Perry continues to pop up throughout the episode, and Token Black (the only African-American “South Park” kid) continues to laugh before stopping himself in self-loathing. Even Obama isn’t exempt from the “South Park” stereotype of every black person loving Perry. “I know it’s embarrassing, but I simply can’t help myself,” says the president.

Obviously, any franchise packed with racially charged material is going to get some negative feedback. Spike Lee himself has often been condemned for portraying African-Americans in a negative light, although his criticism of Perry seems more in line with Lee’s own movie from 2000 about modern-day minstrel shows, “Bamboozled.” Both men, however, attack controversial racial and social issues from within the perspective of the African-American community.

But Tyler has finally had enough of Spike’s insults, and fired back at the director during a recent press conference:

“I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee. Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, ‘This is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘You vote by what you see,’ as if black people don’t know what they want to see…

I’ve never seen Jewish people attack Seinfeld and say ‘this is a stereotype,’ I’ve never seen Italian people attack ‘The Sopranos,’ I’ve never seen Jewish people complaining about ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ or Dustin Hoffman in ‘Tootsie.’ I never saw it. It’s always black people, and this is something that I cannot undo.”

Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here, and there is no “right” answer to the debate over whether an audience knows what’s best for them (since people usually go to see Perry’s movies to be entertained, not to make a political statement, I imagine). But can we just focus on that last paragraph for a second? Tyler Perry has never heard Italian people attack “The Sopranos”? He must not have been looking very hard. Ditto for “Seinfeld.” 

But as for “Tootsie” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Perry digs himself into a hole here by not separating the history of race/ethnicity from the history of drag performances. Because those two movies, last time I checked, had nothing to do with the religion of the characters, although Dustin Hoffman as an actor is Jewish. Sure, Madea’s emphasis on religion is part of her identification with the black community, but saying, “Oh, Jewish people are allowed to dress in drag!” is the equivalent of saying, “Oh, Christians are allowed to dress in drag!” It is a straw man argument that combines too many different elements of culture (sexuality, race, religion) under one umbrella defense.

Spike’s criticisms of Perry deal with his portrayal of race, not religion. Whatever well-reasoned argument Perry may have had, his choice to compare Madea to Tootsie left me completely cold. Mrs. Doubtfire didn’t go around speaking Yiddish in an effort to blend in with her temple. Yes, both movies feature men in drag, and maybe Perry has a larger critique about our culture’s insensitivity to men dressed as women. But somehow I doubt it.

Reviewing Perry’s first solo outing as a screenwriter-producer for New York Press, I called “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” “a jumbled wreck of a movie, alternately prosaic and loony,” but added, “the source material is so rich and in-your-face sincere that it works anyway.” Here we are half a decade on: new movie, same verdict, times 100. Most of Perry’s movies are whiplash-inducing experiences, alternately clumsy and powerful, pandering and bold, crude and beautiful. Perry’s 10th film in five years, “For Colored Girls” — an adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s dramatic prose poem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” — is his most problematic work. It’s also his most ambitious.

Parts of it are so misjudged that it’s hard to look at the screen, and Perry still hasn’t overcome his greatest handicap, his tendency to treat the camera as a device for recording performances rather than as an expressive tool. But he’s made progress on that front, to the point where, in “Colored Girls,” he feels confident enough to block a scene of Loretta Devine’s character and her no-good boyfriend à la mid-’80s Woody Allen, letting them disappear momentarily behind walls and then reappear; or switch between plain expository dialogue and long sections of Shange’s poetry without breaking a sweat; or let monologues play out in long takes, often in gigantic, silent film-style close-ups. (Kimberly Elise — who starred in many Perry productions, including “Mad Black Woman” — is nothing short of astonishing here, plumbing depths of emotion that women rarely get to show in mainstream American films. She’s been as good during the past decade as Meryl Streep was in the ’80s, and she’s done it mostly without access to Streep-caliber projects.)

And even when it’s stumbling (which is often) “For Colored Girls” has an “I’m doing my thing, critics can go to hell” attitude that’s the hallmark of some of the more interesting auteurs, especially ones critics often write off as crude, simplistic, hysterical and otherwise unpleasant (Sam Fuller is one example). Perry never solves the stage-to-screen translation problem. But the path he has chosen is as intriguing as it is irksome, and it works better than you might expect. Perry comes from a tradition of Christianity-infused regional theater that defines characters in terms of social roles. Shange’s stage piece comes out of aggressively secular experimental theater and post-’60s concepts of black and female victimhood and empowerment. While not being remotely the same, the traditions are related, like cousins hailing from different branches of the same family tree. Shange and Perry are both mythologizers, converting unique personal experience into something universal.

