THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 29, 1996 TAG: 9607270059
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Comment
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: 74 lines
A WEIGHTY BACKLASH against Eddie Murphy's remake of ``The Nutty Professor'' has begun. It's reaching critical mass and deservedly so. It's an offensive film.
Sure, there are laughs in it. I laughed at times. But at what price? At the price of a mature adult mind, at least. At whose expense? At quite a few people's.
Insult and shallowness, rather than ``nuttiness,'' define this Murphy comeback vehicle. This is comedy?
The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, a 5,000-member organization based in Sacramento, Calif., has come out against the film, saying it perpetuates harmful stereotypes of fat people and minimizes their pain with incessant, juvenile fat jokes.
The NAAFT is right. Big butts squeeze into chairs. Big mouths slop down food. Big thighs rub together as pants get caught in big-butt cracks. Hilarious.
Sure, the film has a ``beauty's-only-skin-deep'' moral. Murphy's character, the 400-pound genetic scientist Sherman Klump, learns, after metamorphosing into rail-thin sleazeball Buddy Love, to accept himself as he is. He even gets the skinny, gorgeous girl.
But must he endure so much ridicule first?
See Sherman write on the blackboard and wipe out the chalked words with his belly as he goes. See an obnoxious skinny twerp of a stand-up comic slice and dice him while he's out with his lady love. See Sherman drown his sorrows in an upended candy jar.
Sherman is a professor. Don't education and achievement count?
Not as much as humiliation and sexual desperation, apparently.
I wonder, if Love were just a garden-variety slim guy, instead of the testosterone-driven dog he is, would fat Sherman still accept himself?
Wait a minute. That question borders on insight and subtlety. Depth, even. Better to strive for extremes.
``The Nutty Professor'' grossed more than $80 million in its first three weeks because people have been led to believe by raving critics that it's uproariously funny. It isn't.
I don't think I've laughed at flatulence and bowel movements since I was about 8. (OK, the campfire scene in ``Blazing Saddles'' did make me chuckle.) But that's the humor level in ``Professor.'' Obese people are portrayed as gastrointestinal Mount St. Helenses waiting to blow. And Murphy, in an admitted tour de force of impersonation, plays all of them - with glee.
As Sherman's fat mama, fat daddy, fat brother, fat grandmama and Sherman, Murphy alternately licks their crude chops 'round the family dinner table. Daddy provides the ``musical'' accompaniment. What comes out of sex-obsessed Grandmama's lips will give parents fits.
Maybe this is intended to show the familial cycle of obesity.
Just kidding.
Sherman Klump is a sweet and sympathetic character. He could've carried this movie without resorting to raunchy sitcom material.
Instead, sad to say, ``Professor'' falls back on that old axiom of comedy: If fat and flatulence don't tickle the funny bone, exploit sex and body parts. Grandmama is the prime offender, but Buddy Love - Sherman's DNA-potion-altered ego - has a chronic case of penis envy. Envy of his own penis, that is.
Buddy feasts his eyes on as many female breasts and tight bottoms as he can, at one point even counting the breasts around him lest we miss the point that, as Love, Sherman no longer needs a bra. Ha-ha.
Geez, Eddie, elevate, elevate. Get out of the locker room toilet. This is a family movie, not a nightclub act. You're making Jerry Lewis look dignified and smart. I watched the original ``Nutty Professor'' recently and for the first time I think the French may be right.
All I can figure is that the predominantly male corps of American film critics wants so desperately for Murphy to have a hit that it's willing to regress to the anal stage for him to have one.
Either that or my humor belt needs to be let out a few notches.
Naaaah. Fat chance of that. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB