Bowfinger

At the top of his game, there's no one quite like Steve Martin. A combination of ham-handed vaudevillian and ironic commentator, he makes straight man roles inherently loopy and can deliver the zaniest dialogue with a stone face. Who else could deliver the overused "and by X I mean Y" joke construct and make it seem as if he'd just invented it? Apart from Andy Kaufman, no other modern comedian could lay such a concrete claim to being a "song and dance man," given his work in front of and behind the camera as well as forays into banjo playing. Starting in the late '80s Martin reinvented his comic persona to take on a more contemplative and satiric bent, and Bowfinger is the capper of his second era, the one that gave us hits like Parenthood and the classics Planes, Trains and Automobiles and L.A. Story.

Like L.A. Story, Bowfinger takes aim at life in Los Angeles, but Martin this time focuses more on Hollywood and the craft of filmmaking than the all-encompassing feeling of his masterpiece. He plays Bobby Bowfinger, a middle-aged cinephile who's devoted his life to running a production company and has only an empty shell of one to show for it. He prevents his actress friend from getting work because he's always convinced that the right script is just about to fall in his lap, and the only person he ever confides in is a young camera operator named Dave (Jamie Kennedy). Bowfinger's been content to string along the small band of denied dreamers for years, but he finally sees the writing on the wall as he approaches his 50th birthday -- in true Martin style, he says that, at 49, he can still pass for 44, well, 41. Well, 38, but at 50 you're done -- and he concentrates on getting just one picture done before Hollywood declares him dead.

So, when his accountant hands him a script entitled Chubby Rain, about aliens who invade Earth via raindrops, he leaps into action. Bowfinger gives a moving speech to Dave about saving up a dollar a week since he was 10 to make a film someday, and he triumphantly opens a box full of singles and announces that he has a whopping $2,184 from his diligence. That's the first big laugh of the film, and Martin kicks things into high gear at this point, highlighting this goofy band of misfits as they scramble to make a film.

Amazingly, for all its silliness and off-kilter charm, every little piece of Martin's script works. Heather Graham shows up as a sweet Midwestern gal who dreams of being in the movies, but as soon as she lands a part in the picture she demonstrates a keen grasp on sexual politics: she hangs off of Dave and Afrim the accountant until she makes her way to Bowfinger himself. She even displays a willingness to "switch teams" to get ahead (a commentary on Martin's brief relationship with Anne Heche, perhaps?). Bowfinger uses Dave's occupation as a studio-employed cameraman to nick equipment for free, much to Dave's constant fear. Pent up for years, possibly decades, waiting for Bobby to make a film to liberate her, Carol hysterically falls into every bad acting trope in the book, be it a terrible and wholly unsolicited British accent or a sudden case of ego.

Martin weathers everything he throws at his sadsack with adroit timing. Chubby Rain takes the term "guerrilla filmmaking" to new levels, as Bowfinger pulls up to streets in L.A., unloads his crew and tries to get in a few takes before the cops show up looking for a permit. In a brilliant piece of Hollywood satire, a cop pulls up to check their paperwork before it's even fully apparent that they're there to shoot something, only for Martin to offer the officer a role instead. When he discovers that Daisy's love extends only as far as the next rung on the social ladder, he confronts her over her infidelity. "So?" she asks in a tone that betrays how meaningless sex and sexual partners are to her, and Martin takes only enough time to run his eyes up and down Graham's figure before replying, "You know, I never thought of it that way."

As good as Martin is, though, it's Eddie Murphy who makes the movie, putting in his second finest performance(s) after The Nutty Professor. He plays Kit Ramsey, the most bankable movie star in Hollywood but also the victim of mental instability and paranoia. Imagine then his utter terror when Bowfinger, who needs Ramsey to sell his film to a distributor (Robert Downey, Jr.) but doesn't have remotely the money needed to pay Ramsey's rate, simply decides to film the actor without his knowledge, much less consent. Bowfinger convinces his actors that Ramsey is simply method acting, so they run up to him on the street and recite their lines concerning alien invasions, or they trigger squibs and other gory effects to seemingly melt before his eyes. Murphy fleshes out Ramsey with very little screen time, establishing him first as an egomaniac with a persecution complex -- when we meet him, he's berating his agent after searching for the letter 'k' in the script he received, dividing it by three, and shouting that "KKK" appears exactly 486 times in the pages -- and then as the paranoid mess comforted by Scientology knockoff MindHead.

