Someone give Eddie Murphy a good sci-fi role!

This past Saturday I was coming home from a visit upstate to see some old friends. The return bus was crowded, as you might imagine, but I found an aisle seat next to a dude who had a laptop. He was watching a movie. Normally I cringe whenever I'm on a bus that shows movies because usually, there's never a headphone jack available, which means that you get to watch the movie whether you want to or not. (Greyhound has been guilty of this many times.) I've sat through some stinkers as a result. Here, at least, I didn't have to worry, because the guy had his headphones on. He also had Spanish subtitles on as well - not that my Spanish is all that great.

Anyway, the movie he was watching was Meet Dave, that Eddie Murphy flick where he's a tiny alien secretly infiltrating Earth in the disguise of a life-sized android. I did not need audio with this movie to see how crappy it was. The special effects were not quite that special; there was a subplot involving a human family, in particular a little kid, that looked quite cliched; one of the alien characters was a gay stereotype, something Murphy has a rep for trafficking in; and the movie in general did not look terribly inspired. I watched it for no other reason than it was a way to kill time, but I couldn't help but wonder what the dude next to me saw in it.

I was actually gonna write something about Murphy a few weeks ago before he announced his resignation as Oscar host in the wake of the Brett Ratner controversy, but I found that this piece represented my feelings about Murphy quite well and even made me reappraise him a bit. Love him or hate him, his impact on modern comedy films, not to mention his status as a pioneer for black actors in general, is monumental. (Seriously, read that article; it's long, but well worth it.) One thing it didn't go into in any detail, however, and something that I think is worth exploring, is his geeky side.

Murphy has made eleven live-action films that could safely be called either sci-fi, fantasy, or horror: The Golden Child, Vampire in Brooklyn, The Nutty Professor 1 and 2, Doctor Dolittle 1 and 2, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, The Haunted Mansion, Meet Dave, Imagine That, and the forthcoming A Thousand Words. Those first ten films have an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 29, with the highest (and only fresh-rated) one being The Nutty Professor's 66, which is just barely a passing grade. 

That Murphy has made crappy movies in recent years is not news. But Dave, if anything, reminded me of his jones for science fiction in general and one aspect of it in particular. In Dave, one of his roles is as the captain of a crew of aliens. They wear crisp, militaristic uniforms and operate out of a sleek, post-modern looking bridge on their "vessel" (the aforementioned life-sized android). Sound familiar?

It should! Murphy is a closet Trekkie. So much so, in fact, that he originally wanted to be in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the whale one) and would have been had Paramount not gotten cold feet at the last minute. Given this, not to mention the fact that black people have a dubious history in sci-fi films and action films in general, I wanna see him in a good sci-fi film one day.

He deserves it, don't you think? If other geeks like Samuel L. Jackson and Simon Pegg can cash in on their fanboy status with good roles in good movies like Unbreakable and Paul, then why can't Murphy find better geek roles? Why has he settled for less - and more importantly, why has he not embraced his inner geek, as guys like Jackson and Pegg have clearly done, to their advantage? Movies like Meet Dave and The Haunted Mansion seem to come across as family films first, geek films second. I think Murphy could generate some genuine goodwill by, say, a Comic-Con appearance or an interview on Attack of the Show, and possibly expand his fanbase as a result.

He also needs to work with better directors. This is something I've been saying for years. I'd like to see him return to his Beverly Hills Cop/48 Hours roots with a director like Michael Mann or Brian DePalma, or even someone edgier, a Darren Aronofsky-type, perhaps. But if we're talking about making a good sci-fi/fantasy movie, then perhaps someone like Guillermo del Toro or Alfonso Cuaron or Duncan Jones might be the move instead.

It's not too late. Murphy has indicated that he wants to get away from the children's films. Tower Heist, while it was far from a critical hit, was a step in the direction of the Murphy of old, the one millions of people adored for many years, which is all well and good. I think finding a quality genre film, though, could be very satisfying for him personally.

Thoughts?

Devil in a Blue Dress/How to Train Your Dragon

Devil in a Blue Dress
seen online via Crackle


How to Train Your Dragon
seen on TV @ HBO on Demand
12.4.11

Okay, this is an unusual doubleheader, I admit, but I totally did not plan it this way. I thought about separating these into two different entries, but that would mess up my schedule, and I wanted to write about them sooner rather than later. Plus, one of them is a LAMB Acting School entry, which I'm sure will look weird to people coming here from the LAMB site, but whatever. This has never been a conventional movie blog.

Recently I read a Walter Mosley "Easy Rawlins" novel for the first time. It was Bad Boy Brawley Brown, a later book in the series. Mosley is one of those authors that I was interested in sampling, but never got around to for whatever reason, until I acquired this book at a book swap several months ago. It's deep into continuity and it refers to events from previous books that I had never read, but I was still able to get into it.


