The Screengrab : beverly hills cop

Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls" Director to Collaborate on Richard Pryor Biopic

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

The idea that Eddie Murphy is the best possible fit for the role of Richard Pryor may be one of those ideas that seems so obvious that the first thing that should be done with it is to re-examine it. Even back when the two of them were sharing magazine covers, it was clear that they had little enough in common in terms of presence, image, shared experiences and preferred subject matter that the talk of Murphy as being "the new Richard Pryor" seemed redolent of a bygone era when it was thought that America could only handle one black superstar in any particular medium at a time. Whatever was going on in his personal life, there was always something childlike about Richard Pryor, whereas Murphy could credit his fast rise to the fact that, even when he was barely out of his teens, there seemed to be a forty-year veteran of the Vegas club circuit inside him. In the age of Reagan and Rambo, he had his biggest success in what were essentially action pictures (48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel) in which he functioned as both the gun-waving hero and the wisecracking comic relief; he may have been willing to double as a thief (in 48 Hrs.) or dress down (in the Beverly Hills Cop movies) if it would help audiences relate to him as an "underdog", but he was still an authority figure at heart, compared to Pryor's eternal outsiders. In this week's "Random Roles" feature in The Onion, Margot Kidder says that the key to the much-married Pryor's great appeal was partly his "vulnerability"; that's not a quality that ever turned up much in Murphy's character descriptions.

Pryor himself had a long-cherished, off-and-on plan to star in a bipic about Charlie Parker, who would eventually be portrayed by Forest Whitaker in Clint Eastwood's Bird, which came out in 1988, around the same time that Pryor's movie career wa winding down. (Pryor's last starring role was in the 1991 Another You. He later contributed cameo roles to two movies, Larry Bishop's 1996 Mad Dog Time and David Lynch's 1997 Lost Highway, made after M.S. had him firmly in its grip, which might not have been the greatest idea in show business history.) We'll never know whether Pryor, under ideal laboratory conditions, would have been able to get far enough outside his own very powerful persona to convincingly play Charlie Parker, though another lacerating stand-up comedian, Dick Gregory, gave a performance, as a character based on Parker in the 1967 Sweet Love, Bitter, that compares quite favorably to the one Whitaker gave in Bird. One thing that Pryor, Gregory, and Parker had in common was that they had all spent their young adulthood struggling to make it in a tough business; it's no insult to Murphy's talent or imagination as an actor that, having achieved superstardom at twenty on Saturday Night Live, he may not be able to really imagine what drove someone like Pryor, who worked him way up from performing in strip clubs and neighborhood bars to mainstream success in Vegas and on TV, only to dynamite and rebuild his career from scratch because he felt that his early success was a betrayal of what he really knew. There's also the fact that, at 47, Murphy is already much closer to being the age where Pryor's career began rolling itself up than the point at which he was firing on all cylinders and shooting off sparks. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'd be more interested in seeing him played by someone like Dave Chappelle--someone who's not just funny and talented, but whose concept of show business success has traps and demons in it.

Yesterday's Hits: "Crocodile" Dundee (1986, Peter Faiman)

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the oldest and most dependable of storytelling formulas is the Fish Out of Water storyline, which entails taking a character out of his natural habitat and placing him somewhere altogether different. The Fish Out of Water (or “FOW”) formula has been around for centuries, and has been a popular one for movies almost since their beginning. But the heyday for cinematic FOW comedies was the mid-to-late eighties, following the release of the 1984 blockbuster Beverly Hills Cop, one of the quintessential Fish Out of Water movies. From there, the formula caught fire in Hollywood, and studios applied it to movies of all sorts, from the fourth Star Trek movie (which placed the Enterprise crew in 20th Century San Francisco) to an Arnold Schwarzenegger family movie. But in my estimation, perhaps the purest distillation of the formula can be found in the surprise 1986 hit, “Crocodile” Dundee.

What made ”Crocodile” Dundee a hit?: In the mid-eighties, there was an upswing in American interest in Australia. With international tourism at an all-time high, more and more people wanted to jet off to exciting new locales, and Australia was ideal for their purposes- beautiful, distant, home to a wide variety of environments, and (perhaps more importantly) English-speaking. Fueling interest were a series of commercials made by the Australian Tourist Commission for American audiences, which starred a former day laborer-turned-popular Australian television personality named Paul Hogan, who invited viewers to come “Down Under” for their next vacation.

