Tyler Perry's Abomination

To begin our Tyler Perry film study. The real title is Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a marriage counsellor. As all Tyler Perry movies it is titled with his name because as we all know he's actually Oprah dressed as a man. The title also has a sub-title 'Confessions of a Marriage Counsellor'. In the entire movie there is no point at which the marriage counsellor confesses, so this already confused me a little.

Enough with the title. The movie opens up with a white couple arguing in therapy, the marriage counsellor guesses that the wife is having an affair and decides to tell her a story. This is where I get confused with the term confession, the counsellor is not confessing to her client, she tells her the story as though it happened to her sister. Also all of this is extremely unethical!
It's like Tyler Perry sits on his toilet with his laptop, with copies of 'Psychologies', 'Essence' (so that he can really get into the black female mind), 'Cosmopolitan' (so that he can write from the perspective of morally corrupt white women). After skim reading those he types in the words 'hot', 'black' and 'men' into google so that he gets satisfactory males leads. Then types in 'black' and 'woman' so that he can get any type of black female lead. In this case the lead, Judith is played by emaciated Jurnee Smollet-Bell, who was cute as a kid in Eve's Bayou but is still trying to pull those precocious kid faces in her twenties. Brandy Norwood is in it as a mysterious, troubled woman signified by the fact that she covers up with a hoodie and wears 'lesbian boots'.

The only thing that got me through this movie was the fact that my friend had snuck brandy into the theatre and laced my slushie with it (the drink not the actress). This movie was so boring that when the time came for the naive Judith to try sniffing a line of cocaine with the rich playboy Harley I literally scramed at the screen 'Don't do it!!!!'. Not because I was worried for the protagonist but because once that line was sniffed I knew that would add on another 3 hours to the length of the movie.

All the characters are wooden and just downright stupid! The protagonist, Judith has a master's degree in psychology and is working as an in-house thereapist at a glorified brothel. Questons that sprung to mind were: Why doesn't she work at a state facility in the first place, which is what she's doing at the end of the film? Why does an educated girl allow herself to have unsafe sex and become a drug addict? Why is the entire climax of this movie based on a one in a million coincidence? Why does Vanessa Williams have a terrible French accent in it.

I'd have to say the one good thing about this movie was Kim Kardashian. She was absolutely sublime with a great onscreen presence and brilliant comic timing. She lit up the screen as Ava and her beauty captivated the audience...NOT! You know a movie is really really bad when the best thing about it happens to be Kim Kardashian.

India's Ladyboys

I watched a really interesting documentary on BBC lifestyle the other day, shown as part of their extraordinary people aka freaks that we can gasp and laugh at season. The documentary was called 'India's ladyboys' and told the story of a group of Hijras living in a squalid flat in Bangalore, India.
In India Hijras are sometimes considered to be a third sex, this is in no way official but it is difficult to describe them as anything but. They are a subculture that includes cross-dressers, transgenders, drag queens, hermaphrodites and eunuchs.

The documentary featured a small group of Hijra's which then leads on to the wider spectrum of the entire community. By the end of the documentary the flatmates travel to Koovagam where there is an annual Hijra festival. The festival has religious roots in that it re-enacts the myth of Lord Vishnu taking the form of a woman to marry the Lord Koothandavar, who gets killed in battle the next day. The second stage of the re-enactment is when the Hijra's must then mourn their symbolic husbands and have their glass bangles broken. The festival also features dance competitions and beauty pagents. The contestants get all dressed up and for a brief moment in time they can flaunt the fact that they are neither man nor woman. The rest of the year they live in secret, if they can pass for women then they are women if they cannot then they continue to dress as men when in public.

The documentary was really touching not only to see the squalid conditions most of the Hijra's live in, the fact that most of them turn to sex-work just to make a living, cut-off from their families who sometimes even threaten to kill themselves should they ever see their sons dressed as women, but also because it is blatently clear how few options these people have in India. I take for granted the society I live in that allows a spectrum of deviations from the "norm". There are so many ways to express who we are, so many groups that will accept us even if our family's did disown us. In India there are none of these options! Homosexuality in itself is taboo therefore being transgender is something viewed with disgust and ridicule. These people get castrated in deplorable conditions because they cannot fit into "normal" India and must therefore fit into the Hijra society. Castration is not gender reassignment and they often experience problems with urination and cannot achieve sexual pleasure. They go through pain both physical and psychological. When you think about it this way, you almost want to say " Just pretend then! Why choose to be this way?!" Yet this illustrates, for me, the fact that it is so clearly not a choice. And how absolutely awful it is to discriminate against someone on the basis of something that they cannot choose.