Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: Tyler Perry, Madea, and me
Having just encountered Tyler Perry’s tenth self-directed feature, Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family, and his eleventh big screen venture (he didn’t direct the first one), it’s incredible to realize that prior to February of 2005, I had never even heard of a Tyler Perry. That’s about the time the standee for Diary of a Mad Black Woman went up in the lobby of the theater that qualified as my day job. Just glancing at it, I was intrigued by the title and thought this might be something worth checking out. (That translates as “something I wasn’t going to fob off on another reviewer.”) I did notice that the name Tyler Perry was more prominently—and more often—featured than that of the titular director, Darren Grant, and I read up on just who this Perry fellow was.
