June 28, 1996
While the recently-minted superstar Jim Carrey was challenging himself (and getting paid well) with THE CABLE GUY, his ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE director was remaking Jerry Lewis’s 1963 movie THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. A challenge of a different sort, I guess, because it’s a big special effects movie. It was a huge hit (biggest comedy of 1996, and #5 movie overall), a comeback for Eddie Murphy, and even won an Oscar (best makeup for the legendary Rick Baker). Murphy is quite good in it. I always hated it though.
Sherman Klump (Murphy between VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN and MULAN) is a professor at Wellman College who is also heading the lab’s groundbreaking DNA experiments on hamsters. He happens to be quite obese, but he gets by, and he’s very good natured. I think people like him, with the exception of his less-than-one-dimensionally uptight boss, Dean Richmond (Larry Miller, RADIOLAND MURDERS), who hates his fucking guts and always stands around and/or hides in his classroom, making various outraged expressions at his activities.
The first joke in the movie (if you’re charitable enough to count it as a joke) is about Richard Simmons. In 1996 you couldn’t really address the topic of weight loss without the observation “Can you believe that Richard Simmons!?” So Murphy plays “Lance Perkins,” not so much a parody as an imitation of Simmons. That makeup is a disturbing image to open on.
I think a joke in the next scene will give you a better idea of the strength and quality of wackiness in this picture. A couple are sitting on the grass at the college when a hamster somehow crawls up the leg of the man’s pants. The woman sees the bulge it creates, apparently believes he has a large boner wagging back and forth, and is very pleased by this. This is only the first of many hijinks involving the unlikely number of hamsters roaming free on campus due to Sherman not noticing that his ass bumped the “for some reason this lever opens all of the cages at the same time” lever on the way out of the lab. Whoops. When he goes into the dean’s office to be dressed down for it he notices, but is stopped from pointing out, that a hamster dangling from the light fixture takes a shit right into the dean’s coffee.
Friends, welcome to COMEDY! Comedy is illegal today, but in 1996 it was a way of life! (read the rest of this shit…)
A STAR IS BORN, from director Bradley Cooper, is a very good adaptation of the trailer that played before every single movie I saw in a theater for the last three months. I saw that trailer so many times I would try to act it out and could sing the two songs (one with correct lyrics, even). I would get just those song fragments stuck in my head for days. So it’s exciting to discover that they have second verses.
CHI-RAQ (Chicago + Iraq, pronounced shy-rack) is the Spikiest Spike Lee Joint achieved so far. It seems like whatever itch Lee was trying to scratch with those musical numbers in 
DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY is the happiest, warmest, most joyful movie I’ve seen in a long god damn time. And not in a stupid way. The problems of the world are not ignored. There’s some light-hearted jokes about race issues, there’s a mention or two of the war, there’s some militant rap lyrics and a brief sermon by Fred Hampton Jr. All things I’m in favor of discussing. But mostly what this movie is is a whole bunch of people coming together to laugh and make beautiful music and have a good time together. In that sense it turns out it is kind of like WATTSTAX, the movie they mentioned as a model when they were filming this. I made fun of my ain’t it cool colleague Quint for writing that the trailer gives off a Wattstax vibe as if he came to that conclusion on his own. But there is a faint whiff of that vibe in the final movie I guess, if you’re really making a close examination of its vibes.
