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Laughs: Down To Earth & Monkeybone
Chris Rock is a funny man, and watching him is almost always a pleasure, even in a movie like Down To Earth," which is (despite Rock's presence) essentially a misfire.
Hollywood so loves this movie's basic idea -- a good-natured dummy dies, but gets another chance at life in an incongruous new body -- that this is at least the third shot at the story.
The first time out, in 1941, it was called Here Comes Mr. Jordan, starring Robert Montgomery and Evelyn Keyes. Next came Warren Beatty's 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait. Like it's predecessors, this version is about redemption, the fantasy of a second chance in life. Heaven Can Wait was a lot more charming.
The twist, of course, is that Rock inserts his hipper, black-er humor into every facet of the film, aiming for a sharper, much more contemporary story. The movie veers back and forth, sometimes a racial comedy, sometimes a romantic one, ending up being neither.
Rock plays Lance Burton, a likeable young comic chased off the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater so often that some regulars reach for throat spray when he's announced. His nickname is Boo-ey. There's no doubt that Rock is drawing from his own personal, sometimes bitter experiences struggling to make it as a comic. Rock has complained that he was the token African-American on Saturday Night Live for years, and he did hard time in New York's brutally competitive comedy clubs honing his stuff before he finally made it.
Rock's usual biting riffs about blacks and whites provide most of the laughs in this movie. In the opening scene, a snooty New York apartment doorman asks him to use the messenger entrance. Rock launches into a funny routine about why the doorman assumes he's a messenger; couldn't he possibly just be visiting a rich white friend to have some cocoa? Once he completely cows the flustered doorman, getting him to apologize, he admits that he is, in fact, a messenger.
A staple of Rock's humor is that he seems genuinely befuddled by the odd quirks of white people, especially the way they view African-Americans. But if he always comes through as a decent and funny guy, Rock's not yet an effective actor. He's not strong or talented enough to carry the non-comic parts of a movie by himself.
This one gets dumb fast. Mistakenly summoned to heaven by angels who have screwed up and taken him before his time, he's offered a new chance at life soon after dying metaphorically at the Apollo. But he has to take his chances on one of the next available bodies, and winds up a balding, middle-aged white billionnaire named Wellington, who lives in a striking hi-tech penthouse apartment, and who is in great danger of being murdered by his horny wife and private secretary.
Though Lance always sees himself (thin, young, black) in the mirror, everybody else now sees him as Wellington, his worst nightmare. And perhaps Rock's as well -- nothing could be less, hip, less funny.
Hilarious possibilities lurk in the idea of Lance in this badly-dressed old fart's body, but the device too often feels mildly creepy rather than amusing. We see a few scattered, disorienting shots of the white Wellington, but they seem more of a quirky editing mistake than a story line. Wellington is continuously pissing off the brothers by bursting into gangsta rap -- at one point he's getting off on Snoop Doggy Dogg's Gin and Juice, then shouting out DMX's Rough Riders, which gets him knocked on his ass. Not just a racial thing -- people of any color would want to punch somebody so cheerfully oblivious to the horror show he's living.
A dumb sub-plot involves a cliche-spouting Brooklyn activist challenging Wellington to provide greater access to poor people in a hospital he's just purchased. Lance falls in love with this woman, who first views Wellington as the callous, greedy white mogul he is, then sees something in else in his eyes -- Lance -- that permits her to look past his ungainly body and repulsive reputation.
If Save The Last Dance was able to present racial differences in an interesting but saccharine way, this sub-plot is more tiresome, battering home the notion that whites are clueless, culturally bereft, devoid of any humor, compassion or style. In a different racial or cultural context, the movie would be offensive, since this portrayal of whites in black comedies is becoming stereotypical.
Chazz Palmintieri does a nice turn as God's head man in Heaven, Mr. King; his assistant is the very funny Eugene Levy (the well-meaning dad in American Pie. In Down To Earth heaven is a high-class Vegas club, complete with bouncers, a guest list, and hallowed memories of Sinatra.
Chris Rock is funny no matter what the script, and his presence makes Down To Earth amusing in spite of itself. In February, the paucity of movie pickings makes Down To Earth a mildly entertaining option. But only mildly.
