BEFORE: Eddie Murphy carries over again from "A Thousand Words", and it's Father's Day for real today. Did I pick the right film to land on the holiday itself? I sure hope so, because I've got three more films on the topic of fathers which will now be reviewed after. Sure, it's just one day, but if I can knock off three more films about fathers and still get to my Doc Block on time, why wouldn't I do that? Who knows if I'll be able to link to those films next year?
That's a wrap on the Tribeca Film Festival, today is the last day and I'm not scheduled. I've got two other events I'm working this week, but overall it seems things may slow down for the summer, which means I've got to find another job soon. The last celebrity sightings by me yesterday were Sam Rockwell, Lucy Liu, David Cronenberg, Joe Hill, John Densmore (from The Doors) and Aidan Quinn, who I spotted in the crowd. It was something of a slow rainy day, I suspect most people caught the films they wanted to see early in the week so they could spend time with their fathers this weekend, or travel somewhere to do so.
I'm also at the halfway point for June, and one film away from the halfway point of the year, which comes a bit early because I've limited myself to 300 movies for the year, not 365.
THE PLOT: A financial executive who can't stop his career downspiral is invited into his daughter's imaginary world, where solutions to his problems await.
AFTER: This is a totally different film from yesterday's, because in that film Eddie Murphy's character had a son, and here his character, Evan Danielson, has a daughter. Also in "A Thousand Words" his character worked as a literary agent, and here he plays an investment expert. See? Totally different thing - but what's the same is that the main character has to balance his work life and his home life, and the work life is taking up all his attention and his child is being neglected. Bad father! Men just can't skate on child-rearing duties any more, even if they are the main bread-winner of the family. So in several of Murphy's films this week, he has to learn how to be a true father, not just a genetic one, and that takes time and effort and a desire to do better. Really, we could just skip to that, only then the movies would be only five minutes long - so he's got to learn this lesson, but the long way, by making mistakes and by being a neglecting father at first. Why, it's almost like there's a formula being used here, but that's only because there totally is.
As a result of the parental neglect (little Olivia's mother works, too, so she's kind of double-neglected - but I bet her mother's better at juggling responsibilities!) or perhaps as a by-product of it, Olivia won't give up her childhood blanket, and she uses it as a conduit to speak to her imaginary friends, Princesses Kupida, Sopida and Mopida, also Queen Qwali). Her teacher has allowed her to bring the blanket to school, however Olivia's use of it has become disruptive, as she sits outside at recess an extra hour, in her own imaginary world. Evan's efforts to take her blanket away all fail, but when he has to watch his co-parented daughter for a whole week, he's determined to find a solution for the blanket fixation. When those fail, he chooses to bring her to the office because she can't make it through a day at school without the blanket or screaming non-stop when she's without it.
Then something unusual happens, while Evan's not watching her, she paints and colors all over his work reports, and he's forced to bring those reports with him into a meeting, where his co-worker and rival investment strategist Johnny Whitefeather is stealing his clients and influencing his boss by using a bunch of Native American customs and idioms to predict the financial success of investment opportunities. Evan has something of a meltdown, and wildly declares that he's got a similarly successful system, based on his daughter's drawings. He's being sarcastic, but he declares one company "sparkly" and another company with its pants down, and with doody in its pants. During the meeting, reports come in that the stock of the "sparkly" company has risen sharply, while the other company got caught in a fraud case, and actually has no financial success. Evan's boss wants to know how his "predictions" came so close to the breaking news.
Evan's daughter had already been trying to relay messages from her imaginary friends to him about which companies were good investments, but Evan had ignored them until this meeting - then suddenly he's drawn into her world, and if there are more predictions to be had from Sopida and Mopida, or if his daughter is some kind of child investment savant, he's only going to get more information by playing along with her and contacting her IF's with the blanket method. Time and again he gets the imaginary princesses' opinion of companies, and time and time again, their opinion turns out to be quite accurate, whether a company is a "crybaby" or wants to "marry" another company. The girl may know nothing about leveraged buyouts or corporate mergers, but the advice she relays turns out to be correct each time, so maybe she's just incredibly lucky. Investment strategy could be mostly guesswork, iany
Evan rediscovers his inner child, and his daughter enjoys playing games with her father again, what could possibly go wrong with getting investment advice from imaginary princesses and relaying that information to investors? When their investment company gets bought out and Evan has to compete against Johnny Whitefeather for the position of head of the division, the Native American man tries to compete by buying a sacred native blanket and forcing his son to chain drink Red Bulls so he can reach a similar enlightened awareness of investment strategies. Meanwhile Evan loses access to the blanket at a critical time when his week with his daughter is up and she's booked into a pizza party and a sleep-over, forcing Evan to embarrass himself by sneaking in to the sleep-over house and trying to steal the blanket.
He fails to realize that the blanket is useless without his daughter "relaying" the information from the princesses, it's all really coming from her imagination, see? But now she knows that her father only played with her to get access to the blanket, and she feels worse than ever. So bad that she may not be able to sing her solo at the school concert. Her only hope is that her father comes to the realization that spending time with his daughter was much more important than getting the investment advice that would secure him a promotion. But that would mean that Evan would have to choose to go to her concert rather than his meeting with the new CEO, which OF COURSE is scheduled to happen at the same time.
This film was not a financial success, and Murphy at one point referred to it as one of the worst films he ever made, but how could it be, with "Meet Dave" and "Norbit" on his filmography? Look, any film that contains four cover versions of Beatles songs can't be all bad, especially since they're ones I've never heard, and I've been collecting Beatles covers for decades. I think maybe family-friendly films like this need to be rated on a separate scale, like of course there wasn't a lot of Murphy's traditional humor here, because this is a movie kids and parents can watch together. And isn't that really the best you could do on Father's Day, find a movie you can watch with your kids?
Directed by Karey Kirkpatrick (director of "Smallfoot")
Also starring Thomas Haden Church (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Yara Shahidi (last seen in "Peter Pan & Wendy"), Ronny Cox (last seen in "Deep Blue Sea"), Stephen Rannazzisi (last seen in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop"), Nicole Ari Parker (last seen in "How It Ends" (2018)), DeRay Davis (last seen in "Code Name: The Cleaner"), Vanessa E. Williams (last seen in "Candyman"), Martin Sheen (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Lauren Weedman (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Timm Sharp (last seen in "Queenpins"), Stephen Root (ditto), Daniel Polo (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Whatever It Takes"), Marin Hinkle (last seen in "Players"), Bobb'e J. Thompson (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Blake Hightower (last seen in "Be Kind Rewind"), Michael McMillian, Catherine McGoohan (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), James Patrick Stuart (last heard in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2"), Tonita Castro (last seen in "Wilson"), Charlie Koznick, Talen Ruth Riley (last seen in "Two Days in New York"), Jonathan Mangum (last seen in "The Bucket List"), Mike Vorhaus, Bob Rumnock (last seen in "Divergent"), George Karl, Heidi Marnhout, John Nance, Jeff Kosloski, Allen Ross, Rachael Bard, Bernard Cottonwood, Blanche Zembower, Robert Seay (last seen in "Get Him to the Greek"), Tom Wiens, Kellie Sprague, Pipier Ngubo, Allison Weintraub, Erik R. Norris, Joe Sikorra, Diane Goldberg, Luke McEndarfer, Barron Christian, Skip Crank (also carrying over from "A Thousand Words"), Traci Paige Johnson, Donovan Patton, with cameos from Allen Iverson (last seen in "Hustle"), Carmelo Anthony, Mel Harris, Bruce McGill (last seen in "Runaway Jury").
RATING: 5 out of 10 slides at the pizza party
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