This is actually kinda ironic, considering my reading habits in the past. Take comics. As a kid, I thought nothing of coming into an individual issue of a comic book that references past events if the story I was reading right then and there was good. As I got older, that changed. Suddenly, I needed to start from the very beginning on a new series or I'd be less likely to read it. That shouldn't matter quite so much, but a lot of times it does.


Serialization has become much more highly valued - in film, in television, in books. I remember watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it first came on TV, but then it moved to a different night, one I wasn't able to watch it on, and when I tried to come back to it weeks later I was lost. (Now, of course, one can watch episodes of certain current shows online or even read recaps, but I didn't have that option back then.)


One reason I liked The X-Files so much was that it was a mixture of stand-alone episodes and ones that advanced the ongoing plot. Not every episode had to feed into the major story. Then again, the first time I saw 24 was on DVD and I was utterly captivated by the ongoing plot, advanced with each individual episode, and was hungry for more. So I suppose I can see it both ways.

Devil in a Blue Dress is much earlier in the Easy Rawlins series, and it's a shame that the film version never took off into a franchise of its own. Rawlins is a character straight out of the classic films noir of the past, yet being black, his experiences are different than those of Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade, and Denzel Washington embodies him to perfection. I'd love to see someone revive the Rawlins character for the movies. Idris Elba could easily fill Washington's shoes.


Devil was Don Cheadle's breakthrough film, if I'm not mistaken. His impact on the story, as Rawlins' loose-cannon sidekick, is powerful. I've enjoyed him in his subsequent films as well; he projects a strong, confident masculinity and an assured cockiness no matter which side of the law his characters are on, but he can also go deep emotionally. In addition to Devil, I've seen him in Rosewood, Boogie Nights (very subtle performance), Bulworth, Mission to Mars, Traffic, Swordfish, Ocean's Eleven, Talk to Me, Iron Man 2 and The Guard. Fine actor.


Okay. Switching gears now.

I met Rachel at a comics convention several years ago. She was pushing a superhero comic she wrote and she was there with her artist. I'd see her off and on a few times at cons and then I lost track of her for awhile. I found her again on Facebook and it turned out she switched gears to filmmaking, specifically screenwriting and producing. She's thrown herself pretty deeply into it too; on her FB page she writes about going to industry events both here in New York and on the West Coast, networking with Hollywood executives trying to promote not only her screenplay(s), but herself as a film and/or television producer. She has some experience in the field, having worked on videos for various people here and there. She currently offers her services as a screenwriting coach. And she's ambitious as hell - she says she wants Denzel Washington for her movie (there's your connection to Devil, I guess).


Anyway, we've been hanging out together a bit in the past few weeks, getting to know each other better. I had invited her to a movie last Friday, but I didn't realize that she had recently injured her foot and that she was still recovering. So out with the movie plans. She did invite me over to her place in Manhattan, though, so that's where I went yesterday evening. She cooked dinner, she showed me pictures of her family, we talked a whole lot about movies, and eventually we put one on - How to Train Your Dragon, which neither of us had seen.

I kinda wish I had seen this theatrically in 3D. While the story follows many of the same hero's-journey cliches and offered few surprises, visually it's spectacular, especially the flying sequences. I had told Rachel that Pixar has spoiled us so much that sometimes it's easy to see everything else in animation as... not inferior - that word has the wrong connotations - but not on the same level at the very least. Dreamworks Animation is unquestionably good, but Pixar has set the standard so impossibly high in every category. Still, this was very entertaining. It's easy to see why this was a hit.

Soundtrack Saturday: Henry Mancini

"Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's

"Baby Elephant Walk" from Hatari!

Theme from The Pink Panther

Fritz the Cat

Fritz the Cat
seen online via YouTube
12.1.11

I remember when Vija took me to see the documentary Crumb, about comics legend Robert Crumb. At the time, I wasn't that interested in seeing it, believe it or not. I had never heard of him, for one thing. For another, this was a few years before I met Jenny and she got me interested in underground comics. While Vija's probably best described as a casual comics fan (mostly through my intervention), I suspect a big reason why she wanted to see it was because Crumb was a major cultural touchstone of her generation. I'll return to that point in a bit.

When it comes to Crumb the artist, the element that stands out in my mind the most is his hatching style; i.e., those small lines that he uses to indicate shadow and dimension. I remember when I was a freshman in high school, I had an art teacher who everyone absolutely loathed. He was strict, humorless and uptight and he was always hard on his students. We hated him with a passion and couldn't wait to get out of his class. Me, though, I'll forever be grateful for him because he broke me of a habit I wasn't even aware of.

