Review: Showtime

Do they think we're so stupid that we are going to take media/celebrity ethics lectures from a movie made and owned by AOL/Time-Warner? (Of course they do.) Add Showtime to that long list of movies that could have so easily been better. This film is confused: On the one hand, it wants to be a movie about media obsession with celebrity and violence, and also a spoof of vigilante and cop movies and a dis on reality shows. It also wants to rag on its two stars, Robert DeNiro and Eddie Murphy. And then, inexplicably, it wants to be a cop movie, crammed with chases, fistfights, machine-gun blasts, car crack-ups, spent shells, fires and explosions. You can't have it every which way, guys. The end result is a mish-mash film that is sometimes funny -- especially when Murphy and DeNiro are going at one another -- but is mostly boring and lame. It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it?

The best way to describe this movie is good-natured. Murpy, DeNiro, Rene Russo, William Shatner and Mos Def all know what they're doing, but the script doesn't really give them much worth doing. The rather tired premise is the pairing of a tough-guy detective (DeNiro, obviously) with the wise-ass, media savvy urban black cop (Murphy), both enthusiastically manipulated by the stop-at-nothing, no-holds barred and exploitive producer (Russo). The LAPD, seeking better publicity than it's been getting the last couple of years, orders the two to participate in a cop-reality-show called Showtime. Murphy's character, who is dying to be in the movies, is thrilled, hamming it up for the cameras. He essentially plays his character in Beverly Hills Cop, which is funny enough, but a bit tired. DeNiro, a hard-ass from the old school, is ethical, horrified and reluctant to participate. While Murphy's character sees him as a dinosaur, DeNiro's sees his young partner as an incompetent hotdog.

In fact, DeNiro seems to have made a career (Analyze This, and most recently Meet the Parents), out of laughing at his own tough-guy persona, which is really a shame. He hasn't had a serious role in a few years, and this spoofing of spoofs of spoofs is getting old. In the movie, the two don't like one another, at least at first, but -- shock of shocks -- learn to deal with it, as the bad guys (a drug dealer and his gang) get their hands on shockingly lethal hand-tooled shotguns with uranium-tipped shells that can level whole buildings in just a few seconds. The movie is meant to be a satire -- Johnnie Cochran's appearance is a hoot, and so are the Jackie-Chan style outtakes at the end -- but for a satire to work, the story has to be funny and/or biting. This movie, on the whole, is neither. The plot is too stupid to carry any freight, even these talented actors. And the film says nothing about our media or celebrity culture that hasn't been said a zillion times, usually better.

The movie does have its entertaining moments, most of them clustered at the beginning and end, around all of the car chases and explosions, but you may leave Showtime thinking it's time for Eddie Murphy to find a role where he can be funnier, and for DeNiro to stop laughing at himself and start being himself again. And enough media/celebrity narcissism. We get it.

Comments

Re:Yeah...

[ralian]

Funny how all these people that hate Katz so much still keep coming back to his columns anyway. A true nerd loves a flame war, I guess.

Trademark problems?

[yerricde]

Showtime is the name of a premium movie channel owned by Viacom.

Showtime is also a film directed by Tom Dey produced by AOL Time Warner, who owns HBO, which competes with Showtime the channel.

Wait till Showtime the movie hits cable. Watch the legal sparks fly.

You gotta understand how publishing works

[satch89450]

Funny how all these people that hate Katz so much still keep coming back to his columns anyway. A true nerd loves a flame war, I guess.

Columnists. You see them everywhere, and the quality of the writing goes from absolutely fabulous to completely clueless. Some of the columnists writing today (with upgrades in IQ) could well have been the source of the idea for the lead character in the movie Legally Blonde. (I lump movie and restaurant reviewers in with columnists, because most of them are written in the first person and therefore qualify as columns.)

Frankly, a columnist is doing his/her job when there is a lot of reaction by the readership to what they write. It can be right or wrong, insightful or flamebait, intelligent or dumb as dishwater -- as long as the readers react, the editor feels the columnist earns the pay.

And YOU help make Katz successful in the eyes of the OSDN bosses.

Tough and stupid as it may sound, we need columnists. Clueful people [you may disagree] like Katz and Dvorak and Cringley. (And Noonan and Buckley and Safire.) Clueless people like the ones gracing the magazine pages of many national and international IT publications and big-name IT-oriented Web sites. (And non-IT sources, too.)

