This 1992 Eddie Murphy comedy starts out like a warmed-over Frank Sinatra vehicle of the 50s or 60s, but before long it becomes clear that Murphywho’s credited with the story that Barry W. Blaustein and David Sheffield’s script is based onis interested in critiquing, perhaps even dismantling, the narcissistic womanizer he’s been playing for years. In a rare act of deference, he even lets himself get blown off the screen by the galvanic Robin Givens (A Rage in Harlem), who plays his boss at an ad agency, and before it’s all over Halle Berry gives him a run for his movie too. The general idea is to exploit a certain amount of role reversal, and Reginald Hudlin, who directed House Party, does a fairly good job of making this fun. There are also a couple of spirited and raunchy turns by Grace Jones and Eartha Kitt, and David Alan Grier and Martin Lawrence are around as the hero’s best friends. (JR) Read more
This campy, melodramatic 1968 Japanese thriller in ‘Scope and color with its leading character in drag isn’t even a patch on Kon Ichikawa’s extraordinary 1963 An Actor’s Revenge, which has the same characteristics and strikes me as infinitely more worthy of revival. But if you’re looking for something weird and nutty, this might suit. The famous female impersonator Akihiro Maruyama stars as a jewel thief named Black Lizard, who’s pursued by a detective (Isao Kimura) and interested in doing perverse things with the body of a jeweler’s daughter (Kikko Matsuoka). The story was adapted by Masahige Narusawa from a novel by Rampo Edogawa, which was earlier adapted for the stage by Yukio Mishima, who appears here very briefly as a human statue owned by the thief. (JR) Read more
More of the same, but nowhere near as good (funny, disturbing, obsessive) as the uneven original, revealing arrested development on every level. As villain, Danny DeVito’s Penguin is a pale substitute for Jack Nicholson’s Joker, coming across more as a sketch for a character than a fully realized portrait; ditto for Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, who promises a lot more than she delivers. Both characters are Jekyll-and-Hyde schizos like Batman/Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton again), but it appears the filmmakers were so busy plotting the obligatory special effects that they never got around to developing these three leads past the drawing-board stage. The pictorial effects all seem to come straight out of badly reproduced stills from other movies (Batman, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Blade Runner), and there’s practically no suspense. Tim Burton directs with a strong sense of once more around the block from a script by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm that plays suspiciously like a first draft, and Danny Elfman did the music again. Consider, though: this could have been much worse than it is and still have made piles of money, so why make it even halfway decent? With Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, and Michael Murphy (1992). (JR) Read more
Engaging and lively Disney 1949 cartoon diptych adapting Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. (JR) Read more