Shange’s original was a “choreo-poem” that represented facets of black women’s experience in verse and dance. It was performed by seven unnamed speakers, each identified by a color (the woman in red, etc.). Perry’s movie integrates 14 of Shange’s poems into a characteristically Perry-esque ensemble that seems equally influenced by sitcoms, Douglas Sirk melodramas, Pedro Almodóvar pictures and early-’60s social problem dramas such as Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker” and the old CBS series “East Side, West Side.” Most of the major characters live in the same apartment building in Harlem and crisscross one another’s paths but don’t connect until the film’s final third. (The critic David Bordwell coined a great phrase for this kind of story: the “network narrative.”) The apartment building is managed by Gilda (Phylicia Rashad), a voyeuristic snoop who eavesdrops on fellow tenants but also offers advice and help and has a knack for talking troubled women off figurative ledges; it’s a holy-symbol-of-matriarchy role that would normally be filled by Perry himself, dolled up as Madea and bouncing around like a Bible-thumping Flip Wilson.

Perry pays tribute to aspects of his source without slavishly reproducing them. For instance, he and his production designer, Ina Mayhew, color-code the women and their stories via wardrobe colors and patterns, and with flower arrangements that appear at important junctures in the movie. More intriguing is Perry’s integration of poetry with straightforward movie dialogue, and his decision to have the women speak the poetry as if they were delivering non-musical arias — riding the crests of words, sometimes solo, sometimes in duos where monologues overlap or intertwine. (Why doesn’t Perry just direct a sung-through musical? His characters always seem like they’re on the verge of bursting into song anyway.)

The prose-poetry as opera lyrics notion might have been more effective if Perry hadn’t called attention to it. There’s a sequence toward the middle that cross-cuts between the brutal rape of one character — Yasmine, a dance teacher played by Anika Noni Rose — and an African-American opera company performing an Italian aria based on one of Shange’s poems. The sequence would be a bit much even if Perry didn’t pile on the woe by having another major character, magazine editor Jo (Janet Jackson), realize that her stockbroker husband (Omari Hardwick of “Kick-Ass”) is a closeted gay man by seeing him exchange glances with another hot guy in the opera house.

This is a prime example of the judgment problems I mentioned earlier. Simply by crosscutting between the aria, Jo’s realization and Yasmine’s assault, the sequence inadvertently suggests that the two women’s suffering is comparable, or all of a piece, or something, when in fact all it’s actually saying is, “See, folks, this material is operatic — and look, I turned it into an opera!” But on the plus side, I can’t think of another sequence in a recent American movie that throws aesthetic caution to the winds with such abandon, or portrays rape not merely as a physical attack, but as a spiritual violation. I’d rather watch a filmmaker attempt to be audacious and impassioned and fall on his face, as Perry does here, than watch mumbly-mouthed bromance characters lounge on sofas and insult each other’s video-game prowess.

A lot of cultural change has happened since 1974, and rather than simply update the play or set it in period, Perry sets it in a sort of theatrical never-never land, one in which people talk on cellphones and mention websites, yet wear faintly retro fashions (Kimberly Elise’s character, the magazine editor’s secretary, wears mid-’60s-looking short dresses and modified bouffant hairdo). It’s a film in which Loretta Devine’s character, a nurse and community center worker, can lecture a classroom full of women about the necessity for self-esteem and birth control and another character can contract HIV from a sleep-around lover, while yet another character, a young dancer named Nyla (Tessa Thompson from “Veronica Mars”), can get pregnant and decide to take care of it by visiting an alcoholic, chain-smoking abortionist mentioned (in a monologue, natch) by her promiscuous older sister (Thandie Newton).

