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Review: Showtime
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.
Sometimes I think Katz enjoys the ragging... bringing up the topic of boring/lame writing is just asking for it...
Well if this is the best Hollywood can come up with I'll stay at home. Mind you it's been months since any new film seemed good enough to actually go and see. I suppose these are the sorts of films we get outside of the holiday season - when most people have other things to do with their time.
Video Game cheats, hints a
"It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it?"
I guess that's why you're not working for Wired anymore, Jon. *grin*
This is news for nerds because it helps them decide whether they want to go ahead and d/l it from usenet or not.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
btw, please stop harping on ethics when you still haven't answered your "message from kabul" hoax.
It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it?
Somehow this phrase is even more evident when reading a Jon Katz editorial, not always in the context of what he's reviewing.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Heat + Casino, 1995
Ronin, 1998
Men Of Honor, 2000
15 Minutes + The Score, 2001
I think he's trying to not be sterotyped by doing more comic roles. They may not always succeed, but at least he's not stuck playing "Mob Boss #2" for the rest of his life.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
- Film five minutes of material, six different ways.
- Record test audience's reaction to all six sequences.
- Discard lowest-rated pieces.
- Lather, rinse, repeat until you have 120 minutes of material.
There are a lot of people in the "industry", especially the non-acting union-represented trades, who are worried about production flight, and rightfully so. A lot of shooting has migrated to Canada over the last few years because of tax subsidies film and TV production receives in the Great White North. The real reason Hollywood is exporting jobs to Canada is that the producers can make big, expensive mistakes for far less. (However, this is changing, I'm to understand: in the first place, Canadians are sick of paying gazigabucks for film subsidy; and in the second place, California's state legislature has passed special tax cuts for film industry types so they can fuck up more cheaply in state. I love how everyone in Hollywood is a liberal until it comes time to pay the rent.) Nobody in Hollywood knows how to make a movie. Everybody wants to be seen having a part -- hence the proliferation of credited producer and assistant producer roles. The bureaucracy beggars the lexicon. As a result, only "safe" movies ever get made, "safe" being defined as "will a teen-age boy go see it?" The consistent exceptions, unsurprisingly, seem to be coming from Pixar, which is far away from Hollywood's stinking tarpits.Dog is my co-pilot.
The screenplay followed the plan of the movie - at least, the plan as envisioned by the studio. Do you honestly think that the studio said, "Hmm.. we need to make a movie that will use satire and comedy to blow the doors on the wicked exploitation and stupidity of cop movies and reality TV?"
Of course not - just like most comedy, they took some of the more ludicrous aspects of our society and poked fun at them, while advancing a story built around two likeable characters.
That's it. No message. Jon, you went in with the expectation that the movie would be something deeper, but I have to scratch my head - what in the previews or in your previous experience with Hollywood movies made you think you'd be seeing a ringing expose of The Truth?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
Katz you Jackass. You do realize that after Meet the Parents De Niro made two not funny films, 15 Minutes (not so good) and The Score (excellent). Just before Analyze This he was in Ronin, Great Expectations and Jackie Brown.
Every time he was playing a variant of the tough guy he's famous for. He hasn't had a serious role in a while? Go rent The Score you idiot. Yeah the spoofing is a little silly and predictable, but it isn't all the man is doing with his career.
I like most of your articles, I think you contribute to this site in many ways and are an important part of it. Your tendency to make sweeping asinine statements with no factual basis is starting to annoying. It is devaluing your contribution by undermining your credibility. Try researching things occasionally.
My wife and I went to Showtime on Friday and walked out giggling.
On the one hand, it wants to be a movie about [blah, blah, blah] and also a [blah, blah, blah]. It also wants to [blah, blah, blah]. And then, inexplicably, it wants to [blah, blah, blah]. [...] And the film says nothing about our media or celebrity culture that [blah, blah, blah].
Who cares what the movie "wants" to be or say? I didn't go expecting an insightful deconstruction of the Hollywood ethos, I went for a couple of hours of chuckles, a few serious belly laughs and, overall, a bit of light-hearted entertainment. While I never had to worry about spewing Coke on the woman in front of me, I was quite satisfied with the experience and counted it as an evening and $14 well spent.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
First, let me just say... where all da white people at? 90% of the audience was black, and this was in Hollywood, a half block from the Chinese Theatre, which seemed odd -- not that I'm complaining, mind you (I'm white) but I thought Murphy and De Niro were bigger draws among whites. Or maybe the distributor just handed out lots of screening passes in black neighborhoods?
[ Warning: Minor spoilers ahead ]
Anyway, this movie is strange. It's about two cops who end up working on a reality TV cop show together -- one a serious, real cop who's forced into it, and the other a lousy cop who really wants to be an actor. In the context of their TV show, they mock all the buddy-cop TV show/movie clichés... but then the movie's framework (about some illegal gunrunning) is ITSELF full of all the SAME clichés, done in such a way that you can't possibly believe they did it on purpose. It was very bizarre.