The flip side of Murphy's performance is that of Jiff, Kit's brother and a dead ringer for the mega star. Where Kit is handsome and beloved by all, Jiff works oddjobs, can't see at all without his dorky glasses and appears to have sported braces since his baby teeth fell out. A completely one-dimensional character, Jiff nevertheless works because of how deeply Murphy commits to this weirdo. All Jiff wants to do is "real" work, so he agrees to be an assistant for Bowfinger to fetch coffee and the like, but naturally the producer exploits Jiff's resemblance to his brother and uses him as a body and stunt double. In the film's best comedic sequence, Bowfinger has Kiff run across an L.A. freeway as an action scene. Thanks to Frank Oz's skillful direction, which captures the cars only as blurs, I felt genuine terror watching Jiff try to make his way across eight lanes of traffic -- twice of course; you always need retakes -- even, as Martin points out, the cars are driven by professionals.

In some ways, Bowfinger is as revealing about the ins-and-outs of the industry as The Player: Martin's character believes he has a winner in Afrim's script simply because it ends with the catchphrase, "Gotcha, suckers," but Downey's executive gives Bowfinger his shot solely because he likes the phrase. In Ramsey's first rant, he rails against black people never getting any good catchphrases, as they go to Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or other white stars. Graham's character is a manipulative succubus who just might make it one day because of her shrewdness and certainly not her talent. But it's also a story of hope, one that vindicates these insane people through the sensation of making art (or whatever the hell it is you'd call Chubby Rain). These two aspects never fully gel for, as with all things to come from Steve Martin, you can never find solid ground because he never lets on what is sincere and what is simply an ironic ruse. Nevertheless, Bowfinger is a triumph, if not altogether great, about the joys of filmmaking, ultimately every bit as earnest as Tim Burton's Ed Wood and just as concerned with prying the beauty from B-movie absurdity. It's not the best Hollywood movie out there, but it's one of them, and it's lighthearted enough to be enjoyed on a rainy Sunday or a film class.

Heckler

At one point in Jamie Kennedy's Heckler, an investigation into the nature of the (de-)evolution of vocal and written criticism, filmmaker Joel Schumacher angrily asks, "Does any child want to grow up to be a critic?" Not a bad point. As someone who only moved out of his teens a few years back and obviously seeks to be one (a real one) someday, I might as well share my own feelings: from the ages of 2-5 I wanted to be a garbage man, simply because I thought the trucks were magical. Feel free to hold that over my head. Then I wanted to be an engineer, though why I can't be sure. Maybe it's because I just liked building crap with Legos and was brainwashed by all that talk of "my brother used to play with Legos all the time. He's an engineer now." Anyway, I kept with that ill-defined dream into my first year of college, at which point I found that I hated every one of my courses pertaining to the major.

I'd had the idea to perhaps study and write film criticism in my spare time since I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey a year earlier and had been changed by it, so I simply decided to shift my focus to make a career out of seeing and reviewing films, essentially because I wanted to see if there was a movie out there that could affect me so profoundly again.

I say all of this because Heckler brings up a number of good points about the impersonality of critics. A critic must rightly live in a vacuum, away from the stars and filmmakers you will later have to review, possibly negatively, and one must try to add an objective tint to the very definition of subjectivity. But that impersonality also makes some criticism perhaps too rigid, and definitely too harsh. The comics and filmmakers Kennedy assembles stress that they all have feelings, and that today's style of vicious criticism can have terrible effects on them. They're quite right: Lord knows I've devoted ream after ream of bile directed at anything and everything to do with the new Transformers, and at times I feel an almost insatiable need to insult rather than truly critique. This is a shameful practice which I've tried to curb for all but the most loathsome theater-going experiences I have in a year, but we can all agree that, sometimes, an insult is just fun.

I also share my pathetic, truncated life story because Heckler's chief weakness is its inability to see the critics, too, as people. While many have kind words to say about Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert, who are constructive even in their most scathing reviews (though the nicest thing you can say about Ebert's review for North is that he like Wood and Reiner's other films), a number of the interviewees erect critics, be they paid -- for lack of a better term -- "professionals" or anonymous Internet commentators, on a pedestal. To them, critics are nothing more than glorified hecklers, and the lot of them can be grouped into an institution as corrupt as any government.