To get to the abortionist, Nyla literally has to traverse a back alley and walk past a rogue’s gallery of ghetto scourges: dice-rollers, a junkie, a barking pit bull. Like so many Jesus-gonna-get-ya scenes in Perry films, it’s so intense that it crosses over into nutball comedy. (Perry could have gone for full-on “Airplane!”-style ludicrousness and capped the scene by having Nyla pass a mysterious figure in a black robe sacrificing a goat.) The scene is saved by the realization that less gothic versions of these situations still exist. And notice how Perry counteracts his fundamentalist antiabortion attitude by showing that Nyla, Tangie and their apocalyptically religious, pack-rat mother, Alice (Whoopi Goldberg), don’t question Nyla’s decision, and in fact seem to view it as inevitable and necessary. (Alice even remarks that Nyla had to get the evil out of her body.) The film encompasses pro-choice and antiabortion attitudes without making a fuss, and portrays the back-alley abortionist not as an evil person, but as a marginalized figure with serious substance abuse problems who nevertheless fills an urgent need within the community.

The film also encompasses other spectrums of attitudes toward hot-button topics. Jo’s on-the-down-low husband, for instance, defends his secret trysts by saying that he prefers to have sex with men but would rather have a woman as his life partner. In 99 out of 100 movies, the confession would be staged as a joke, proof of the man’s hypocrisy. In this film, the intensity and seriousness of it suggests that maybe the problem is one of categories — that there isn’t yet a label to affix to men like him, who have heterosexual minds and homosexual urges. (The film seems more disapproving of his failure to wear a condom than of his sexual life in general.)

Elise’s character, Crystal, has two young kids and is abused by their father, Beau Willie (Michael Ealy), an alcoholic ex-soldier (he was a Vietnam vet in Shange’s production but has been updated to Afghanistan service here). Although Perry gets a lot of flak for making his men irredeemably selfish or cruel and his women victims, I’ve never thought that criticism was fair. “For Colored Girls,” more than any of his movies, puts the lie to such complaints — especially in the Jo and Crystal storylines. What Willie does to Crystal is beyond awful, but between Shange’s original monologue, Perry’s wraparound screenplay and Ealy’s performance (his eyes seem to be imploding from sadness), we can’t despise the man. He’s a victim of both post-traumatic stress disorder and entitled patriarchal attitudes handed down over generations; he knows not what he does, and his wife and children are the ones who suffer because of it.

The flourish in Perry’s movie that might inspire the most debate is Gilda’s climactic statement to Elise that her pain won’t begin to heal until she admits that she bears partial responsibility for the miseries inflicted on her — that if she hadn’t stuck around so long, things might not have ended up so horrifically. Kirk Honeycutt’s Hollywood Reporter review of “For Colored Girls” calls this a “peculiar view” that suggests that “the women often collaborate in their victimhood. They invite the stranger into the home or let men stay when they clearly should go.”

That’s a neat trick on Honeycutt’s part, conflating Crystal’s misery (which is committed by a man she truly loves and who still has good in him) with Nyla’s rape (which is committed by a man she barely knows — a poster boy for macho entitlement, a guy who expects sex on the third date and won’t take no for an answer). There is no such “collaboration” in the movie, and Perry’s view isn’t a “peculiar” view at all. In fact, it’s modern. American feminism has changed a lot since 1975, and takes a less monolithic attitude toward male sexism and female suffering, conceding that while men can be oppressors and women oppressed, women do, after all, have free will; they can (and should) take responsibility for their pain as well as their pleasure. and exert control over both. These are more complex attitudes than Perry’s broad-brushstroke filmmaking might seem capable of articulating. Articulate them he does — not that critics notice or care. In their eyes he’ll always be an interloper, and he’ll never get credit for being anything but a vulgarian bumpkin who made a fortune pandering to black churchgoers and kissing Oprah Winfrey’s ring.

I’ve barely touched on what I like best about Perry: the fact that, in film after film, he gathers together some of the greatest African-American actresses in America — actresses who are lucky to get one or two scenes in a film with a predominantly white cast — in leading roles that let them chase dreams, make mistakes, fall in love, have their hearts broken, flirt, seduce, manipulate, preen, pout, rail against injustice, and endure and transcend Old Testament-level suffering. And they reward Perry with performances so heartfelt, and often so accomplished, that they make all of his films worth seeing no matter what you think of him as a director.