At the time of its American release, ”Crocodile” Dundee was already a huge hit in Australia, due in large part to Hogan’s television popularity. But the film’s success in the States owed less to Hogan’s TV-commercial ubiquity than to good, old fashioned word of mouth. ”Crocodile” Dundee- due in no small part to Hogan’s good-natured performance- ended up grossing nearly ten times its opening-weekend take of $8 million, a figure that’s almost unheard of nowadays. In addition, the Aussie craze kicked into overdrive, with Down Under tourism increasing by more than 40% after the film’s release, one of the biggest movie-inspired tourism spikes to happen to any foreign country pre-Lord of the Rings.

What happened?: ”Crocodile” Dundee was a pop-culture sensation and propelled its leading man to big-screen stardom, but by the end of the 1980s, the ardor had cooled. 1988 saw the release of a sequel, but while it was also a hit, it was of subpar quality and didn’t linger in the memory like the first film did. By the time 1990 saw the release of Hogan’s first non-Dundee leading man role in Almost An Angel, the once-hot star (who was by that time upwards of fifty years old) was looking like a one-trick pony, playing leathery, twinkly-eyed charmers who use their wits to get them out of tight spots. Hogan had ceased to be the scrappy underdog whose easy smile won over audiences in the first film, and his subsequent star vehicles- the quasi-Western Lightning Jack, a big-screen remake of Flipper- failed to set the box office on fire. Following the turn of the millennium, Hogan returned once more to the role that made him famous, in the misguided Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

Does ”Crocodile” Dundee still work?: When I first made my list of potential Yesterday’s Hits back in December, one of the first movies that sprung to mind was this one. However, I was sort of dreading the idea of watching it again, in part because for years it seemed to me like the epitome of eighties formula fare, to say nothing of the bad taste left in my mouth by the terrible sequels. But while I wasn’t exactly wrong about the film’s narrative, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself during ”Crocodile” Dundee. More than two decades later, the movie still has a lot of charm and good cheer.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its problems as well. To begin with, there’s no real chemistry between Hogan and leading lady Linda Kozlowski. This seems odd, since the two later married in real life, but they just don’t click onscreen, and as such the film’s final scene doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. In addition, the movie trades almost entirely in clichés, from the stereotyped portrayal of Kozlowski’s editor/fiancé (Mark Blum) as a snob who takes every opportunity to expose Dundee as a bumpkin (for his part, Dundee socks him in the face) to the Tarzan/Jane dynamic of the Hogan/Kozlowski relationship. In the latter case, the movie even makes this explicit in a dialogue exchange, which is almost never a good idea, and certainly isn’t one here. Also, as with many other eighties blockbusters there’s an undercurrent of gay-panic humor that didn’t wash well with me- it’s not blatant, but there was enough of it to be somewhat troubling.

But while the movie traffics in formula, I was surprised by how pared-down the storytelling is. The first 45 minutes or so of the movie show Hogan taking Kozlowski on a guided tour of the outback, and demonstrate the character’s skills on his home turf. Then the action moves to New York, where Dundee navigates the city with a combination of outback survival skills and friendliness. There’s a refreshing lack of gratuitous subplots, something that marred the film’s sequels. Instead, the plot becomes almost imperceptible, so that even if we notice the formula at work, we barely mind. One major constant of the FOW storyline is that the protagonist’s nature tends to make him surprisingly well-suited to his new environment, and in ”Crocodile” Dundee, this happens almost instantaneously. Yet the character’s personality and skills have been well-established enough that I bought it completely.

Rather than leaning heavily on narrative, ”Crocodile” Dundee takes its cue from its hero. Much of Mick J. “Crocodile” Dundee’s success in New York is predicated as much on his innocent good nature as it is on his innate street-smarts. Rather than closing himself off from those around him like many city-dwellers tend to do, Dundee walks right up and makes friends, and with his easygoing smile and “no worries” demeanor, Hogan’s performance sets the tone for the rest of the film. Sure, ”Crocodile” Dundee may lack the narrative tension that’s found in most films of this sort, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. ”Crocodile” Dundee has no lofty goals beyond providing a couple hours of genial entertainment, and on those grounds it still gets the job done.