Their purpose is to make you, the reader, THINK, and more importantly to express your thoughts out where others can hear. This is the basic exercise of Speech. Further, the cure (in other countries, not just the United States) for bad speech, insipid speech, just-plain-wrong-facts speech is... more speech. Speech from the clueful. Speech from people who are rarely heard.

One way to get you, the reader, to do that is to goad you into telling people like Katz what a knothead they are.

(I don't work for OSDN or SlashDot in any way. Opinion not necessarily that of the owner of this website, its editors, or its moderators. Or Katz, for that matter.)

Re:You gotta understand how publishing works

[Accipiter]

Their purpose is to make you, the reader, THINK

I can agree with that, to a point. However, the argument doesn't apply to Katz articles.

The problem with Katz, is that his writing is middle-school quality. Actually, I've written better quality work during my years in middle-school than Katz has produced during his entire tenure with Slashdot.

Katz was quiet until around the point of Columbine. That's when he write his Hellmouth series, which was the first (and last) thought-provoking Katz article. Since then, he figures "Hey, I'm going to ride the coattails of the Columbine articles, and work the same edge on everything that I write." Hence, he looks for deep, meaningful issues in movies like Showtime and Tomb Raider.

It doesn't work.

Plus, people who read Katz's writing are constantly tripping over sophomoric writing, bad grammar, and worse spelling. There is no excuse for a (supposed) professional writer to consistantly make glaring mistakes in his or her writing the way Katz does in his articles. Simple mistakes that would be caught by a goddamned spell checker go uncorrected, and submitted to Slashdot's front page.

And now Slashdot is asking for money? For what? The same badly-written slop, just without the ads?

Sorry. Sure, editorials are supposed to make you THINK, but that kind of thing usually has to appeal to your level of intelligence.

So why am I reading this article? I wanted to see Showtime. However, I don't rely on Katz to determine the movie's worth, because he's a damaged scale. I quickly skim through his writing to get a grip on the movie's base, then I read the comments to see how my peers (other Slashdot readers) liked it.

If I relied on Katz to tell me what movies to see, I'd be staying home a lot.

Showtime was our big FX film for the year

[Thagg]

This post will try to make Showtime qualify for the 'News for Nerds' motto of Slashdot.

You might not think of this as a big FX movie, after all, it's just a cop buddy movie, right? Well, it turns out that my little company did over 140 digital FX shots for this film. This demonstrates among other things that computer graphics effects are a big part of almost any film these days -- it gives the director and writers freedom to shoot things more effectively, and allows the director and writer the freedom to improve the film in the post-production phase.

I'll try not to reveal too many plot points to those of you who haven't seen the film -- but if you don't want to know anything about the film you can stop reading right here.

Ok. The biggest thing that we did was build the environment outside the penthouse -- buildings, reflections, and helicopters. The challenge was to keep that environment alive (without the cliche flocks of pigeons.) We did this mostly by observing that windows in skyscrapers flex somewhat in the wind, so that the distortions of the reflections in the windows are always changing. There are a few places that you can see near the ground, and we added little sparkles of light from car windshields, things like that.

We also added a bunch of lasers to the guns, and a bunch of sparks in the gun show sequence. Finally, we did all the 'videoization' and changed the license plate of Eddie Murphy's car for some shots. There were a few dozen other little things here and there, but that's the majority of the shots. By the way, in reality there is a heliport on the roof of the Westin Bonaventure in downtown
Los Angeles.

All of this work was done by a team of 10 or so people over about six months. We used a combination of SGI and Linux boxes to do the animation design, and our render garden (it's too small to be a proper render farm) of Linux boxes to do all of the batch rendering.

thad

X-Files "truth"

[Infonaut]

Your mention of the X-Files reminds me of an episode in which the intrepid FBI agents found a bunch of cloned humans floating in big fishtanks in some underground secret lab at DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Having formerly been a DARPA contractor, I thought their interpretation of DARPA was hilarious. Instead of the well-lit hallways populated with contractors jockeying for project funds and project manager doors festooned with Dilbert cartoons and spiffy project logos printed with color laser printers, the X-Files version of DARPA was dark and sinister, with M-16-toting security guards (rather than the more passive and more effective security measures DARPA actually uses) and humorless dark-suit types everywhere.

It makes me think of that strange fuzzy line between pure fantasy, well-researched "believable" fiction, and mundane truth. So much of our entertainment these days is meticulously researched and realistically rendered on screen - witness "Saving Private Ryan" and "Blackhawk Down", but with most pseudo-realistic entertainment, it's very difficult to know whether the b.s. factor is small, medium, or large.

No wonder so many people believe the Earth is flat, and there was no moon landing.