Consider Jackson, who made no particular impression as the title character in her debut film “Poetic Justice,” but has been knocking performances out of the park for Perry. She outdoes herself here — especially in the scene where she confronts her husband over his secret life, and Perry stays on her in a tight close-up while she describes exactly how he’s broken her heart. It’s not just Jackson’s short haircut and traumatized eyes that might remind viewers of Jane Wyman or Joan Crawford; Perry gets at the mix of masculine hyper-competitiveness and feminine vulnerability that has always defined Jackson, and links it to the wily, lonely coldness often captured in Wyman and Crawford performances, a directorial gambit of tremendous perceptiveness. He’s just as sharp directing Jackson’s costars — especially Elise, Rashad and Devine (who, judging from her work in Perry’s films and in assorted lowdown slapstick movies, can do just about anything). This isn’t just a repertory company he’s been building over the last few years. It’s an all-star team.

Perry gets grief from critics not just because he’s an outsider who’s still riding a learning curve, but because he mixes moods and genres with the blithe confidence of an old Hollywood filmmaker, switching from dumb slapstick to three-hankie melodrama and back again within minutes. (Critical barbs about Perry’s early films often boiled down to the critic’s belief that knife-twisting tragedy, drag comedy and you-go-girl empowerment messages can’t, or maybe shouldn’t, mix — a rule that will come as shocking news to Almodóvar.) If he had a strong eye and were able to modulate actors’ performances with more finesse, his uniqueness would be more celebrated.

He’s got a touch of the vibrant renegade looniness that they prize in directors such as Sam Fuller, who in the mental institution potboiler “Shock Corridor” had inmates deliver purplish rants about hot-button social issues as if they were projecting to the back row of some personal theater of the mind, and sometimes intercut the rants with footage from other Sam Fuller movies. Over the years I’ve often said that the only thing standing between Tyler Perry and a spot alongside Fuller in the pantheon of great American primitivists is half a year of film school. I stand by that statement. Perry has the soul of an artist but not the chops. If he could do something about that, he’d be unstoppable.

But as ubiquitous as Tyler Perry movies are, they are equally as contentious. And as “Why Did I Get Married Too?” (which did not screen prior to its release) opens this Friday — most likely met with big box office and lukewarm reviews — I am bracing myself for the inevitable debates to come about Tyler Perry, the man and the work.

Over on my blog, Racialicious, any discussion of Tyler Perry immediately becomes polarized, with fans and detractors fighting for comment space. Does Tyler Perry really speak to the black community, or just a small, primarily religious and middle-class portion of it? Do his movies condone domestic violence? Should we support his movies regardless of what we think of them, knowing there are so few successful black filmmakers? And don’t even get readers started on Medea — the wisecracking, pistol-packing grandma with a heart of (tarnished) gold, the role that catapulted Perry to fame. The debate gets louder with each new release, but the argument boils down to one question: Does Perry’s importance as a black filmmaker — who uses actors and actresses of color — outweigh the mediocrity of his work?

It’s a question I go back and forth on. As a feminist, I bristle in my seat at his treatment of women. Nichole at Postbourgie throws a wrench in the Perry machine, noting:

TP wants to teach women how to have successful relationships by making sure their male partners are satisfied. His morality plays, on stage and film, scold women: Be quiet, in appearance and voice. Don’t try to be more than what you are. Serious ambition is a danger to the family. Be grateful for “good enough.” Wait for the right man to notice you. Don’t bring attention to yourself. Be appropriately thankful when a man takes care of you.

Of course, part of Perry’s problem is the unfair burden placed on him as one of only two prominent African-American filmmakers, along with Spike Lee. There certainly are other black directors — Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Singleton, Kasi Lemmons and Darnell Martin, to name a few — but only Lee and Perry have the power and influence to produce major motion pictures, which puts an intense scrutiny on their choice of subject matter and project. (Tyler Perry’s decision to write and adapt Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored GirlsWho Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” wasn’t exactly met with parades. I wrote about my own misgivings at the time.) 

But while Spike Lee’s movies are searing investigations into the black American psyche, Perry has more in common with the bland Hollywood romantic comedies of Ken Kwapis (“He’s Just Not That Into You,” “License to Wed”), Garry Marshall (“Valentine’s Day,” “Raising Helen,” “Runaway Bride,” “Pretty Woman”) and Robert Luketic (“The Ugly Truth,” “Monster in Law,” “Win a Date With Tad Hamilton”). 

Tyler Perry, at heart, is an entertainer. He’s good at churning out stories about people battling with life and love. There’s nothing remarkable about the scripts that he produces; in a way, he’s only doing what thousands of other white filmmakers do — he’s eking out a living making formulaic date flicks. But consider the fact that the romantic comedies of the past year barely featured minority extras — far less minority heroes — and you get a sense of how extraordinary it is that Tyler Perry puts African-American stories front and center in his films.