EW Makes Great-Movies List; Screengrab Points, Laughs

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

With last week blessedly free of celebrities getting knocked up and/or being caught without underwear, Entertainment Weekly has seized upon this fallow period in entertainment news to unveil yet another list for your perusal. In this week’s double issue, EW’s writing staff unveiled their lists of “The New Classics” in a number of media, including their top 100 movies of the last quarter century. There were a few pleasant surprises- like #4 pick Blue Velvet making its second prominent appearance on a high-profile list in less than a week (after the latest AFI special)- and you can't really argue with Pulp Fiction at #1, but many of the choices left something to be desired. Put it another way- if you know both jack and shit about cinema, EW’s list is bound to feel pretty unsatisfactory, with a whopping six foreign-language films and two documentaries out of 100.

Of course, the makers of such lists are always prone to stating that their goal is to “stir up debate.” So in the proud Screengrab tradition of speaking truth (or at least strongly-worded fibs) to power, I’d like to go on record to state that a number of masterpieces of the past 25 years were ignominiously robbed in order to make way for the likes of Pretty Woman. On top of that, a few of the movies that made the list were so unceremoniously- and undeservingly- buried near the bottom that their inclusion is arguably even more of a disgrace when you consider the titles that outrank them. In keeping with EW’s format, I’ve kept the artsy-fartsy to a minimum- no shorts, no avant-garde, no mentions of Peter Watkins. Instead I’ve selected five pretty accessible movies (including a foreign-language pick) and one classic that deserved far better than EW wanted to give it.

But first, a note to EW’s webmaster: your online feature on the 26 greatest movie posters doesn’t want to scroll over to the poster for The Limey. Please fix this immediately. Thank you.

Now, my alternate selections, in no particular order:

The New World- to my eyes, the finest American film of the last 25 years. Should have qualified just by being one of the most beautiful films ever made, but there’s more to Terence Malick’s masterpiece than gorgeous cinematography and panoramic shots of nature. Malick’s re-creation of the founding of Virginia and the resulting “settlement” of the land is always completely convincing, transporting the viewer into the lifestyle (and mindsets) of the time in a way few period pieces can manage. But it’s also a heartrending love story of a particularly mature kind, as Pocahontas (the glowing Q’Orianka Kilcher) must learn to let go of her childish love in order to find sustainable happiness with another. The New World is a marvel, and I expect that we’ll be seeing it on plenty of lists in the decades to come.

Naked- Now, I can kind of understand leaving Malick off your list, since the guy’s only made two movies during the eligible period. But what’s your excuse when it comes to Mike Leigh? Even the Academy has caught on to Leigh’s greatness- witness the bevy of nominations for Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake- but for my money his best work to date is still Naked. Of course, it’s something of a bitter pill to swallow, with an almost painfully bleak view of human nature. And in the middle of it all is David Thewlis, giving one of the all-time great performances, as the compulsively verbal misanthrope Johnny, the kind of bastard whose sole redeeming virtue is that he knows exactly how much of a bastard he is. Thewlis owns the film, creating from the ground up a character so fascinating that we can’t help but watch him, mouth often agape, up through the film’s magnificent final shot.

Heavenly Creatures- Hey EW, you know that Peter Jackson guy? The one whose most famous films you’ve placed prominently at #2? Well, he did make movies before Lord of the Rings, and in its way Heavenly Creatures is just as good if not better. Beginning with a true-crime story that would in other hands have lent itself to sensationalism- teenage lesbian murderers!- Jackson instead crafted in alternately invigorating and harrowing movies about the seductiveness, and the dangers, of fantasy. As Pauline and Juliet (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, in their breakthrough roles) grow ever more attached to their King-Arthur-meets-Ayn-Rand fairy tale land, they increasingly feel compelled to defend it against the encroachment of the everyday world, until the story commences in a sudden, shocking act of violence that sends these killer angels crashing back to Earth forever.

Once Upon a Time in America- Once again, Sergio Leone’s final masterwork is the odd man out among gangster dramas, with the EW writers forwarding the unfortunate notion that the genre began with The Godfather and ended with GoodFellas, with a brief stopover in Scarface Land. Leone’s film may not have the iconic status of Coppola, the seductiveness of Scorsese, or the gangsta cachet of DePalma, but as a cinematic achievement, it deserves respect, at least in its 227-minute long version. As a minor-key elegy for a crime culture that has long since passed, Once Upon a Time in America mops the floor with The Godfather, Part III, with as many classic moments as any film in Leone’s oeuvre. You’ll never look at a garbage truck the same way again.