That simple-mindedness, perpetuated not by all of the subjects but fatally by Kennedy himself, turns Heckler from a potentially insightful look into the Internet's effect on cruelty and rudeness in criticism into what feels like, ironically, Jamie Kennedy's video blog, one long rant against the haters who so torment him.

The first segment, which tackles hecklers in clubs, is the most immediately rewarding, because we can see the comics fighting back. Classic clips such as Bill Hicks' verbal assault on a hostile crowd, which remains as terrifyingly entertaining now as it was the first time I saw the video years ago, rub up against more recent footage of Kennedy and other comics handling the drunks and the asses. Revealingly, a number of these comics simply aren't funny; one poor sap even manages to turn the entire audience against him with bad jokes and worse defenses against the heckler. Kennedy himself, it must be said, is too quick to fall back on the easy sexual jokes about drunken girls' promiscuity and standoffish males' inability to get laid.

Kennedy only makes matters worse when he interviews some kids who openly profess themselves hecklers; snotty, hipster, virginal teenagers all, they cannot articulate their thoughts beyond, "You're not funny." Now, I'm willing to cut Kennedy a lot of slack, because anyone who would pride himself on being a heckler is probably a world-class douche anyway, so these interviews are actually a nice bit of fun.

When he tries to apply that same tactic to paid film critics, however, Heckler hits a speed bump. He confronts some critics -- including high-profile cases such as Richard Roeper -- and reads them some of the harsh things they said about the poor comic. Some of these excerpts are scathing but nowhere near brutal, while others cross every boundary of taste you could imagine. One critic in particular, who appears on G4's Attack of the Show with Kennedy, throws out disgusting lines that are not criticism by any standard but simply base insults.

Then the criticized get their say. Just as a number of the comics responding to hecklers in clips were unfunny and even sexist and racist (though no one deserves to be yelled at in the middle of a show), many of the filmmakers and actors weighing in on film criticism produce some awful schlock. All the makers of lame teen comedies point out that 12-year-olds thought the movie was hilarious, ergo the film succeeded. The goal of any film is to entertain, yes, but how can anyone say such a thing with matter-of-fact pride? Joel Schumacher complains that people tore apart his Batman films, saying that they were just "comic book movies." That mindset is exactly why those films were so bad (and it's not like he has audience appreciation to fall back on there; everyone hated Batman & Robin), and why Christopher Nolan's Batman was such a revelation. Even Jon Lovitz, who voiced the lead in the animated series The Critic, gets in an absurd rebuttal when he confidently asserts that he wouldn't get a job coaching the Lakers just because he's been to all the games for 20 years -- no Jon, but you could damn sure get a job writing about them, now couldn't you? And let's not even go into Kennedy's antics of reading scathing reviews of his cinematic hallmarks Son of the Mask and Malibu's Most Wanted as if the critic had laid into Orson Welles (he even asks Roeper why he loves all of Ang Lee's films but doesn't have fun with Son of the Mask).

The Internet's influence takes up a great deal of the film's running length, yet no one ever really investigates the nature of the information superhighway and its ability to give everyone a voice. Lewis Black and some others say some sage things about the toxic effect of anonymity, yet the connections between this new mindset and contemporary criticism are tenuous at best and forced at worst. Had it been trimmed down to about 20 minutes, this final segment would have been better even if it only vaguely addressed the Internet's power. Nevertheless, it does offer up golden quotes from Carrie Fisher and a reviewer for CHUD.com, who explodes in the film's best rant (in a film interviewing comics, no less!) when critic Leonard Maltin blanket insults all internet critics.

While the heckler segment contains too much open sexism and bad comebacks, it kept me completely engaged, because everyone hates a heckler. I would have admired its take on critics too, had it not been so simplistic and one-sided. Then again, the movie actually gives some critics the chance to explain themselves, which is something actual film criticism doesn't allow; the only way for a filmmaker to really get back at a critic is to make his next film that much better -- or beat them up in a boxing match; your choice, really. In the end, though, I couldn't help but laugh at all of these supposedly edgy comics and teen-targeted auteurs dismissing critics and hecklers even as they devoted a feature-length film to complaining about how mean they can be. The richest irony is that Kennedy's web site contains numerous pull-quotes from critics who gave the film positive reviews. I thought you didn't care what they said, Jamie?