Eddie Murphy Out, Marlon Wayans In As Richard Pryor

If they could make a great (but admittedly mostly fictional) movie about Mozart, as Milos Forman did with the brilliant Amadeus, then I guess they can make a movie about another one- of-a-kind performer like Richard Pryor. That's the plan, and somehow it involves Marlon Wayans.

Now, Pryor, if you're younger than, say, 30, is just about everything you need to know about contemporary stand-up comedy. He's kind of the Beatles of that art form, incorporating everything that came before him, turning it into something completely new, and inspiring everything that came after him as well as his contemporaries. So his life story is certainly worthy fodder for a bio-pic, so I have no problem with that. Bill Condon, who directed Dreamgirls, has a script, which previously had Eddie Murphy attached as his mentor. The screenplay wound up at Sony and Happy Madison, but Murphy did not. Why? Probably because Paramount was originally going to produce the film and Murphy has delivered two huge losers for that studio in the past 18 months.

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What? 'Dance Flick' Now Opening May 22nd?

Sometime very recently, apparently, the release date for the new Wayans Brothers comedy, Dance Flick was changed again. Originally set for a Feburary debut, the film was pushed back to mid-August. Now, according to the Paramount website and a couple other sources, Dance Flick will compete head-to-head with Terminator Salvation and Night at the Museum on May 22nd.

I've searched high and low (but mostly high) for an announcement about the change, but to no avail. I can see several independent sources indicating that it's due out in May, but nothing anywhere about when its status changed from August. Interestingly enough, my Paramount reps still had the August 14th date on their most recent updates of the studio's releases, which I got received last Tuesday. A Wayans movie typically wouldn't be worth the amount of effort I've already put into it. It's not like the studio is going to give me a chance to see it beforehand, so why bother?

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Now that it's a new year and we can forget all the bad 2008 movies - that is, if they haven't burned themselves into our psyches - we need to look ahead at even more awful movies. Early prevention is the key. It's the only way to avoid the Disaster Movie of 2009.

The first week in January is the perfect time to run this little experiment for two reasons, the most obvious of which is that we haven't seen any of the movies yet. You don't want to taint the study with anything like firsthand knowledge. But the second reason this is the right time to prognosticate the putrid is that we're faced with several candidates in just the next three weeks. January is always one of the two worst months for movies every year, along with August. Hollywood is focused on other things, I guess. In January, the studios are throwing their considerable weight behind Oscar movies, and in August, they're all on vacation or getting ready for the fall film festivals. This month, we have a Kate Hudson romcom, Kevin James as a mall cop, two Asian horror remakes, and My Bloody Valentine. I actually want Valentine to be good (or at least not awful), but you have to keep your wits about you with these things; it really could be appalling. Again, that's just January. It's not like February is truly a breath of fresh air, either. We have Pink Panther 2, another Madea movie, a college comedy called Fired Up, and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

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I'm So Sorry: It's the 'Dance Flick' Trailer

I don't think we need an official ruling on this, because how good could a trailer for Dance Flick actually be?Here's the problem with making this movie, or at least making it this way: All of these dance movies are almost all parodies of themselves now, to the point that making fun of their threadbare genre riffs doesn't even require a satire. We know they're all the same. And we know they're lame.That's the difference between a movie like this and a movie like Blazing Saddles or Airplane! For example, Airplane! managed to make fun of the structure of 1970s disaster movies on a very basic level, but the real jokes were in the dialogue and not in recognizing that the plane was going to crash. The disaster was in every movie, but the comedy in Airplane! is character-driven, not plot-driven. Blazing Saddles is not remembered as much for its jokes about Westerns as it is for its jokes about everything else. The genre is less important than the rest of the comedy. But that lesson is surely lost on the Wayans clan, who introduces a new director, Damien Dante Wayans. See, even the family appears to be parodying itself now.  
Get yer trailer on at MovieWebDance Flick will play to mostly empty theaters beginning February 6th.