Three reactions to Eddie Murphy telling Extra‘s Tanika Ray that he’s considering retirement from film acting with comments like (a) “I have close to fifty movies and it’s like, why am I in the movies?,” (b) “I’ll go back to the stage and do standup” and (c) that he “doesn’t want to be a part of” Brett Ratner‘s Beverly Hills Cop 4 because “the movie [isn’t] ready to be done.”

Eddie Murphy; Frank Sinatra.

One, Murphy may be feeling deflated about the tracking on Meet Dave (7.11), which has been fairly abysmal for the last couple of weeks. The first-choice numbers have recently improved (they’re up to 2 or 3) but the signs are unmistakable that the bloom is off the rose and that people have finally understood that the odds of a Murphy comedy being gross or sloppy or not funny enough are pretty good so why bother in the first place? Murphy has since quashed the retirement talk, but that’s only because he’s moody fuck who feels what he feels when he’s feeling it. The bottom line is that he’s in a lousy place.
Two, he’s talking about a “Frank Sinatra retirement” which really means an extended “fuck all this” adventure that’s about shedding the old skin and finding new sources of vitality or what-have-you. A soul-seeking, soul-recharging exercise that every high-stress creative person goes through once or twice, usually in their 40s or 50s. In short, a bout of the middle-aged-crazies.
Three, it’s obviously a healthy thing or Murphy to be thinking about getting out of the rut and get back to his stand-up roots. I used to love the guy in the old days (late ’70s to ’83). I saw him perform live twice back then — once at a comedy club in Manhattan, once at the Universal amphitheatre. But the hip industry people haven’t been with him for 20 years. His loss of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Dreamgirls confirmed that, and then people really didn’t like his graceless ass when he bolted out of the Kodak theatre 90 seconds after Alan Arkin, the winner, took the stage.
All I know is, the guy used to be really funny, and that he needs to get back to that place again if he wants to matter again. Or feel anything again. Right now he’s a dead man.

A 30-minute iPhone 3G video tour starring that same dweeby-looking Apple guy in his 40s with the conservative haircut and the glasses — the same guy who’s been hosting the how-to video on the Apple site since the iPhone first appeared last summer. Except it’s not a quick tutorial for experienced users showing what’s new and different. It’s a basic tutorial about everything. Oh.

There are two PUMA PACs — one run by founder and Massachusetts mom Darragh Murphy that stands for People United Means Action, and one run by Will Bowers that stands for Party Unity My Ass. But they’re both are about rallying Hillary Clinton supporters believe she lost due to media sexism and who won’t support Barack Obama (who, PUMAS believe, were the principal agents of said sexism) are perhaps inclined to vote for John McCain.
Here‘s a New England Cable News report on Darragh that ran yesterday, and here’s a report by Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte contending that “PUMAS are Swiftboats” and particularly that Darragh was a McCain contributor in 2000 (based on a donation record found on Open Secrets.com) and that there’s reason, therefore, to wonder about her true motives. Apart from being dead set against Obama, that is.
“I would like to argue that this PAC was not formed to support Clinton,” Marcotte writes, “but to support the media narrative about hysterical feminists, and to help the McCain campaign with (a) creating the illusion that McCain is moderate enough to attract the votes of feminist Clinton supporters and (b) reinforcing the narrative about how feminists are just hysterical bitches with no common sense who subsist on outrage, can√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t act in their own self-interest because of their feminine-addled brains, and can safely be ignored.”

An HE reader named Lucas sent me an embedded code for that Travelocity ad I spoke of the other day. The actor is Stephen Full — here’s his reel. The actress is Diane Ruby Lane.

The currents flowing between Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock “are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall. It turns out that there’s a bond between these two (which I won’t reveal), and the rest of the movie, which includes some superb comic invention as well as scarily turbulent scenes, grows out of it. Hancock suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It’s by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer.” — from David Denby‘s New Yorker review, dated 7.7.08.

I’ve been sitting on this recording of Rob Reiner talking last Thursday to Pete Hammond during the L.A. Film Festival. It’s well worth it for the story he tells toward the end about Albert Brooks doing a mime bit on Johnny Carson‘s Tonight show back in the late ’70s or early ’80s, and a lesson Reiner learned about how funny is funny even if the audience doesn’t laugh. Because they will eventually.

Rob Reiner , Pete Hammond

IGN’s Todd Gilchrist is doing the usual somersaults over The Dark Knight — “an intense, disturbing masterpiece.”