In his class, I did a still life in pencil, and for some reason, I rendered the whole picture, which must have been 18" x 24", with this little vertical strokes perhaps an inch and a half in length. The picture was recognizable as a still life, and I knew enough to render light and shadow, but the entire thing was done in hatch lines, all in one direction. My teacher pointed it out to the class and to me, and made me realize that I wasn't doing it as a stylistic choice. I was doing it because I didn't know any other way. He enabled me to use broader strokes, in different directions, to shade in the shape of the object I was drawing, and that freed me up artistically. I became a better, more complete artist as a result.


In art college, we were taught how to work with fewer lines instead of more, particularly in figure drawing. "An economy of lines" was how one of my teachers put it - and as a result, my drawings began to have a cleaner look to them. So when I see a style like Crumb's, the art school side of me recoils slightly because it's not as economical as I might prefer (though this doesn't necessarily make it bad, of course).

Ralph Bakshi does a good job of preserving Crumb's style in the animated film version of Fritz the Cat. You can see the hatch lines in places, even if they seem really superfluous in an animated cartoon. I've never read the original comic strip, but the familiar Crumb elements are there: the counter-culture sensibility, the jazz music, the fat chicks.


Vija and I have often talked about the 60s. She was a Midwestern teenage girl at the time, so she was definitely part of the zeitgeist, so to speak, especially when she went on to college. It's hard for someone like me to believe that talk of revolution and consciousness was so prevalent, but the 60s is stereotyped that way for a reason! Fritz has quite a bit of that as well, although substituting anthropomorphized animals for humans comes across a bit incongruous at times, such as in one scene where Fritz talks about race relations with a crow, crows being the stand-ins for blacks. Shouldn't that be species relations instead?

I have to admit, all the animal sex made me think of furries for a moment or two. I've met plenty of animal lovers, but I can't recall ever meeting any open furries. I don't doubt the stereotypes are true to a degree, but I'd just as soon not have them confirmed for me... (This from a cartoonist whose best known characters are talking rodents.)


Finally, given the current talk about how to sell the NC-17 film Shame to the masses, the poster for the X-rated Fritz comes as a bit of cold water to the face, as you can see. But then, it was a much different time in 1972, and the X rating didn't have quite the same connotations as it does now. We could use some of that perspective today.

The Descendants

The Descendants
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY
11.29.11

There are a lot of good and bad aspects to the Oscar season. On the one hand, it kinda sucks that so many of the quality movies get squeezed into the final two months of the calendar year instead of being spread out over the other ten months. Then again, as a movie fan, it is kinda nice to have this time of year to look forward to, especially if you've read about certain films playing film festivals like Cannes and Toronto and getting great receptions.

For my part, I don't try to see every potential Oscar contender. I can't. Part of it is financial, but also because it gets tiring. In my experience, it becomes less about appreciating the movies as movies and more about a race. I remember in 1997 - which was a very good year for movies - I tried to watch a bunch of contenders in one week in late December, all in Manhattan. Never again. It had nothing to do with the quality of the films (I don't even remember which ones; I know one was Jackie Brown); I just caught up in the Oscar race and felt like I had to see everything as soon as possible and as a result I forgot to take time to really appreciate the movies. 

When I covered the Urbanworld Film Festival this year, it was different. I was seeing movies I had never even heard about before, for free thanks to my press badge, in a limited time period, in one location. Who knew when (or even if) I'd get to see some of those films again? I didn't have that excuse in 1997. If I had bothered to take my time with those movies, which would play for longer periods of time in theaters all over the city, maybe they'd stand out in my mind more.

Anyway, I also say this to explain why you may not see me write about certain films from this Oscar season. I've settled into writing about three movies a week for months now, and even that feels like much at times. I want to see the contenders, but I refuse to knock myself out trying to see them all, or even close to it. So I make choices. If I can wait for a movie to come to the Kew Gardens where I can see it cheaper, I do. If I see a potential contender looks like it's bombing, I know to avoid it. If I can wait until January to see a contender, I will. And if a certain movie simply doesn't appeal to me for whatever reason, even if it is a contender, I'll pass on it.


The Descendants is a good example of this process. It's a movie I had been reading about for weeks, one that had gotten rave reviews at film festivals, and was touted as a major Oscar contender. As a result, I was eager to see it, but I knew it would eventually play at the Kew Gardens after opening in Manhattan, so I was willing to wait a couple of extra weeks and save some money. (I should also say that I'm fully aware of this luxury I have - the ability to pick and choose where and when to see movies like this, and I'm grateful for it. When I lived in Columbus, it wasn't a choice - the art house theaters there would always get their movies later than those in New York or LA - but at least we got them.)

