Tag: Bill Murray

Bill Murray is Funny

RilalyLeave a comment

“It can’t be that easy for him,” Steve Martin is reported to have said about friend and fellow actor Bill Murray. “It just can’t.”

Some guys are just funny. We hated them in high school, because they could effortlessly do, what the rest of us worked so hard to do: Make people laugh. Was there a super-secret formula to their success? Not that we could see. They could just lift an eyebrow in a particular situation, or smirk in a somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious way, and put everyone on the floor. It was frustrating to those of us who’ve had to work our way through the dark and mysterious halls of funny to find that which they just had sort of attached to them at birth. Everyone wanted to be around them to hear what they might say next, and they hoped that he liked them half as much as they liked him. Why? Because he was funny, naturally and effortlessly, funny. “Some guys just are,” we might tell our kids facing similar circumstances, “and there’s nothing you can really do about it.”

Bill Murray, I have to imagine, was one of those guys we all hated in high school. He was the fifth of nine kids in the Murray family, and we can imagine that some of his comedy came from striving for some attention in such a crowded home, but we also have to imagine that comedy was a way of life in that Irish, Catholic home. Regardless how it came about, Bill Murray became one of the best comedic actors of his generation, and as his stint on Saturday Night Live shows displayed, he had great improvisational skills too, but I’m sure if we saw him attempt to do standup, we might see through his otherwise bullet-proof veneer. We’ve heard man-on-the-street stories of him engaging in improvisational acts that prove hilarious, but those are based on his good guy graciousness as a well-known celebrity. If we could somehow remove his status, and read through these stories, would he still be funny? Impossible to know, because they’re built on his iconography, as well as adding to it. Bill Murray movies, however, are almost all funny, some hilarious, and others are enshrined in our personal hall of fame of funny. 

What is the super-secret formula to Bill Murray’s success? My guess is that there isn’t one, and that might be his secret. Bill Murray does have an undeniable everyman appeal in that he’s not gorgeous, he doesn’t have great skin or hair, and while he’s not fat, no one would say he’s fit and trim. He is just a funny man. He is the embodiment of the annoying “It is what is” principle. I go to see his movies, because he’s funny. Why is he just as funny, or funnier, than his peers? “I don’t know, he just is.” 

Anytime we discuss the merits of one actor over another, there is always the question of presentation. Everyone from the lighting guy to the director and the editor plays some role in the way Bill Murray is presented to the audience. Murray, as has been reported, can be difficult to work, because he doesn’t feel like certain people know how to do their jobs. Does this have anything to do with the idea that Bill knows how all the players need to work together to form this presentation, because he’s seen quality players do it? If that’s the source of his reported obnoxiousness, then he obviously knows how to cultivate and foster his presentation, which is more effort than that which we accredited to him.

To everyone from the frustrated peer to the casual fan, it appears as though Bill Murray just coasts through his movies, and he isn’t even trying to be funny or dramatic, depending on the role he’s playing in a movie. He’s just Bill Murray in the way Tom Cruise is just Tom Cruise and Clint Eastwood is just Clint Eastwood. Bill Murray is also so consistently Bill Murray that we know what to expect from the productions he participates in, in the same manner we know what to expect in a Starbucks franchise or an AC/DC song. 

Now we have Steve Matin, one of Murray’s peers and colleagues, a man who began around the same time, has attempted to do as almost as many comedic and dramatic movies, and TV shows saying he basically agrees that it doesn’t appear as though Bill Murray is even trying. Regardless the actual number of movies, or the debate over comedic quality, the two can be viewed as colleagues in many ways, and he views Murray’s career as so effortless that it’s almost frustrating to him. 

It’s not our intention to belittle Steve Martin’s brilliant and influential career, as we think it speaks for itself, but he’s obviously worked very hard to achieve everything he has. Bill Murray, on the other hand, has achieved similar heights without seeming to try near as hard. We’re sure that Murray does his due diligence, research, mental preparation, and everything else it takes to make a quality production, but it doesn’t appear that way. In terms of perception alone, it appears as though Bill Murray rolls out of a hammock shortly after someone yells, “Action!” delivers his lines, and goes back to his hammock funnier than the rest of us will ever be no matter how much work and effort we put into it. 

