Think Like A Man – Tim Story

About an hour in, my usually gently-spoken wife said: “ I don’t give a sh*t about any of these people – I’m off.” With relief, first time for a very long time, I left a movie half way through.

Excruciatingly unfunny, even the narrator in this mumbled, jabbered rubbish is scarcely comprehensible much of the time. Why people of colour do not scream with fury at the lazy, patronising, inverted racist cardboard stereotypes that (dis)grace this manipulative extended advert for a fatuous ‘self-help’ book, I don’t know. Perhaps they do.

Hollywood Rap-ese is becoming so incomprehensible we will soon need sub-titles so that we can at least understand enough to be affronted by the witless jibberish that passes for screenplays in far too many movies nowadays.

Every woman in this largely black cast is beautiful, coiffed and made-up to an ethnically white middle-class perfection every second of every day. They ooze the dishonest titillating sexuality of soft-core porn – all promise, no delivery. They talk and gossip in a mock-condescending way about their feckless, dumbstick-led men, in a mannered, chippy way that parodies even the worst excesses of Sex In The City. Their strategy: to lock their ‘cookies’ i.e their sexuality away in a cookie-jar presumably so their guys can see but not touch until they stump up with a ring. The objects of their supposed desires are a bunch of hip-talkin’-head-waggin’-eye-rollin’-sex-seekin’ layabouts desperate to get in, or stay in, their respective women’s beds while escaping intimacy and commitment: in fact anything approaching a relationship. They include Chris Brown fresh from his real life admitted assault on ex-girl-friend Rihanna.

The excuse for this ‘story’ is an actual self-help book by ‘comedian’ Steve Harvey Act Like a Lady – Think Like a Man and four women scour these words of wisdom to aid them in life’s most crucial task – how to get reluctant men to put a ring on their finger.

This is not a comedy – it’s not funny; it’s not a romance – there is none. The advice resembles a sales manual on how to con unsuspecting customers into buying double-glazing they don’t want.

Sexist and weirdly, patronisingly racist. Avoid like the plague.

http://pinterest.com/atthemovies

Filed under: Tim Story