Word: comically
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Despite the weakness of "Professor" as a whole, it is impressive to see Murphy destroy a stand-up comic and, in the process, stretch his own comic persona's self-assuredness to the breaking point. Yet his efforts are lost in all this material This, perhaps, is the essential failure of "The Nutty Professor"--low comedy and boring plotting weigh down the film's potential...
Ironically, one of the finest parts of the film involves Murphy attacking a mean stand-up comedian. Buddy Love returns with his date to the Def Comedy Jamtype comic (Dave Chapelle) who before had made public mockery of him as Sherman Klump. Turning heckler, Buddy begins by sarcastically praising the comic for his ability to pick out and pick on people for their weaknesses. Thereafter, things turn ugly for the poor guy: in a sequence owing a lot to Steve Martin's nose-joke routine in a bar in "Roxanne," Buddy proceeds to roast the comic to a crisp. Where...
Ultimately, the movie only follows well-worn paths, trotting out a revelation-of-main-character's-big-secret scene, the shock-of-love-interest-at-betrayal/breathless-reconciliations scene, even a sappy speech about identity that Al Franken's Stuart Smalley could have written. After the vicious stand-up comic scene and another superbly funny nightmare sequence (again, alas, tainted with a gaseous joke or two), the movie simply gets tiresome. It's as if the movie's taking a collective funny potion now and then, having enormously concentrated effects, and then abating, painfully. Even Murphy's Buddy Love fizzles toward...
...Miller, who as Sick Boy obsesses over the career of Sean Connery, is the son of actor Bernard Lee--"M" in 11 Bond films. Producer Andrew MacDonald is the grandson of auteur Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes). And McGregor is the nephew of Denis Lawson, a deliciously droll, comic actor in Scottish movies (Local Hero) and West End musicals (Mr. Cinders). Young Ewan, the son of teachers, got the itch to act from Lawson. "I was brought up in Crieff, a small, conservative town," McGregor says, "and he had long hair, beads and a furry waistcoat. I aspired...
...pink letters on a white marquee, this establishment proudly alerted passersby that it featured live girls working their way through college. Patrons, presumably, found topless women who had taken the SATs to be more tantalizing than those who had not. That's the basis for Jennifer Belle's comic first novel, Going Down (Riverhead Books; $12; 254 pages), which chronicles a year in the life of a young woman who becomes a prostitute to pay her tuition at New York University. Right away we know we are in for humor of the zanily incongruous sort because Belle has given...