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

Down to the writing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes I think Katz enjoys the ragging... bringing up the topic of boring/lame writing is just asking for it...

Yeah...

[Cyph]

"It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it?"

I guess that's why you're not working for Wired anymore, Jon. *grin*

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.

The writing matters...

[hyrdra]

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.

For the writer's-eye-view

[Scareduck]

go here. The problem with this movie is the usual story -- too many cooks in the kitchen. But that's not unusual; a friend who works for a major studio once told me that, on one feature he was working, the filming process looked something like

• 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.

comes down to story, not writing

[Infonaut]

I just saw Showtime yesterday, and I enjoyed it for what it was: a matinee movie devoid of any real meaning. It took easy shots at reality TV and cop movies, but then slid back into standard Hollywood fare when there were no more shots to take.

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?

Research Katz, Research

[0xA]

Okay guys this is my very first bash Katz post so forgive me if I'm not quite as polished as I could be.

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.

A different perspective

[swillden]

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.

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.

Wow..

[ApheX]

Jon,

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 .. on second thoughts, Don't.

Jon Katz: Still on Slashdot because we love to hate him.

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