Annette Bening Deserves Better, Tyler Perry Deserves Nothing, and Other March 2024 Watches

Or: March 2024 and What I Watched

More from Hung Up this month: Challengers promo budget going crazy, things you might not need but maybe want, and a Club Chalamet update and an update to the Club Chalamet update.

Forgive me … and I mean just a little bit … I have to say … Arm. Kelly Rowland and Trevante Rhodes in Mea Culpa. Photo: Netflix.

Mea Culpa
New release
Well.
Tyler Perry’s Netflix movie is about a lawyer named Mea clearing the name of an artist (Trevante Rhodes) with a missing girlfriend. I was mumbling and cackling. It makes no sense in bold and radical ways: sex on a bedsheet covered in paint? Sure. An anesthesiologist with no job, an attitude, and a fade? Definitely. Kelendria Rowland getting sprayed in the face with Windex? As Peyton said onstage at Ira! Live: “Abolitition first. And life in prison for Tyler Perry, second.”

The Effect
Revival
Just when I thought people are never sexy anymore, when I was asking whatever happened to people being sexy … I saw the revival of The Effect (good play) at The Shed (weird place). For everything M*a C*lpa didn’t deliver on, The Effect did. I almost planned a trip to London last year because I wanted to see this show so bad; it played in New York for a month. (The playwright, Lucy Prebble, was an EP of Succession and wrote I Hate Suzie.)

Someone told me the premise was like a sexy Black Mirror episode: Two young people participate in a clinical trial for an anti-depressant and start having feelings for one another. Is the desire they’re feeling theirs? Or are the the drugs just reacting? The play is sparse and lean: Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are the young clinical trial participants, an unlikely pair with mood swings and lovely mumbled affection. They run deliriously hot and cold. Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith play the trial’s administrators, a duo with a vexing history of their own. It was so good! Funny and discomfiting and sometimes strange. The ending didn’t land for me, but everything else did. (You can read the script here.)