Trailer: Eddie Murphy in “Mr. Church”
Posted on August 14, 2016 at 3:41 pm
Eddie Murphy takes a serious role in “Mr. Church,” which looks a lot like another film from this same director, “Driving Miss Daisy.”
List: Hercules Movies
Posted on January 10, 2014 at 3:59 pm
2014 will see not one but two different movies about Hercules, the mythical half-god who had super-strength. This week’s release stars “Twilight’s” Kellan Lutz and upcoming we have “Hercules: The Thracian Wars” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Joseph Fiennes, and Ian McShane. In case you’d like more, here are some other versions of the Hercules story, mostly better known for their cheesiness and bad acting than their cinematic quality, but all fun to watch.
Hercules
Hercules
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Hercules/The Adventures of Hercules
I used to love this when I was a kid:
And I can’t resist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt9vHuxjIME
Interview: Tom Bancroft of “Mulan”
Posted on March 18, 2013 at 3:59 pm
One of my favorite Disney movies is out in a glorious new Blu-Ray/DVD release this week, Mulan and its sequel, Mulan II
“Mulan” is a gorgeously hand-animated film based on a traditional Chinese folktale about a girl who dresses as a boy to enlist in the army and serves with skill and courage. It has one of Disney’s most tuneful scores and characters who are funny, smart, and endearing. It has an exceptionally engaging and heartwarming plot. I especially love it when the guys have to dress as women for a stealth maneuver, a very satisfying turnabout. It has a very modern but very touching romance, featuring a female heroine who is as strong and brave as her love interest. Eddie Murphy as the dragon Mushu is one of the all-time great sidekicks. And it has simply spectacular setting with visuals inspired by Chinese works of art and geography.
And one of my favorite Disney World experiences is the tour of the animation studio led by Mushu himself, who explains what went into creating him. It is astonishing to compare the version we know so well with some of the early sketches. So, it was a special thrill to interview one of the “actors with pencils,” Tom Bancroft, the animator responsible for Mushu, who appears in that exhibit. He talked to me about some of the early thoughts about the character (Richard Dreyfuss??) and about how one of Disney’s least successful movies inspired him to become an animator.
How did you become involved with “Mulan?”
I was in the Florida studio since it opened. Mulan was our first feature film to create by ourselves in Florida. Before that we had done pieces of other feature films, but California was the hub because we were such a small studio. But we had grown and “Mulan” was our first “all right, we’re going to do it on our own” movie. When they started doing the development for it, they offered me the supervising animator position for Mushu, but this was a good year before we went into production. The scripts were being rewritten constantly. Mushu was still very much in development. They didn’t have a voice selected. We were still looking at people like Joe Pesci and Richard Dreyfuss. So that whole first year was designing him, but designing him kind of generically. What are the aspects of an Asian or Chinese dragon, looking at old artworks. We were still trying to figure out his personality. A lot of his posing and expressions came later, once we knew that Eddie Murphy was the voice.
So he recorded the voice before you did the animation?
Yes, the actor always goes first. We get an audiotape and for whatever scene I’m sitting down to do that day or that week — it’s slow, usually a scene a week, I listen to the line over and over and over again and just try to figure out, “How would Mushu say this?” Sometimes it’s “How would Eddie Murphy say this?” and sometimes its me acting it out in front of a mirror. A third of the way into the movie, it really becomes “How would Mushu do it” and that’s when you’ve really got it.
Listening to Eddie Murphy’s voice was a huge influence. Even before we got his dialogue, I did my research, watching “Trading Places” and his old Saturday Night Live sketches to get his facial expressions, what he does with his hands. I wanted to really try to get that in there. He does a lot of the work himself just in the way he delivers a line. You listen to the audio and it’s already funny. Robin Williams is the same way. Job one is not to lose the humor, to keep it as funny as it was when I heard it. And two, if I can make it even funnier, with a visual, then I really won the day. A lot of time that’s just trying to find an expression or a little piece of action that just fit the moment. That’s my goal.
What animated movies did you watch growing up that inspired you to get into this field?
The irony is that the one I watched that made me say, “I want to become an animator” was not very good. It was “The Black Cauldron.” It’s the movie that Disney doesn’t confess that they made. But it was in theaters when I was the right age, 15 or 16. I loved cartooning and was doing comic strips for my school paper, and I loved animation from afar. But I went to that movie, even as a teenager, because I thought it was cool and it hit me for the first time as the credits rolled — people worked on this. There are a lot of artists behind this movie. This was before we had DVDs with all the behind the scenes features. So it hit me on that movie and I said, “That would be fun to do.”
Is there a classic Disney movie you wish you could have worked on?
Oh, there are many! “Lady and the Tramp,” for one. It’s just such a perfect movie. “Pinocchio” would be up there, too, and “Dumbo,” and “101 Dalmatians.” But the one I really wish I could have worked on was “The Little Mermaid,” because I just missed it. I was an intern then and it was all around me, and I saw the rough pencil tests, heard the music, watched the animators. But I was training, taking Goofy tests and learning the Mickey Mouse walk cycle. To this day, it kills me that I didn’t work on it because I was there and watched it being made.
What are you working on now?
I’m freelance now. Right now I’m working for Christian Broadcasting Network, the lead character designer on a series called “Superbook.”
What can we see on the Mulan Blu-Ray that we didn’t see before?