Three Colors Trilogy- I debated including Decalogue on this list but decided against it because it premiered on television. But I had no such problem with Kieslowski’s trilogy, a wholly unique- yet entirely approachable- grand work in three parts. In telling three intimate stories, Kieslowski manages to capture a specific end-of-the-millennium worldview, as well as some surprising insights into human nature in general. But the film’s true power comes from their simplicity- Kieslowski tells us everything we need to know about these people and their lives, if only we know where (and how) to look. Beyond that, they’re just ravishing cinema, with the scores of Zbigniew Preisner ranking among the greatest ever written for the screen.

And finally…

Back to the Future- #91? Really? Working from perhaps the tightest and cleverest screenplay ever made into a Hollywood blockbuster, Robert Zemeckis and company turned what was essentially a comedic take on Americana into a genuine piece of Americana itself. How many movies of the past quarter century are this widely seen, or so beloved by all sectors of the moviegoing audience? Back to the Future is a textbook case of all the pieces lining up just so, as well as a testament to how wonderful a big-budget movie when the filmmakers trust their assembled elements enough to stay out of their own damn way. But hey, if you guys really think Shrek, Gladiator, Speed, Fatal Attraction, Scream, Beverly Hills Cop, Dirty Dancing (?!?!?), Out of Africa, and Napoleon Dynamite are all better than Back to the Future, I guess I don’t have anything left to say to you.

Unwatchable #93: "Howling III: The Marsupials"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here I face a similar problem as with the earlier entry Kickboxer 4: I went into the 1987 horror sequel Howling III without having seen its predecessor Howling II…Your Sister is a Werewolf. (I'm pretty sure I've seen the original Howling, directed by Joe Dante and co-written by John Sayles, but that didn't really help.) For all I know, I will encounter Howling II later in this process – as I've mentioned before, I don't peek ahead. It's possible that if I had seen Howling II, I would have been less confused by the beginning of Howling III. It's hardly possible I could have been more confused.

I knew I was in for something special right from the opening credits. Let’s start with the title. Ooh, scary! If there’s a subtitle less capable of striking fear in my heart than “The Marsupials,” I’m not sure what it would be. Howling III: The Fluffy Bunnies? Even that scares me more, but then again, I’ve seen Night of the Lepus. Then there’s this gem after the screenwriting credits: “Based on the novel by Gary Brandner.” Seriously? The Howling III is based on a novel? I looked it up at Amazon and it’s true, but if I am to believe the single customer comment, the movie is NOTHING like the book. Sigh, ’twas ever thus.

What is the movie like? Pretty freaky, actually. I don’t mean it’s actually frightening, and I certainly don’t mean it’s actually good, but I can’t say I was ever bored. We begin with an anthropologist showing footage his grandfather took in Cape York, Australia in 1905 of what appears to be a wolf-woman tied to a tree, being tortured by aborigines. “The mask on the woman is so realistic, we don’t know how they created it,” he claims. I don’t necessarily agree, but let’s not quibble. The action then shifts to Siberia for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, and then there are a few more seemingly random scenes that might make sense were I up to speed on the trilogy. I sort of doubt it, though; it’s almost as if every other scene was ripped out of the script in order to save money.

I do know that the bulk of the action takes place in Australia. I know this because the Sydney Opera House is in about seventeen different shots in the movie, so you know the makers really wanted to make it clear. There was a weird Aussie fetish going on in American pop culture in the ’80s – everything from Mad Max to Crocodile Dundee to Men at Work to that Jacko dude from the Energizer commercials. Anyone else remember this jackhole?

