SPEARE'S TIPS: THE FILMS OF 2/20: Madea Goes to Jail, Fired Up!

It’s very frustrating when a film that you chose for your slate packs up and moves, isn’t it? Imagine it happening to a whole handful of titles, all in the space of about a week! It just hangs there in your lineup, unable to help you out, useless as an abscessed tooth. So let this be an alert to all of you guys: If any of you have any of the following films on any of your lineups, you need to get them OUT.

Possession
This Side of the Truth
Vanilla Gorilla
New York, I Love You
All About Steve
Youth in Revolt

And now, it seems, The Accidental Husband and A Perfect Getaway have followed suit. What's next? Place your bets! (My money's on Janky Promoters.)

Due to the number of players that have still not entered the February leagues, I have decided to dispense with the usual curfew of mid-month and just let people trickle in on their own. For players like W, who has been absent ever since his laptop suffered an unfortunate mishap, and TheJman, who informed me that he is currently moving from Sydney to London (quite a trek), exceptions can and must be made. Of course, time and tide, and the Super Leagues wait for no man, and if the consequence of their absence mean eventual elimination, c’est la vie. (I’m sure everyone languishing near the bottom of the standings will be breathing a sigh of relief as that red zone gets smaller and smaller.)

So on to the films of February 20th. After two consecutive really crowded weekends, late February 2009 seems to be very thin, given that there are only two major (along with two minor) wide-release films being put into theaters. Of course, moviegoers every where have already started girding their loins for Watchmen, wondering if this will be the cinematic event of the year or the worst reason in history to sleep on the sidewalk. But anyway, let’s gab about this week’s featured picks.

Some studios can be reliably counted upon to turn out a certain volume of films per year. Sometimes you can count on an actor or actress to appear as the lead in one or two films in a twelve-month period. But the last three years, no writer-director has been as consistent as Tyler Perry. This man has, since late 2006, put out one film every six months. You could almost set your watch to it.

Despite what their IMDb User Ratings might tell you, most critics will agree that Perry is a quality director. You probably won’t find a more popular director among the African-American population, if the number of BET Comedy Awards, Black Movie Awards, Black Reel Awards and Image Awards are anything to go by (not to mention a couple of MTV Movie awards). Whether his project is a comedy or a drama, you can pretty much always count on Perry’s films to have very good opening weekends and a very reasonable total box office take.

Probably the most popular character in Perry’s arsenal is the wisecracking, troublemaking grandmother Madea (who is played to the hilt by Perry himself). In 2005, the character made her big-screen debut in Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which pulled in over $20 million on its O.W. en route to a $50 million purse. One year later, she returned in Madea’s Family Reunion, which elicited an even more impressive take of $63 million (after a $30 million O.W.). So how well will Madea Goes to Jail (PG-13) do by comparison? I would say, the odds are it will do quite well.

In this segment, Madea’s penchant for shenanigans lands her behind bars, where she ends up coming to the rescue of Candace (Keshia Knight Pulliam), a fellow inmate who is being victimized by a large inmate named Big Sal. Derek Luke (Notorious) co-stars, along with KeKe Palmer (The Longshots), Viola Davis (Doubt), and Vanessa Ferlito (Nothing Like the Holidays). Dr. Phil also has a cameo, if that’s a deal-breaker for you…

African-American comedies are a mixed bag. Sometimes they hit, sometimes not, but Tyler Perry has a very reliable following, and a minimum opening of $20 million seems likely for Madea Goes to Jail, and if it can manage $25 million, I think it has a very decent shot at #1. Friday the 13th is tracking huge, but horror movies almost universally suffer big drops in its second weekend, and this will probably be no exception. Though the User Rating will probably once again be in the “completely unfair” range of 3.5 to 5.5, I see it pulling in ten or eleven Top 5 points, four or five PTA, and no worse than $45 million in total receipts.

For $15 in the Ultimate leagues ($12 in Box Office), this might be a very good pick for you. Sure, it’ll probably hurt you in User Ratings, but look at it this way: very few titles have really set the world on fire in that category anyway. Case in point: only two wide-release films since the start of 2009 have managed a Rating well above 7.0, those being Taken and the surprise hit Coraline. So maybe the handicap isn’t as bad as you might think.

The genre of teenage sex comedies is not a new creation, but, just like any category, it seems that for every good title that comes out, four or five bottom-feeders come with it. For every Superbad there’s a College; for every Animal House there’s a Sex Drive; for every Porky’s there’s a Porky’s II: The Next Day. And, sorry to say, Fired Up! (PG-13) looks like it will be on the back end of the coin rather than the front.

Even though it’s rated PG-13 for “crude and sexual content, partial nudity, language and teen partying”, this is one title that will probably not pack them in. (“Partial” nudity? What’s the point then?) Put it simply, this is a film for teenage guys with nothing else to do, and that will not translate into big, or even mid-range, numbers.

In Fired Up!, 28-year-old Nicholas D’Agosto and 31-year-old Eric Christian Olsen play Shawn and Nick, the stars of their HIGH-SCHOOL football team. (I always laugh when I see people playing high-school students who are old enough to have kids in middle school, don’t you?) However, rather than suffer through another grueling pre-season of football camp, they decide to switch to cheerleading, accompanying the girls up to cheerleading camp, where they are surrounded by hot babes 24/7. Can the boys do their best Kirsten Dunst impressions, motivating their “team” to victory why still getting their freak on? (Insert sounds of crickets chirping here.)

I believe that in order for a film of this ilk to be successful, it has to have recognizable names either in front of the camera or behind it. Fired Up! has neither. Honestly, the only names I recognize in the cast at all are veteran character actor Philip Baker Hall and actress Sarah Roemer, who co-starred with Shia LaBeouf in Disturbia. Throw them together for ninety minutes of thinly-veiled innuendo and homophobic humor, and you have a film that should have taken its clue from the last American Pie movie and gone straight to DVD.

This film is priced at only $6 in both leagues, and if you really feel in your heart (or somewhere somewhat south of your heart) that this film has a shot at the Top 5, go for it. I predict zero Top 5 points, no PTA, and $15 million at the Box Office, tops. The User Rating will be self-inflicted. Do like the poster for this film says, and give it a big “F.U.”


My predictions for the weekend of February 20-22:

1. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail - $26 million
2. Friday the 13th - $19 million
3. Confessions of a Shopaholic - $11 million
4. The International - $10 million
5. He’s Just Not That Into You - $9 million


Well, that will do it for another week. Next week, I’ll have an equally light schedule, with only two more movies slated for release on February 27th: The Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert Movie Film For Theaters OMG!, which will no doubt pack in every salivating preteen girl in creation; and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, the latest in a long line of low-grade video-game adaptations.

Later!