Everything is crisper and more vivid. What you’ll see on Blu-Ray is even better than what we saw doing the final color mix. It’s even sharper than that. We can see movies even better than what we saw at the theater. And this is a great movie to see with real sharp color. You can see the paint strokes in the background. And I think traditional animation looks even better on Blu-Ray than the digital films.
A Thousand Words
Posted on March 9, 2012 at 9:59 am
C-| Lowest Recommended Age: | High School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG-13 for sexual situations including dialogue, language, and some drug-related humor |
| Profanity: | Some strong and crude language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, including drinking to deal with stress |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Comic peril and violence, references to sad death of parent and dementia |
| Diversity Issues: | Homophobic humor, diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | March 9, 2012 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B005LAIGIM |
“A Thousand Words” was filmed four years ago, when George W. Bush was President and a joke about the massive popularity of Hannah Montana was timely. Four years later, it is being not so much released as exorcised as Dreamworks cleans out its backlog. It isn’t a horrible movie, at least not in comparison to Norbit from the same star and director, but it is a dispiritingly dull and cynical one. Nicolas Cage is listed as a producer, which suggest that at some point he might have planned to play the lead role of a fast-talking literary agent who learns that he is down to his last 1000 words. Once he used them all up, he will die. Cage might have brought something interesting to the role of a man who speeds through life and then has to learn to choose his words very carefully and to begin to listen to others. But Murphy is barely present in the role at all, throwing some wild gestures and facial expressions at us and failing completely at conveying any sort of lessons learned.
Murphy plays Jack, who will say anything to anyone to get what he wants. He lies about his wife being in labor to get to the front of the line at the coffee shop (intrusive product placement alert). He lies about having read the books he is supposed to represent. He is inconsiderate to his wife and their toddler son and nasty to his assistant (Clark Duke), forcing him to pick all of the marshmallows except for the yellow moons out of his breakfast cereal. At his therapists, he talks non-stop but does not say anything.
Dr. Sinja (handsome Cliff Curtis, maintaining some dignity) is the nation’s most prominent spiritual leader and Jack is determined to represent him in the sale of his book. He promises to devote himself fully to Sinja’s project but he does not mean it. And then a mysterious tree appears in Jack’s yard, and it loses a leaf for every word he says.
He uses up a lot of words arguing and complaining and then we get to see him struggle at work (he cannot speak in meetings) and at home (he cannot communicate with his wife). It is supposed to be funny when poor Ruby Dee, as Jack’s mother struggling with dementia, talks crudely about the body parts of another resident of her assisted living facility, and when Kerry Washington, as Jack’s wife, puts on bondage gear and offers to perform “all the naughty things you want” — and he can’t ask, get it? It is even less funny when Jack mistakenly knocks on the hotel door of an overweight gay man expecting a male prostitute. The condescension and superficiality of the closing scenes, complete with choir-of-angels soundtrack with not just a reconciling visit to a cemetery but a healing conversation with Jack-as-a-child, is painful. Murphy’s great strength is his extraordinary verbal facility. His great weakness is a palpable anger that sometimes comes across as contempt for his audience and his material. A movie about an actor with prodigious talents who keeps coming back to material so wrong for what he has to offer — now that might be a movie worth seeing.
Parents should know that this film includes some crude sexual humor, some strong language (s-words), some homophobic humor, a woman in bondage gear, drinking to deal with stress, and references to dementia and a sad death of a parent.
Family discussion: How did not being able to talk make Jack a better listener? What were the most important words that he said and why?
If you like this, try: “Shallow Hal,” “Liar, Liar” and “Bruce Almighty”
Tower Heist
Posted on November 4, 2011 at 10:09 am
If the Occupy Wall Street crowd decided to make it movie it would be “Tower Heist,” the story of 99%-ers stealing back from a 1% guy what he stole from them.
Alan Alda has a lot of fun playing a bad guy for a change, a Madoff-style villain named Arthur Shaw who takes a daily swim in his rooftop pool with an enormous painting of a hundred dollar bill along the bottom. He lives in the penthouse of a luxury building in New York with an attentive staff under the perfectionist eye of building manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller). The employees entrusted him with their pension money and when he is arrested for securities fraud they realize that the money they saved and counted on for retirement has disappeared. Luther, the doorman (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is so disconsolate he attempts suicide. And Josh is so frustrated and furious that he plots a heist to steal some of their money back, with the help of a lowlife neighbor named Slide (Eddie Murphy, who co-produced). Josh has spent years protecting Shaw and the other wealthy residents of the building by creating an unbreakable security system. And he has spent years losing to Shaw in their online chess game. Will he be able to take Shaw’s king?
Co-scripter Ted Griffin wrote “Oceans 11” so he knows that heist films depend on three things: (1) We have to be on the side of the thieves and it helps to have them steal from an arrogant bad guy. Check. (2) It has to be a challenge with some enormous logistical obstacles to outsmart. Check. And (3) there have to be some unexpected problems for our anti-heroes to solve as the caper is underway. Check again.
It is a pleasure to see Eddie Murphy, who co-produced, funny again in a live action film, playing a character who might be an older, less smooth relative of his “48 Hours” Reggie Hammond. Instead of trying to play all the parts himself, he blends into a top-notch ensemble cast that includes Téa Leoni as an FBI agent, Gabourey Sidibe of “Precious” as a maid who is handy with locks, an abashed Matthew Broderick as a failed Wall Streeter evicted from the building, and Michael Peña and Casey Affleck as accomplices. We could use a lot more Leoni (any movie could use more Leoni) and the conclusion feels awkwardly tacked on, but it is timely and fun.