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Imagine That

Eddie Murphy, Thomas Haden Church, Vanessa Williams

As this is a family newspaper, I have to tell this story as carefully as a nudist convention walking through a briar patch. At some point in your life, if you are unlucky, you date someone you cannot stand, I mean darn right hate. You look at her or him and just want out. You want to never see them again, for a cosmic black hole to suddenly appear and swallow them. In college I went out with this girl for a couple of months. On my best day I look like an unmade bed and she was so high maintenance that the words “fine German engineering” will probably appear on her tombstone. On one of our dates she spent an entire meal telling me how she yelled at a saleslady because the store did not have the exact shade of lipstick she wanted to go with the $700 little black dress she just bought as I tried to spell “shoot me” with the spaghetti on my plate hoping the waiter would take a hint. Now, when you are in a bad relationship, it is like Vietnam. There are negotiations, peace treaties, fall back positions, and the whole time you feel like the grunt leading the platoon just waiting for the head shot. Bad relationships are particularly hard for us Norwegians because it means dealing with emotions and feeling, all those things that make us human, that we of the Nordic set have worked so hard at avoiding our entire lives.

Well, I had finally worked up the nerve to end things but when I got to her house she had a flat tire on her car and she was under the mistaken assumption that I could change it. I should add that it was raining. She waved to me and went into the house. I knelt down in the mud, looked at the tire and said to myself that I could do this and I did it in record time. You would be amazed what two stoner teenagers walking by will do for $10. Grabbing some sweats I had in my car, I headed inside. She smiled at me as I headed to her bathroom to shower and promised me a special reward for my efforts. Now I was thinking the same thing you are, cake, yummy, unhealthy, icing that puts you into a diabetic coma cake. Her bathroom was on of those nooks that the builder could have either made into a small closet or a cramped bathroom. It had on the wall one of those old cast iron water heaters and it should be noted that I am a big guy. As I stepped out of the shower, I slipped and to try and catch myself before I fell, I turned towards the wall to put my hands against it to brace myself. Now part of me that does not need to be mentioned here brushed up against the hot, steam hot, water heater. Now I will not swear to this in a court of law, but in my mind there was a sizzling sound and a slight whiff of smoke. Jumping back I knew I had hurt myself, hurt myself really, really badly. As I did the limbo under the sink’s cold water faucet, you quickly realize this is a conversation you can have with almost no one, particularly one you are about to break up with. So gently pulling on my sweat pants, I did the John Wayne walk out to the living room and sat down on the couch.

Closing my eyes, thoughts of skin grafts filled my head. From the kitchen came her voice asking if I was ready for my surprise. Next thing I knew, I saw this blur heading across the room at me. I was in one of those Nature Channel specials, where the rabbit, minding it’s own business, is suddenly attacked by a hawk. She leaped into my lap and started kissing my face. I saw stars. Pain, unbearable pain. I am going to leave it there. Tears started rolling down my face. Now there is a problem when one person is being romantic and looks into the other person’s eyes to find tears streaming down their face. She looked at me and sighed. A look came across her face of pure, satisfied joy. “You amazing, amazing man. I love you, too,” she sighed.

“Oh, my god, she thinks I have emotions that Norwegians do not have,” I thought. She hugged my neck; to her I was a cross between Alan Alda and Phil Donahue. I was so screwed, because you cannot go from the emotional Everest that ever woman dreams of, to hit the bricks in the same day, not even the same week or month for that matter. [pub. Note: Our apologies to all of Trevor’s women with broken hearts]. It meant at least two to three more months of going out with her. To make things worse, every time we would go out in public and her girlfriends would see us, they would get this dreamy look in their eyes and have to pat me on the arm. We were “the happily ever after” of a fairy tale to them. To this day, people from that time who are Internet “friends” still ask why things did not work out between us, as we seemed so perfect for each other.

Why am I telling this story? My cinematic relationship with Eddie Murphy has gone on too long and it is starting to get abusive. I am starting to wonder what the American public and studio executives are thinking. It would be one thing if he made a stinker here or a stinker there. Everyone has there clunkers. The problem is he is not even hitting the Mendoza Line, or as it should be called in cinema “The Kevin Costner” Line for making a good film. Except for the Shrek franchise, where he was only a voice, and Dreamgirls, in which he was not the lead, he has not made a good film in over two decades. Meet Dave, Norbit, Daddy Day Care, Pluto Nash, I Spy… ugh… He has made such poor decisions that he could have almost been a foreign policy advisor for George W. Bush. What makes this particularly painful is, in the 1980s Eddie Murphy was the man. At eighteen, he, along with Joe Piscopo, brought “Saturday Night Live” back from the dead. Young, angry, cutting edge, many people looked at him as the man who would replace Richard Pryor as the king of comedy and it was hard not to believe that when a person looked at his resume. 48 Hrs, Beverley Hills Cop, Trading Places, Raw and Delirious, he was like a lion on the prowl, ready to turn his wit on whatever unfortunate victim presented itself. This dangerous man became Dr. Doolittle, The Nutty Professor, and in a year or two, Mr. Roarke, in the movie version of “Fantasy Island.” The warm, fuzzy Murphy is always awful, except when he played the family man who picked up the pre-op transsexual hooker on Santa Monica Boulveard in West Hollywood … wait, that was real life, sorry. Here is yet another movie were liberal Hollywood tries to reinforce the mainstream values especially the “Cats in the Cradle” notion that men need to stop working so much and spend more time with their children, ground that Murphy has combed through numerous times before. All the answers to men’s problems can be found in connecting to the life of one of their seed.

I would like to imagine a lot of things: that I had not gone to see Imagine That, that I could go to my shower to find Eddie Murphy standing there (“Dallas” reference), that the last two decades of his career had not happened, that he was funny again, that he was still the heir to Richard Pryor, and not just mimicking the master in an upcoming movie, that I actually looked forward to watching his next movie. When a story that I tell in a free column is funnier than anything that Eddie Murphy has done in the last two decades, it is time that the American people’s relationship with him comes to an end. Oh, I know that he will do a good film here and there. I actually have high hopes for his Pryor biopic and have no doubt that he will probably get an Academy Award for Best Actor out of it, but all in all, I want the old Eddie back.

Verdict: Another Murphy Miss