Columnist Carol Daniel
The last time I walked out of a movie theater it was in 1980 when Jack Nicholson played in the horror/thriller The Shining. I’m afraid of horror films, and I don’t see any these days. But walking out of a movie for any reason is something I didn’t need to do again until the Eddie Murphy film Norbit was released.
I’ve never walked out of a movie I thought was inappropriate for my children until now. Why I thought this film would be anything like The Nutty Professor is beyond me. I knew it had a PG-13 rating, but the ratings system is often fraught with under-reactions and overreactions. This time, I can tell you the Motion Picture Association of America under-reacted on rating this film. From the 15 minutes I viewed, Norbit clearly should have been rated R. And I am so thankful that the theater management gave us all of our money back and commented that we weren’t the first to walk out.
The profanity, sexual content and use of such endearing terms as b—h (and other disgusting and harsh expressions for women, black people and the obese) came flying at you immediately. I kept thinking it would get better, but it didn’t. My oldest son actually excused himself and went to the bathroom to escape the images on the screen.
I had to apologize to them and explain that I thought the movie was going to be funny. Boy, was I wrong. And to an adult audience it was probably funny, but not funny enough for me.
I know it’s comedy, I know it’s only a movie and I know it’s personal taste, but come on! I don’t even have a problem with Tyler Perry donning a wig and a floral housecoat to play Medea. It’s not about that. And I’ve seen Martin Lawrence get into the fat suit a time or two and laughed, but Norbit takes the genre to a new level and it’s not a higher level.
I don’t even have enough space to go off about why the obese black woman has to have the ugly name “Raspusia” and the equally ugly disposition, while the love of Norbit’s life is the thin and beautiful one. I know, I know, there are plenty of evil skinny women, and it’s supposed to be comedy, but there were more than a few gasps of disbelief and moments of uncomfortable silence in the theater when some of the dialogue was being uttered.
I want to believe that we’ve turned the corner on black exploitation films that feature caricatures of us, but this might as well have been released in vaudeville. Perhaps the Foreign Press Corps got a whiff of this film and held a grudge (and its nose), which may have led to Eddie Murphy’s loss at the Academy Award for his Dream Girls performance.
I messed up by taking my sons to something like this. The really sad part to me is, several parents who also bought children that night stayed in the theater and I even heard from one parent who said, “My kids loved it.”
Now, I laughed a time or two during my short stay, but the movie would be just as funny without all the profanity and negative stereotypes. By and large, Hollywood still thinks the black experience is limited to certain characters and situations. There have been many breakouts and breakthroughs, but Norbit … that’s a setback.