# Bowfinger (1999)

### reviewed by
James Brundage

    Bowfinger (1999, PG-13)

    Directed by Frank Oz

    Written by Steve Martin

Starring Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, and Jamie Kennedy

As Reviewed by James Brundage (MovieKritic2000)

In a review of Clue I restated the well-known fact that Hollywood is unpredictable. Clue was a good example, but Bowfinger is a perfect one. As much as Hollywood doesn't like to admit it, it's a highly touchy group. Movies that are politically risky are ignored. Movies that question the system are feared. This, by the way, explains Oscar snubs for movies like The Truman Show, Chasing Amy, Mother Night, Lolita, Smoke Signals, and countless others.

As touchy as Hollywood is, it can always surprise with the capability to do something completely bizarre and unexpected. Case in point: Bowfinger. Yeah, it's childish. Yeah, the jokes are cheap. But guess what's the nip of the jokes... Hollywood itself.

Not since Get Shorty has Hollywood dared to take itself out and beat itself up. Its a universal constant that no one wants to admit that they are hypocrites (the particular breed of person that makes up most of the true power in Hollywood), and movies like Bowfinger expose the hypocrisy of Hollywood in a very public way.

Bowfinger centers around Robert Bowfinger (Steve Martin), failed movie producer who decides to give it one last go after reading the script for a movie "Chubby Rain", a highly B-movie science fiction yarn that gets its title from the fact that the rain becomes chubby as the aliens fall to Earth encased in it. Bowfinger decides that he needs superstar Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) in the film in order to make it work, and, when Kit doesn't want to be in it, Bowfinger decides to film him without his knowledge.

He enlists a failed stage actress Carol (Christine Baranski), a crew composed of illegal immigrants (the funniest moment in the movie comes as INS does a roost of a field while people are motioned into a van to work on the movie), an actress from Ohio who knows what you really need to do to get ahead in Tinsel Town (best described in the single line acceptance speech for an Emmy winning Oscar telecast "I'm sorry I didn't have to sleep around to get this part") played by the always fun to watch Heather Graham and a wannabe cinematographer named Dave (Jamie Kennedy).

The sad thing about Bowfinger is that, for all of its hard work and perseverance of making fun of moviemaking, the people in it have such an obvious allure towards the industry that they ultimately fail at their goal. There is no incredible sense that you are laughing at Hollywood in general. You just laugh at Bobby Bowfinger et al.

It seems particularly ironic, though; that a film that had such perfect potential for skewering the Hollywood system was ultimately trapped by it. That, in being both anti-Hollywood and Hollywood at the same time, it comes out with only good one liners and gags. And, as we all know, good one-liners do not a movie make.

Another particular irony is that, as Bobby Bowfinger is so often the but of the movie's jokes, Steve Martin seems to be the but of the joke of the movie. He seems to not be able to go beyond being a charicature. Daisy (Heather Graham) does go beyond her character, but not enough to make up for the lack of personality that Bobby Bowfinger has.

Oh well. These things happen too often and too well. Such ends up being the fate of people brave enough to be working against the industry that they have worked with for so many years.

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