Anyway, Howling III is clearly trying to capitalize on the Down Under thunder, as it features a tribe of distinctly Mad Max-ish wolf people, one of whom is a hottie in the Rachel Hunter mode. At least, I thought she was a hottie until I saw her give birth to a slimy embryo and stuff it in her hairy pouch, and then suddenly I wasn’t so keen on her anymore. I guess the idea here is that a breed of Tasmanian wolf was killed off early in the 20th century, and in a quest for vengeance its spirit came into these people. Look, it doesn’t really matter. I could try to make some sense of the plot, but suffice it to say that the filmmakers are trying really, really hard to entertain you. There’s a bus full of werewolf nuns, a ballet dancer who turns werewolf in mid-performance, a were-skeleton that comes back to life, a leather-boy version of Alfred Hitchcock, a soundtrack full of synthpop power ballads that sound like Beverly Hills Cop rejects, and there’s even Dame Edna, years before her U.S. stardom. Maybe it’s just that as a child of the '80s, I’m hard-wired to be more susceptible to the junk of that era – but I know what I hate, and I don’t hate this.

Previously on Unwatchable:

94. Invasion of the Neptune Men
95. Marci X
96. Track of the Moon Beast
97. Bolero
98. Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

This week's top ten comes to us from guest writer Gabriel Mckee, friend of Nerve and author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. Read his fantastic blog here.

Recent years may well be remembered for bringing back the over-the-top action hero. New sequels to Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo have revived long-dead franchises, and the trend is continuing. Indiana Jones 4 has started filming, and a fourth Mad Max film would have wrapped by now had scheduling conflicts not led director George Miller to make Happy Feet instead. Though it's an easy trend to mock, it opens the door for other action heroes to be resurrected — here are some top candidates.

10. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), The Delta Force

Before he was a meme, before he was Walker, Texas Ranger, even before he was a Karate Kommando, Chuck Norris was Maj. Scott McCoy of the Delta Force. This elite antiterrorist strike force, led by Lee Marvin, consists of some thirty soldiers who are highly trained in standing around in the back of a cargo plane while Chuck Norris rides around on a motorcycle killing terrorists. Delta Force came out in the pre-Die Hard world, before we expected our action heroes to have pathos, depth or family troubles. There's not much character to this character, but when it comes to straightforward ass-kicking, Norris is the undisputed master. Norris is ripe for a Stallone-style comeback, and in the and in the age of the War on Terror, a new entry in the Delta Force saga is the perfect vehicle for his revival.

9. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), Beverly Hills Cop

Remember when Eddie Murphy made movies that people enjoyed? Barring Dreamgirls, his film career has been on a losing streak for over a decade, putting him just below Robin Williams on the list of actors who need to be rescued from their own careers. A return to the role of Axel Foley, the detective/con man of Beverly Hills Cop, might be the best way to ensure that Norbit never happens again.

8. Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter

Michael Caine has made a major comeback in recent years, but in most of his recent roles — in Batman Begins, Children of Men,and The Prestige, for instance — he's played the Kindly Old British Guy. It's easy to forget that he made his name playing jerks — first a heartless cad in Alfie, then a brutal-but-suave thug in Get Carter. This story of a London gangster who travels to Newcastle (Britain's equivalent of South Jersey) to investigate his brother's murder isn't as flashy as more recent tales of the U.K. underworld. But Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham nevertheless owe everything to Get Carter's blueprint and Caine's cynical performance. A return to the character of Carter would give Caine a chance to recapture both the grim violence and the effortless sexiness of one of his greatest roles.

7. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman), The French Connection

The most successful action film of the '70s didn't star Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee or any other established veteran of the genre. The French Connection owes much of its success to Gene Hackman's performance as hot-headed bad cop Popeye Doyle (which earned him his first Academy Award). More than just a tough guy, Doyle is a contemptible bully, and instead of an invincible supercop, his temper makes him a bit of a screw-up. Hackman is still more than capable of this kind of complexity (as proven by The Royal Tenenbaums), and it would be thrilling to see what he could do with this character after thirty-five years.

6. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier)

The 1973 film Coffy established Pam Grier as the undisputed queen of '70s blaxploitation. Foxy Brown (originally intended as a sequel entitled Burn, Coffy, Burn!) justified her ascension — whether infiltrating a high-end call-girl ring, shooting her drug-dealing brother in the ear, or hijacking a drug runner's crop duster, Foxy is "a whole lotta woman." At turns smiling and sneering, she violently opposes an oppressive society symbolized by a white-operated heroin syndicate. Grier has had a slightly higher profile since Quentin Tarantino reintroduced audiences to her charms, but it's been far too long since she's kicked ass like she did in Foxy Brown.

Read PART 2.