Friday, 28 July 2000

WEEKEND PREVIEW

There is only one release really worthy of excitement this weekend. And most of you won't be able to see it. At least, for a while. The movie is Patrice Leconte's The Girl on the Bridge and it is one of my favorite films of any year. Hot Button veterans will recall coverage of the film starting almost a year ago when I saw the film at the Telluride Film Festival. (My initial reactions can be found on this page. This is a movie that I found deeply touching, but it comes at me like a poem, not a novel. Like Leconte's The Hairdresser's Husband, the characters and the story are almost surreal. But the humanity hits at the core. Only my belief that The War Zone and Romance were not only great films, but terribly important films, kept The Girl on the Bridge in the third spot in my festival Top Ten. For me, Leconte has the innate emotional muscularity of a Billy Wilder, except while Wilder used words to pound your heart into submission, Leconte uses images. It's definitely not for everyone. And if you aren't sure, do rent The Hairdresser's Husband and see how you feel. But right now, I would have Girl, which I kept of my Best of 1999 list because it wasn't being released until now, and Erin Brockovich as the only two legitimate competitors for Best of 2000.

And have no doubts, the second annual Telluride-N-Toronto festival journey is coming again this year. It seems like hours away.

For all the venue counts and my b.o. guesstimates (it's hot in L.A. lots of b.o. to come), check out Box Office Extra after noon, e.s.t.

THE GOOD: You thought I was going to forget The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps? &#$&$ing hell no!

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this movie going in to the screening. I really did love the original. I liked it when I first saw it and then really fell in love over time. Eddie Murphy deserved at least one Oscar® nomination for the original and the movie was, for the most part, tight and on target. I don't see a huge difference between Tom Shadyac as a director and Peter "Tommy Boy" Segal. Neither is really a camera guy, both have had successes with big talents in front of the camera and they seem capable of shooting a master, a close-up and a two-shot without distracting me too much. On the other hand, Nutty 2 had a hard time keeping a director on board as it steamed towards production. (You know, after Holy Man put the fear of God into Eddie Murphy.) And there were reports about an ever-shifting screenplay. And Eddie has become a media sphinx as of late, so.

But although The Klumps suffers from a mild, but notable case of Sequelitis, it's pretty funny. Buddy Love has become a caricature this time around, as his only purpose in the movie is to torture Sherman Klump and to serve as a sexual object for Granny. And of course, Granny is the queen of this movie. When she is in a scene, the lid is sure to boil off the comedy pot. She has to go some ugly, ugly places to get cooking. Elderly breasts haven't taken this much comedic weight on since There's Something About Mary gave us the over-tanned torpid torpedoes. But she is funny. And speaking of big busts, surprisingly, Janet Jackson's bust line is a constant camera pleaser in this film. And while she's just about perfect in my book, she's not in that lose-a-rib-or-two-for-the-camera mode she was in when we last saw her touring America. She's been recurved. And while I go for that, it was a bit of a surprise.

But I digress.

Murphy & Co. add three new Eddie Murphy-performed characters to the slate this time around. I'll let you discover them for yourselves. But they are as fascinating as the originals. I personally think that Ernie Klump is really Murphy's ultimate creation in this film. He is subtle and completely realistic. Going Granny has to be easier than taking a 30 degree turn to Ernie.

The other new element in this sequel is some raw humor that trumps any flatulence that made us blush in 1996, oh so long ago. The Klumps goes almost anywhere to get a laugh. From erection jokes to impotence sub-plot to inter-species mating to giant floppy breasts to oral sex references. they push it as far to that line as the MPAA would allow. And once again, I found a few of the jokes over the line for my 9-year-old and 11-year-old nephlings (a friend's brilliant word for nephews & neices, since there is no word like "sibling" for the relation). Did I need a giant erection to turn up in the first 2 minutes of the movie? Not really. Was it that funny? No. Did my niece need to have that image in her head. Or the constant discussions of impotence or oral sex? Nope.

The Sequelistis of the film comes from the film trying to hit some of the same notes that worked so well in the original. For instance, there is a movie-parody sequence that just wasn't worth the time and effort. The machinations of plot in order to create another formula and to involve Buddy Love were one step more complicated than any of us needed them to be and ultimately, the need for the "fountain of youth" formula didn't drive the movie. In fact, it was a bit disappointing that more Klumps didn't find that fountain of youth, on purpose or by mistake. Imagine and Murphy and Universal were all right in focusing on The Klumps. They were who we loved the first time. And they could carry a movie. Granny could probably carry her own movie. But the movie kept going away from family and the laughs slowed down. Similarly to Me, Myself & Irene (which is still the funniest movie I've seen this year), in trying for something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, the emotional guts of the original Murphy version of The Nutty Professor were a little lost. Had they abandoned the reach for some of that and really gone whole hog with the family, this might have felt as original and irresistible as the original.

As it is, it's easily as funny as Big Momma's House, with more surprises and a few huge laughs. And that's pretty good.

"Controlling the Wire & Sucking Martin Lawrence"