William Shatner kicks ass, though.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I'd have to disagree that you can't have it all. I think the problem with mixing ideas and genres of film is that the majority of times the execution is just horrible. I have seen a few multi-genre films that pull this off quite well, the most recent was 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' which I heard referred to as the 'best kung fu, horror, fantasy, western, mystery, romance, period peice out of France' ever. (believe it or not that wasn't someone being an ass, the rest of the review was gushing about the movie). Point is I think you can cross multiple genres of film if the underlying premise of the film will hold together throughout. If the writing, or characters are weak then it will show through somewhere in the genre hopping. On the other hand if the characters are strong and well written then as the movie transitions then the characters will also and you'll end up having a good fluid experience.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
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.)
Jon,
.. on second thoughts, Don't.
This is a movie, not a prostate exam. You look WAY too deeply into a simple slapstick comedy. Take some valium and write an auto-biography
Jon Katz: Still on Slashdot because we love to hate him.
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
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
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Jon Katz is a moron who couldn't be bothered to go to imdb.com before spouting off with his malformed biasies...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I remember reading a while ago, a comment from some sci-fi author saying that most of what was passed off as "sci-fi" these days was not, but rather fiction set in a familiar world pioneered by the sci-fi greats. Not any different then fiction set in the Wild West or whatever. The author singled out star wars as an example. No real science, but rather a story that drew on the readers understanding of the 'sci fi world'
I do have a point
If this movie can be made without the pretense of needing to explain how reality shows and the media are exploitive and cynical, it means that we as a people are 'familiar' with the thing. They don't need to be told it, they know it already.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...or until all the celebs simply become voice-over crews. Ice Age had quite a number of big names in it, IIRC.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Heat, Ronin, etc are not serious movies.
Action movies are action movies, ie you arn't meant to take them seriously.
If you were to take either of the above movies seriously you'd keep wondering why the automatic firearms don't run out of bullets after 3 seconds.
600 rounds per minute = 100 rounds per 10 seconds = magazine load of bullets last 3 seconds on average automatic with 30 round mag.
So people blasting away with automatic firearms for heaven knows how long = equals movie that aint serious.
What you've just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read to it.
dinner: it's what's for beer
>cel animation didn't make actors redundant
.. except that CGI's ultimate goal (or one of them at least) is to look exactly like real actors.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Most of Slashdot thinks "Resident Evil" refers to the installations of Windows and Office on their home computers.
...aren't we boycotting the Hollywood movie industry because jackasses like Valenti are trying to get the government to pass draconian anti-freedom laws?
Fuck sakes, people, only one thing is going to shake up the industry, and that's you having the integrity to stand up for your beliefs and hit 'em where it hurts: their bottom line, by not purchasing their product.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I don't think JonKatz wrote this review, or else there's a new JonKatz.
Based on this review, I am definatly taking my so to see Showtime as soon as he gets to Northern VA for his spring break.
I was undecided before, but we like real guy movies and if Jon hates it we will LOVE it!
Thanks Jon!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
are you a teenage boy?
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've never really played with the slash code or any of the filtering things, but is there a way to just filter out anything he writes?
Or do you have to pay for the subscription to get rid of Katz?
It's not that I don't care for people going deep into films, it's just painful when they are so off base and out of touch.
What's next? A Katz review of 'SuperTroopers' where he thinks it's a serious examination of police corruption?
The Internet is generally stupid
Perhaps it was all done on purpose. One company makes a really bad movie called showtime, therefore creating a negative image in the minds of consumers, detracting from the services provided by another company.
I wonder if they can sue them for slander???
Ice Age, bleh. Same campy prehistoric cartoon plot. Animated animals find human baby and either a) raise it or b) try and return it to humans. It amazes we'll bitch until we're blue in the face about the need for story line in our games, but are willing to look past horrible plots in CG movies simply because they're CG. I'm no exception, I love to see the well done computer animation, but for christ's sake, how about adding a real plot as well.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
RE was ok, maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10, but there were some ridiculous plot points not to mention the completely overused loud sound + suddenly appearing something in a lame attempt to make people jump. Note to the director of RE: That trick only works a few times and when not expected, doing it every five minutes does NOT make your movie any scarier.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
And yet, in Japan, CG superstars have been around for awhile.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Oh give me a break! In this film he couldn't even play himself well. Shatner sucked balls.
And, BTW, Katz is right. This movie was lame. If Murphey and De Niro want to keep their stardom, they need to figure out that the first step is to make sure they (or their agents) read the script before accepting the part.
That is all.
Why didn't Katz review Resident Evil?
/. mob.
Showtime has very little pertaining to "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Resident Evil on the other hand is a movie adaptation of a video game. Whom decides what movie reviews by Katz are greenlighted?
I say that CmdrTaco and the rest audition other folks for movie reviews. They can at least find someone as adept as Katz at reviewing movies and deciding to review movies that are closer to the
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 actually has been doing this for years and did it best in Midnight Run
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
"Hollywood is scared shitless of believing in anything. That's why they spend so
much fucking money asking test audiences to write their endings for
them. So, what we get are technologically perfect movies with no soul.
That's Ice Age: millions of dollars of computers thrown at a
bland script full of pooping and animals getting bonked on the head.
It looks great, but where its heart should be is a hack screenwriter
doing exactly what a bunch of play-it-safe executives and focus groups
ask for. It's like having a CD of a shitty album when it's way better
to have a vinyl copy of a great one."
...and for an even more accurate look at "Ice Age", go to http://bigempire.com/filthy/