year

Happy 2014!

May the love, light and laughter you experienced in 2013 continue to bring joy to your heart and strength to your spirit. Everything else, feel free to let go…

She Almost Got Me

wowwzers

The marketing was fierce. For several days, everywhere I turned…there seemed to be a pull towards the “buy” button.*

1st Wave: The Fans

I woke up Friday morning, ready to see my timelines full of people trying to recover from Scandal. Low and behold, many of those who had been slayed by Mama Pope, Papa Pope, and little Olivia Pope had been revived, given life anew by an unexpected but highly anticipated release!

That’s when the legend started: no promotion, no marketing, no nothing – she just reached through the Internet and touched her fans. It sounded like the artist had just put up a blog post somewhere that a fan found and then the news spread by word of mouth. Imagine my surprise when I went to the iTunes store and there was only 1 artist featured on the front page.

Suddenly, the spell was broken. I bet no matter where you were in the world, if you went to the iTunes store the same artist was featured prominently. That kind of looks like promotion to me–a really, really big promotion…

Still, I liked the joy and exuberance expressed by the fans.  It’s good to see excited, happy people. I couldn’t wait for the Holiday Spectacular edition of The Read. 🙂

2nd Wave: The Media

The news media was just so late – scrambling to understand what was going on and five steps behind the fans. If you didn’t have iTunes or have a lot of fans in your timeline, they made sure to fill you in.

3rd Wave: The Feminists/Cultural Critiques

The album hadn’t seen a good 48 hours before the blog posts analyzing the product itself and the quality of the artist’s feminism appeared. To my knowledge, I haven’t heard one note of this album–but I know all about Jay-Z’s issues with anime, themes of empowerment vs faux empowerment that upholds the patriarchy, etc.

I thought, “Maybe I should buy the album so I can hear for myself.” How can I judge the quality of the “conversation” or debate if I haven’t experience the music for myself.**

Look at that marketing genius–even the detractors still drive you to the “buy” button.

I realized that I had spent more time in the last few days thinking about the artist than I had in the last year.

Well played, Queen B.

theundisputedqueen

*I prefer buying the 2 or 3 songs that I like instead of downloading whole albums – no need to clutter up my hard drive with songs I’m not going to listen to.

**Then, it hit me. By having conversations and discussion about feminism etc via social media outlets, do we actually feed the capitalist patriarchal machine by drawing eyeballs to the ads and commercials in the sidebar? Or is the intellectual depth of our conversation enough to offset the capitalist, patriarchal footprint–and that ad for the Whirlpool Freestanding Range? <–This is the point when I backed away from the Internet and read a book. One can over-think things.