If you have to try that hard, you’re probably not very funny, you might counter, and you’d be right, but we have all had to learn how to be funny. Learning the beats, rhythms, and everything else it takes to be funny is often done by osmosis. We don’t learn how to be funny in the same way we learn math, how to play baseball, or how to be an electrician. We pick up various elements of our presentation from our peers, that crazy-funny uncle, and our TV shows and movies. If you were around during the Seinfeld/Friends era, you saw how they influenced what it takes to be funny, and you picked up some tips and copied the actors’ mannerisms, their tones, and sometimes we stole the lines their writers wrote for them. They, and numerous others of course, defined funny in our era. Other eras had Abbot and Costello, The Honeymooners, and The Lucille Ball Show define funny. We’ve also had others tell us “That’s not funny!” and we adapted and adjusted to the current cultural norms of funny, and in some ways, it took some definition of work to do so. Others, it seemed, didn’t have to go through all those trials and errors. They just seemed to fall into funny, because that’s who they were.     

These funny people weren’t great looking either. Bill Murray, for example, does not have what we consider “leading man” looks. I’m not trying to diss the man, as he’s probably better looking than I am, but if we were to take headshots and show them to citizens of another culture, with the headshots of a couple of great looking character actors and ask them to, “Pick out the leading man in movies in our country,” Bill Murray might be the last chosen. I don’t know if he’s ugly, but he has an unmade bed look about him. He doesn’t have great skin, and he barely has any hair left, and he rarely changes facial expressions in the course of his movies, but movie directors flood his 1-800 number to try to get him to lead, or at least appear, in their movie.   

Most of us worked hard to be funny, shortly after we realized we didn’t have anything else going for us, and it was so frustrating for us to see someone roll out of bed funny. We can all identify with Steve Martin’s complaints, because we all know someone who achieves what we worked so hard for with such apparent effortlessness. If you’ve ever watched camp counselors, teenagers, try to MC an event, you’ve seen them try to work the audience (of camp goers and their parents), you’ve seen them try to act crazy, nuts, and fun, and you’ve walked away thinking, they could really use a natural speaker with some unusual levels of charisma, a Tripper (Bill Murray’s character in Meatballs). If you’ve ever seen a grown man sing with a full stage show, with dancers, pyrotechnics, and anything and everything to entertain an audience, you know that there are just some men and women who, armed with nothing but a microphone, can sing a song called Star Wars, and produce one of the funniest things ever seen. How does he do it? No one, not even one of the other funniest men of his generation, knows. He just does. When we watch it, we send out Steve Martin’s “It can’t be that easy!” complaint sent out to the unfairness of the universe.   

A Personal St. Vincent

RilalyLeave a comment

Everyone has had an experience with a Vincent McKenna (played by Bill Murray), a St. Vincent, and very few of them involve any form of redemption. St. Vincents are St. Vincents as a result of the demons that chase them into being the people they are, and those demons are, often, so powerful that they cannot be thwarted.

st-vincent-movie-reviewsAnyone that has read my personal experiences with Ellis Reddick, knows that I’ve had my own experience with a St. Vincent, and that I’ve been affected by his sociopathic tendencies in a subtle manner that I may never entirely shake. Ellis Reddicks, and St. Vincents, are considered ideal characters for horror movies and coming-of-age style redemptive movies. They are often nice people (in the coming-of-age movies) that require a viewing from a non-traditional lens, and it’s in that scope that they often find the redemption that no one ever afforded them before. Having said all that, St. Vincent is a really good movie for its honesty, and it’s all too realistic (for some of us) portrayal of a demon-ridden, lout that tries to take advantage of everyone around him, but as anyone that has watched a movie made in this century (the 21st century) knows, he’s not going to be such a bad guy at the end of this production, and in the version of reality depicted in this particular movie no one really is.

The demons that chased Ellis Reddick are the same that presumably drove Vincent throughout his life, except for the alcohol and the stripper. The demeanor, the overall outlook, and the need for vices are all the same. Vincent McKenna is an alcoholic that frequents the track, and spends some of his day and most of his nights with a stripper in a seemingly asexual relationship. He tries to take advantage of everyone around him, including a banker, and a recently divorced single mother to fund his loutish behavior. With the banker, Vincent finds out that the money he’s received thus far from the bank, as a result of a reverse mortgage, has been completely tapped. The banker tries to explain the process of a reverse mortgage, and the idea that as far as the process is concerned, the bank can no longer afford to finance Vincent McKenna’s lifestyle. Anyone that understands this process, understands what the banker is saying, but Vincent (and thus the audience) believes that the banker could find a way to continue to fund Vincent’s lifestyle, and the fact that he doesn’t makes the banker a tool. The banker then becomes, in a limited manner that only characterizes Vincent’s current plight further, a bad guy. There is some struggle at this point, however, in totally believing that the banker is a bad guy. He looks at Vincent with confusion in a manner that suggests that his hands are tied, but the sympathy for the main character cannot be shaken. There is no struggle with the story of Vincent taking advantage of the single mother’s situation however. That is more blatant and –in an odd way that makes the audience uncomfortable– kind of funny.