From a new Vanity Fair spread about Hollywood’s New Wave. I know two of these guys — Amanda Seyfried, 22, co-star (along with Meryl Streep) of Mamma Mia!, and Kristen Stewart of Into the Wild, Adventureland and What Just Happened?. But I’m just not that into Emma Roberts (Wild Child) or Blake Lively (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Okay, I haven’t heard of them.

Seyfried, Roberts, Lively, Sterwart.

“If Michael Moore, Oliver Stone or, God forbid, some effete French director had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?”

So asks Hitsville’s Bill Wyman, the former arts editor for NPR and Salon. His point is that Pixar has done exactly this with WALL*E and that reviewers have barely acknowledged it. Many who have admitted that WALL*E has this social criticism aspect have done so in a vague pussyfoot fashion. The only ones who have stood up Gary Cooper-style and called a spade a spade, says Wyman, are N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and myself and…I think that’s it. (In Wyman’s piece, I mean. Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and Cinematicals’s James Rocchi also took note.)
“What was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called Buy n’ Large has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely,” Wyman writes. “While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn’t bother to point out what the film was saying.
“I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.
“And not subtextually, either; as my friend Michael Sragow says about such obvious material in films, ‘It’s not subtext — it’s text text.’

One day after Bill Clinton‘s “Obama needs to kiss my ass before I’ll enthusiastically campaign for him” quote was picked up by news services, Clinton and Barack Obama talked on the phone and had a “terrific” conversation, according to this Nedra Pickler AP story filed an hour or so ago.
OBAMA: All right, Bill. How do we do this?
CLINTON: Well, are you ready to kiss my ass on Main Street?
OBAMA: Heh-heh…okay.
CLINTON: I mean, that would work.
OBAMA: I’ve got a campaign to win, Bill. I need your help. You don’t like me, I can take you or leave you personally and who gives a shit? What do you want?
CLINTON: I want my reputation back. I was Elvis, the first black president. And I want a speech from you that pays tribute to that and puts all that race-monger, race-card player stuff to bed. I want it dead and buried. Like it never happened.
OBAMA: People respect you, Bill. I respect you as far as it goes. No need to dwell on the past.
CLINTON: I want my name back.
OBAMA: You made your bed, Bill. You, not me. I don’t control the press any more than you do. Everyone says you hurt Hillary’s campaign as much as help it. Probably more hurt. You’ve made yourself look emotionally petulant and hair-trigger with this kiss-my-ass thing, which tarnishes your rep. Not presidential, not dignified.
CLINTON: But here we are and you want my help. That’s where we are right now.
OBAMA: I’m not going to get into the way you and Hillary played your cards with the rust-belt voters.
CLINTON: I want to move on the way you want to move on. I have a price, is all. Nothing is for free. Everybody wants what they want. You want what you want, but to get that you need to give me what I want. Or you may not get what you want.
OBAMA: I’ll speak about you with respect and admiration, but I’m not going to go back to the campaign and say what happened didn’t happen. Let’s stand on common ground and go from there. That I’ll do.
CLINTON: Then we need to try again. I want an apology or I stay home. I want to be who I was before you and Hillary got into it last fall. Particularly the guy I was before last January. Before we started campaigning in Iowa.
OBAMA: You’re deluded.
CLINTON: And you can kiss my ass.
OBAMA: Okay, let’s take a break. Try again next week.
CLINTON: Bye.
OBAMA: Adios.

Drew McWeeny‘s combo-review piece on The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, posted this morning at 7:38 am, is too sprawling and wind-baggy. He’s a first-rate writer but it wore me down. That said, here’s the best graph in the whole piece — a tribute to Aaron Eckhart‘s Harvey Dent performance in the Chris Nolan film.
Eckhart “deserves some praise as well for the way he brings Dent to life, and for finding a way to play earnest without becoming overbearing,” Drew says. “Dent’s a more difficult role than the Joker in many ways because there aren’t as many big emotions you can play. He’s a decent, upstanding man who believes in doing things right, in prosecuting criminals instead of fighting them on a street level, and little by little, he’s actually making a difference.
Eckhart, in short, “gives the guy an inner life, just enough quirk to make him seem human, so that when the inevitable tragedy (which really is awful as laid out in the film) occurs, it’s not a simple on-off cartoonish lurch into violence for Dent. We feel it. We believe it. Dent’s physical trauma may be exaggerated, but the emotional side of it is pitch-perfect. And his work as Two-Face is just sad and angry. He’s nothing like the Joker. Hell, I’m not even sure I’d call him a villain.”