In the meantime, I just bought two tickets to “Why Did I Get Married, Too?” on Fandango. But if anyone asks, I’m there supporting Jill Scott. 

That’s a lot of adversity to overcome, a virtual trauma pile-up, and you could argue that Precious’ story — as it’s told in Sapphire’s 1996 novel and as it’s adapted here — would actually be more effective if some of these dire circumstances had been dialed down just a bit, leaving some room to focus on Precious as an individual rather than as a symbolic victim. In the novel, Sapphire seems to be striving to pack in the greatest number of personal and social problems for maximum heartstring-tugging, point-making value, and the ultimate solutions to Precious’ complex, anguishing problems — education, the love of a few key people who genuinely care — come off as too pat.

That problem extends, to a point, to this movie version, directed by Lee Daniels. (Geoffrey Fletcher adapted the screenplay, and its executive producers include dual powerhouses Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.) But the performances are so plainspoken and direct that they manage to push the material beyond the confines of a mere social-problem tract — as played by the cast, these characters aren’t symbols of inner-city hardship, but people. When we first meet Sidibe’s Precious — the story is set in 1987 Harlem — she’s a girl who might be better off, practically speaking, if she could just close herself off from the world. But Precious isn’t closed off, as Sidibe plays her: She’s cautiously expressive; she may be watchful, but she’s curious, too. She shows flashes of a sense of humor, even though she can barely afford to have one. And she doesn’t mind going to school: For one thing, she has a crush on her math teacher, and she harbors cheerful daydreams that he’ll whisk her off to a nice life in the white-bread suburbs.

That’s a world away from her life at home. In the evenings, she does her best to cook meals for her sour-spirited mother, who berates her with a degree of cruelty that’s almost unbearable to watch. (Mo’Nique plays the role with unnerving efficiency, her face a mask of nearly immobile hardness.) Precious tunes out, when she can, by drifting into escapist fantasies, most of which involve an imaginary “light-skinned boyfriend with nice hair” and an array of diva-like costumes, accompanied by the adoration of camera flashes, though Precious has no skills upon which to build that fame — in fact, she can’t even read.

Fortunately for Precious (though admittedly a little too late — we’re talking about a 16-year-old girl who’s unable to recognize simple words like “at”), a tough-minded principal urges her to switch to a special school. There, enrolled in a pre-GED class taught by an unsentimental but compassionate teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton, in a meticulously controlled, no-nonsense performance), Precious is finally able to live a life in the world, instead of only in her mind.

There are other links in Precious’ support net: Lenny Kravitz shows up as the marvelously named “Nurse John,” the dreamboat health professional who befriends Precious when he assists in the birth of her second child. And Mariah Carey, in a superb, tough little performance, plays a welfare worker, Mrs. Weiss, who tugs like a terrier to get Precious to open up. Carey’s approach to the character is both hard-nosed and delicate: She understands the idea of intimidation as an act of kindness.

What Daniels seems to recognize, perhaps even unconsciously, is that even though this is supposed to be Precious’ story, for most of it she’s a passive, if sensitive, receptor: The forces swirling around her provide most of the drama’s dynamics. And within that context, Sidibe’s performance is understated but alert. It’s not her line delivery that gets to you, but the cautious curve of her smile, a smile in which she indulges only occasionally. When we see her going off to her first day of school, the blue plastic beads she wears around her neck are a dash of visual confidence, offsetting the shyness of her lumbering carriage.

Daniels — who produced “Monster’s Ball” and directed a previous feature, the 2005 drama “The Shadowboxer” — indulges too frequently in gratuitous shaky camera work, and the picture overall has a dull, grayish look. Those stylistic choices are predictable, but in other ways, Daniels is sensitively attuned to the story he’s telling: He takes care to keep the long list of horrific details of Precious’ life from being too relentless — he doesn’t flinch from them, but he doesn’t seek to punish us with Precious’ tribulations, either. The actors are in tune, too, knowing how to break the story’s thunderclouds: At one point Precious emerges from her baffled silence to ask Mrs. Weiss outright, “What color are you, anyway?” “Precious” is a blunt, effective piece of work that succeeds not because it paints a realistic, believable picture of inner-city hardship, but in spite of it. Its characters are rescued, perhaps just barely, from the worst fate imaginable: that of being case studies.