The John Nolte, November 14, 1014 review for Breitbart.com, suggests that the movie, St. Vincent, is basically trope-less, or as he describes it, “It isn’t a tropey-trope.” I’m guessing that Nolte is stating that this movie isn’t so loaded with tropes that it’s totally derivative, and thus unwatchable. If this is what he’s saying, he’s right, but it’s still loaded with so many tropes that any serious review would probably have to mention the word to be taken seriously, even when they are attempting to dismiss the adjective. The primary reason to watch this movie, as with any movie Bill Murray is involved in is Bill Murray.

Bill Murray pulls his role off with the inexplicable, characteristic ease he pulls off every role. As Steve Martin once said of Bill Murray: “It can’t be that easy for him. It just can’t!” Inherent in Martin’s consternation is the consternation that Hollywood, the critics’, and most Americans display with their inability to understand why he is popular, and why they love him too. The consternation also suggests that there has to be some underlying philosophy, or effort to it all, that no one can see. If it were any other actor, most people would accuse Bill Murray of sleepwalking through most of the movies he’s done. He doesn’t appear to care about all that, and we love him for it. I love him for it. It may have something to do with what Bill Murray said, “I knew from the moment I finished reading the script for Ghostbusters that we would all be able to be late for the rest of our lives.” It may have something to do with, as Truman Capote once said, “All an author needs is one truly great book.” It may have been his years on Saturday Night Live, the movies What about Bob? or Groundhog Day, or the stories of “citizen” Bill Murray that have made their way into the zeitgeist, but one gets the feeling that if St. Vincent were his first movie, we would all love his performance without knowing why.

If it’s true, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt says that “To think critically is always to be hostile,” then the reader could regard this review as hostile. Most critical thinkers prefer to think of a critical review as an honest review. Some critical thinkers rip apart commercials and cartoons. They may enjoy these vehicles, but they can’t shut that critical portion of their brain off, no matter how much they enjoy the presentation before them. Some may view critical thinking as negative thinking, or cynical thinking, and some may take critical thinking a step too far. The latter tend to think that the audience of that criticism can’t help but think that they are striving for the cachet that critical thinking can gain a person.

Having said all that, Theodore Melfi’s directorial debut of his screenplay is very good. The primary reason for this, as I’ve stated, is that Melfi and Murray combined to characterize this Vincent McKenna character in a manner that recalled the Vincent McKennas I’ve known throughout my life. That alone, in my opinion, makes the movie worthwhile. As the movie moves through this methodical characterization, we only love to hate Vincent McKenna more. Prior to the redemptive phase of the movie, the trope that we all have to suspect in a modern well-rounded movie, I was reminded of all of the St. Vincents I’ve known, as I worked my way through the confusing aspects of youth –looking for a hero to imitate or emulate– I found them all falling so far short that the St. Vincent redemption eventuality seemed both inevitable and incorrect to my experience with this type of person.

Other than the fact that this curmudgeon, this Vincent McKenna, doesn’t have a tropey-trope-like, Scrooge-style redemption at the end, but all the surrounding characters do, I would point out that just about everything else in this movie has been done, ad nauseum, before. The most pervasive trope in this movie, and that which seems so pervasive in modern cinema, is that “there are no good guys, there are no bad guys. There’s only you and me babe, and we just can’t agree”. And if there are bad guys, they may be bad guys to traditional thinkers, but once viewed through a non-traditional lens, they can be something more, something better. The lens of this movie is, of course, provided by a child, the neighbor’s son, named Oliver. Another “bad guy” Oliver’s bully becomes a good guy after a more traditionally-minded style of beating. The audience’s focus then shifts to the villainous divorced Dad of Oliver. As the movie plays out, the audience realize he’s not such a bad guy after all either.

The St. Vincent’s I’ve known were not Vietnam Veterans, and they weren’t retirees that had already lived a life when I knew them. When I knew them, they were fully immersed in the depths of their failure, so it may be unfair to equate St. Vincent with the curmudgeons and louts I’ve known throughout my life, but (again to the credit of the movie) they reminded me so much of some of the awful characters that have littered my life that I couldn’t help but feel cheated by the happy, redemptive ending. When it involves Bull Murray though, it’s impossible to leave angry.