Martin searing, funny in ‘Bowfinger’ role

In theaters

BOWFINGER

The end of a career can be an ugly thing — just ask Dan Quayle — but what can be even uglier is a career that never takes off, no matter how great or exhaustive the effort to make it work.

Such is the case with Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), a man on the wrong side of 49 whose perennial hope of hitting it big as a producer and director in Hollywood doesn’t quite have the same twinkle and shine it had when Bobby was twinkling and shining at 21.

In a town hooked on youth, Bobby is stale brioche, a California schemer who wears a clip-on ponytail and cheap suits, who nevertheless dreams of Armani.

Desperate for a hit, he thinks his big break rests in a sci-fi script called “Chubby Rain,” but before a studio will give him the go to make it, Bobby first must enlist the world’s hottest action star, Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), a paranoid actor who has no intention of starring in “Rain,” yet who becomes the film’s star anyway.

You see, Bobby and his entourage of illegal Mexican immigrants plan to secretly film Kit reacting to Bobby’s makeshift cast of bad actors (Heather Graham as a loose, upstart actress and Christine Baranski in a wicked turn as a young Norma Desmond) who routinely throw themselves at Kit with bursts of inspired dialogue.

In a cinematic climate smitten with the low budget of “The Blair Witch Project,” Bobby’s film — made for $2,184 — should be intoxicating to watch unfold, and it is. Written by Martin and directed by Frank Oz, “Bowfinger” is an ingenious, sometimes explosively funny comedy about the film industry that is as much a satire as it is a farce. It finds Martin back on Los Angeles soil, which, to him, is as rich as the soil in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

Unlike Martin’s “L.A. Story,” which also featured biting observations on L.A. life, “Bowfinger” has a slightly meaner streak, a more damaging eye, recalling Robert Altman’s “The Player” and Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” in that it is essentially about desperation in an industry whose underbelly is seething with desperation.

But Martin’s great triumph is in delivering a script that isn’t bitter. Just as Warren Beatty did in “Bulworth,” Martin wants to say something meaningful couched in the absurd. He wants to tell the truth about Hollywood through slapstick, he wants to push buttons by pulling our leg, which he does in a film that not only features Eddie Murphy in the performance of his career, but which also finds Martin revealing something about himself: He’s a very good writer.

Grade: B+

On video

EDTV

TV or not TV, that is the question in Ron Howard’s “EDtv,” which focuses on our obsession with instant celebrity and the price of fame in a culture increasingly hooked on trash TV.

The film is a bizarre cross between PBS’ “An American Family,” MTV’s “The Real World,” and “The Jerry Springer Show” that exploits the sometimes hilarious shenanigans found at the shallow end of the gene pool.

Howard’s “EDtv” is no exception; it knows we’ve become a culture fascinated by the darker side of our nature, and thus focuses on the root of that fascination through the eyes of Ed Pekurny (Matthew McConaughey), a Texas-born, San Francisco-based video clerk who is Howard’s idea of today’s Everyman.

Plucked from obscurity by a desperate television producer (Ellen DeGeneres), Ed is quickly signed to star in his own life. Televised on the nearly washed-up cable channel True TV, the show is live, runs nonstop, and includes members of Ed’s lowlife family: brother Ray (Woody Harrelson), mother Jeanette (Sally Kirkland), stepfather Al (Martin Landau), girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman), and scores of extras, all of whom will do anything for a moment in Ed’s rapidly growing limelight.

As the world turns to their television sets, Ed’s life predictably gives way to soap opera. But it is an uninspired, dumbed-down soap opera that seems oddly scripted for something that’s supposed to mirror real life. And here is where the film differs from “The Truman Show,” which is a film about voyeurism: “EDtv” is about the less interesting exhibitionism. Further, it is only occasionally funny while never truly serving its indended purpose: emerging as the sharp, social commentary Howard intended.

Grade: C+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His film reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS. Tonight on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” he appears in The Video Corner.