Monkeybone is an easier movie to see than describe. You have to pity poor Brendan Fraser, who plays the tortured cartoonist Stu Miley, and who also has to portray a horny orange monkey who has taken over his own body and is after his girl friend (Bridget Fonda). This movie has some of the funniest sight gags in a long time -- you will actually laugh out loud -- especially towards the end.
But it's a hybrid movie, part romantic comedy, part animated movie, dumb teen flic, and at least half of it is a quite eye-opening journey into Freudian notions of neuroses, nightmares and angst. Whoopi Goldberg is great playing Death, her head exploding in rage from time to time, to be quickly replaced by spares in her closet.
Stu is an unhappy man plagued by nightmares who finds some measure of happiness and peace after he meets and falls in love with Dr. Julie McElroy (Fonda doesn't have a lot to do in this movie, other than look troubled, and for good reason). Stu gets into a car crash, ends up in a coma, and finds his body kidnapped by Monkeybone, the obnoxious and sexually frustrated simian cartoon character he created from his awful dreams and who been busy plotting with the Forces of Darkness. Monkeybone wants his own body, and, at least for awhile, gets that of his creator, a nice Frankenstein-ish riff.
Some of the animation in the dream/nightmare sequences is terrific, sometimes even haunting, but the movie hops all over the place in almost free-form, sometimes bewildering, sometimes highly imaginative style. At its lowest, we're subject to platoons of orange monkeys farting. At it's best, it's an inventive story about people struggling with their nasty identity crises. In the year of Saving Silverman, it looks pretty funny.
I don't think this film was officially approved by the "race relations industry." It was put out by Hollywood, for which the only color that matters is green. Furthermore, a film like this stereotypes blacks as much as it does whites. Sure, it's saying that white people are corny, and goofy...and, well, rich...Hmm, that doesn't sound so bad to me. But it also cordons black people into a ghetto of jive-talking, dance-feverish, thuglike behavior, which may may seem "cool" onscreen, but in RL that sort of conduct translates to "can't keep a job." And the fact that it is shown as an attractive lifestyle choice only makes it more pernicious.
Anyway, the real culprit here is lazy screenwriting. It's easier to work with lame old stereotypes instead of to coming up with original characterizations, motivations and so on. Back in the 80's there was a TV show called "St. Elsewhere" which ran for about six seasons. One character, an "Asian" Dr. Wendy Armstrong, was gotten rid of after the first season. Why? Because the writers claimed they couldn't come up with any "Asian" storylines for her. Translation: She wasn't a madam or refugee, so they didn't have stock stereotpyed storylines to draw from. After a few years, they were able to add another "Asian", Dr. Paulette Kiem, to the storyline, but if IIRC, she was a refugee who became a doctor...
The race relations industry has become just that - an industry - and if racism were to dissappear tommorrow then they would all be out of a job. So we can see that it is in their interest to promote racism, even if they do it unconsciously, for their own wealth.
Maybe there's some truth to that, but you'd have to agree the same is true for, say, the American Lung Society, which would be out of business if everybody REALLY stopped smoking. So maybe they are secretly rooting for RJ Reynolds?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
It's not that Rock can't act--he plays a pretty straight apostle in Kevin Smith's Dogma, it's just the black-man-in-a-white body jokes don't transition well to a romantic interlude. There were three writers on this movie, it's pretty easy to pick out where they made their transitions.
This movie will have you both rolling in the aisles laughing one minute, and rolling your eyes the next. It's horribly inconsistent, but possibly worth renting if you like Rock's comedy.
However, if do you like Rock's comedy, I suggest you try to catch the "Diary of Chris Rock" on MTV. Traditionally, the "Diary" series is a melodramatic half hour confessional--Rock turns it into a one-man hilarity special. Especially amusing was his riff on Jay-Z: You see, the difference between Jay-Z and I is that if you meet us in the street, I have the extra $290,000 in my back pocket, because I am rockin the {Nissan} Altima, while he be rockin the Bentley. Rockin the Altima.
However I was reading Harry Knowles' savage review over on Ain't it Cool News and while I don't share his disdain for the movie, he claims a lot of material in the original script was cut due to budget concerns. I'm not certain how accurate that is (Knowles did have a cameo part in the film) but there do seem to be parts missing from the movie, such as explaining the people in Downtown need nightmares. That makes me wonder if those scenes were filmed then cut. It makes me wish for a director's cut.
Still I did enjoy the movie and I would recommend it. And of course no review of this movie would be complete without mentioning Kitty... DAMN!