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...economy is near the top of every campaign agenda, even though none of the candidates have ever balanced a state budget or run a company. No President can magically fix what ails this economy, but White House policies--on taxing and spending, trade and regulation--will set the stage for recovery. Here's where the candidates stand on five key issues: [This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] DEMOCRAT Hillary Clinton DEMOCRAT Barack Obama REPUBLICAN John McCain 'I would take immediate, comprehensive action to fix the housing crisis.' Calls for a $30 billion emergency fund to help...
...movies come off like neutered versions of his strutting, crazily intense stage shows (available on the seven-disc DVD set Tyler Perry: The Plays). These are the source material for almost all his films. Onstage, you can see the author and his cast sweating to please a live audience, which hoots its disapproval of the naughty characters and its delight at all that vigor. Also, the shows are musicals, and it's during the singing that they really soar--Dreamgirls meets the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, and the congregation's spirits raise the roof...
...Perry, who in civvies has the smooth good looks of a Will Smith, cuts an arresting figure. Outfitted in a purple print dress, giant glasses and sandbag bosom, carrying a purse with three handguns and punctuating every comment with the wave of a cigarette, the star stomps around the stage shouting out orders and ridiculing the supporting characters for being too short, too fat or insufficiently black. In these "recorded live" stage performances, he also evidently enjoys breaking the other actors' rhythm. You're encouraged to believe that this is a free-form stage dress rehearsal and that Perry takes...
...house he built in suburban Atlanta. You could also ask if Perry is mocking the folks he hopes to uplift. But his form of comic melodrama depends on creating emotional extremes, acute cartoons of recognizable behavior, people who hurt and get hurt. Public humiliation is the penance his stage characters must endure before they are absolved in a final embrace and bring the curtain down with a full-throated gospel song...
...would be nice if some of the down-home fervor and neck-snapping incongruities of his stage shows could be duplicated in movies. They might not cross over to the wider audience, but that shouldn't concern Perry. His core crowd loves him. And, he surely believes, so does Jesus...