This was an iTunes rental that I viewed on flight from Chicago to Los Angeles on February 10th. This film was not well received. It received an 8% Rotten Tomatoes rating for crying out loud. But, I am a Bill Murray fan and I had a 4 hour flight so I took a chance.
This film had everything it took to be a good film; Bill Murray, a solid cast and a good director in Barry Levinson. The finished product just didn't turn out that way. There's a reason why the picture got universally panned. It's not good. At all. Apparently the film borrows heavily from the 2009 documentary Afghan Star. Murray plays Richie Lanz, a down on his luck music promoter who somehow gets his only client booked on a USO tour in Kabul, Afghanistan (not the most fun place during the war). Predictably things fall apart and Lanz finds himself brokering an arms deal with a local tribe. During the night he hears a lovely voice singing in the valley. The voice belongs to the chief's daughter and of course singing and dancing is forbidden to women. Lanz smuggles Salima out of the village and gets her a spot on the Afghan version of American Idol called Afghan Star. Which is not an easy task.
Let's gt to the point, despite the threat of death, Salima gets on Afghan Star and wins. In addition to all this, Lanz gets involved in a tribal coup and gets shot during said coup. The overlying plot of the film is that Murray gets into one ridiculous situation after another...
Like this one.
And this one. To name a few.
Then pulls Bill Murray antics to get out of the ridiculous situations. That's essentially the film,a series of separate Bill Muray skits woven together in an attempt to make a cohesive plot.. There's a good story within the film, that of Setara Hussainzada, but we only get Murray hamming it up for the camera. There's a scene early in the film where Murray explains to his daughter (he's pretty much a deadbeat dad but he loves her and that's what matters) why he's going away and he mentions "the Casbah." His daughter replies by saying that the Casbah is in Morocco and nowhere near Afghanistan (I can only speculate that that's why they spelled Casbah with a K, a flat joke). It goes downhill from there.
This film did not have it from the beginning and it deserved all the bad reviews it got.
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