The Descendants is also the kind of film that I want to be able to think about for awhile. It's an outstanding achievement; deeply moving and thoughtful. The dying-wife-and-mother element made me think of my father's final months of life, although unlike the movie, I didn't have any kind of issues with him that complicated my feelings for him. I do remember the hurt, though, the great sense of loss, and it was hard not to think on that as I watched this.


I think we who write about film ought to take more time to reflect on the movies we write about. The need to consistently provide content for our blogs and websites has the potential to preclude our enjoyment of the films sometimes, especially if we, like certain film critic groups, are in a rush to proclaim our opinions of them before everyone else. Just a thought.

'Kinyarwanda' opens December 2!

Kinyarwanda star Cassandra Freeman:

... Kinyarwanda is like a movie no one has ever seen before. Though it's based around the genocide, the film is really about love in the time of genocide.Going out to parties and being a teenager during the time of genocide. And what it's like to be a freedom fighter in the time of genocide. It's about so much more. It's about what would happen to your life if you chose freedom and forgiveness instead of vengeance and violence. And that's really the story of this movie.

Just a reminder that Kinyarwanda, the second film released through AFFRM, is coming out this Friday (rescheduled from its original date of November 23). Here's my review of the film from the Urbanworld Film Festival back in September. I strongly recommend it; it's quite moving, in unexpected ways, with a message that needs to be heard. Check the AFFRM site to find out which cities and theaters it's playing in. Here's some more items related to the film that have come out since September:

the trailer
Kinyarwanda wins audience award @ AFI Fest 
director Alrick Brown
AFFRM founder Ava DuVernay

 Alrick Brown profile in the October 2011 Vanity Fair (click to enlarge)

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Related:

'Kinyarwanda' is AFFRM's second release!

Kinyarwanda: a primer

The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show
seen online via Crackle
11.27.11

Earlier this month, members of the cast of The Last Picture Show, along with director Peter Bogdanovich, reunited for a 40th-anniversary screening hosted by AMPAS, along with a Q-and-A afterwards. Reading about it made me want to revisit the film myself, since I hadn't seen it in awhile. While it isn't as much of an explicit tribute to cinema as recent movies like Hugo and The Artist, a love of movies is certainly integral to its success as a movie, particularly in the influences it wears on its sleeve. I had never noticed it in previous viewings, but my knowledge of film history has expanded since then.


Though its subject matter is thoroughly American, Picture Show is filmed like a European film: black-and-white, no score (the only music comes from radios and jukeboxes), the casual, realistic approach to nudity and sex, all of it comes across as familiar to anyone who has seen enough Italian and French films of the 50s and 60s. At the same time, though, the wide open Texas spaces recall the work of John Ford easily enough.

Bogdanovich, of course, has always been a huge film nerd, so this comes as little surprise. He came up around the same time as the likes of Coppola, Scorsese, Ashby, Lucas, and Spielberg, and like them, brought a vastly different sensibility to moviemaking than the generation before him. A look at his wonderful blog will give you an idea of not only his influences, but his ideas about film history in general.

What is it about black-and-white? It's a question worth pondering again now that The Artist is poised to become a big success. Bogdanovich chose to film Picture Show in B&W partly as a tribute to those old picture shows he loves, foreign and domestic, but there's something else about it, too. It's the reason why I choose to do my variant banners in B&W, and I can even tell you the moment when I noticed it. 

When I did my New Year's Eve banner, I chose an image from a full-color movie, The Poseidon Adventure. It was a shot of Shelley Winters. Just for the heck of it, I removed the color from the image, something I did for the image for my Christmas variant - the leg lamp from A Christmas Story. I didn't notice the difference then because it was a single, isolated object with no background, but here something changed. Suddenly I didn't see Winters the actress so much as I saw... the emotion of fear on her face, as her character is about to be upended by the sinking ship. Something about that appealed to me, seemed purer in a way, and that's when I decided to make all my variant banners in B&W.

Not that I necessarily think Poseidon should've been shot in B&W, or movies in general, for that matter - Avatar would've been much poorer in B&W, for example - but perhaps directors like Bogdanovich use B&W in order to have less distractions. It's easy to focus on a color in a picture, but by paying too much attention to it, one can lose sight of the bigger picture. Sometimes focusing on color is a deliberate choice on the director's part, but I think using B&W in a film can sometimes free one to notice intangibles like emotion and mood, which Picture Show has plenty of.


Also, B&W can be used almost as a meta-textual element, to call attention to the movie-ness of a movie, to coin a phrase. Think about the first time Dorothy opens the door of her house when she lands in Oz in The Wizard of Oz - you can't help but notice the color before you notice anything else. That was a stylistic choice, not something one sees in real life, because one doesn't transition from B&W (or sepia tones) into full color just like that - but a trick meant to emphasize this brave new world that Dorothy has stepped into. Regardless, I can't imagine Picture Show being made any other way than in black and white.