Everyone loves Bill Murray, but only the die hard fans recognize the majority of his work. The rest, unfortunately, concentrate too much on his greatest films, such as Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translationand all of his collaborations with Wes Anderson. Yet while each of these films, and Murray’s roles and performances in them, are certainly deserving of their preferred and predominant praises, Murray is the kind of actor who is so talented and entertaining that he can be enjoyed in even the worst movies on his resume. In fact, he’s probably the only A-lister who could lend his voice to a bastardized CG version of a beloved cartoon character and get away with barely any contempt from his devotees.
This week, Bill Murray makes an appearance in the new kiddie sci-fi flick City of Emberas the selfish mayor of a doomed underground metropolis. And it’s sure to be one of his less-appreciated roles, whether because it’s in a children’s movie, because it’s a supporting part in an ensemble filled with many talented actors, or because it’s not Ghostbusters 3. But those who really love Murray will likely flock to the movie primarily to see him, just as they did and do for the rest of these movies with underrated Murray roles:
Bloody-Disgusting calls Plan 9 From Outer Space“arguable one of [Ed Wood's] only ‘good’ films” [sic], but the general consensus is that it’s one of the worst films of all time. But, um, maybe the remake will be better! Motivated by no logical reason other than the fact that they could have it ready in time of a 09/09/09 release date (well, okay––it is the original’s 50th anniversary, and since the film has lapsed into the public domain a remake can be done for cheap, cheap, cheap), Darkwave Entertainment is planning “a serious-minded retelling of the original story, paying homage to the spirit of Wood’s film without resorting to camp or parody.”
As BD points out, you can watch the original Plan 9 on Google Video, but we think the only way to possibly make sense of this is to watch the above scene from Tim Burton’s masterpiece, Ed Wood. Let’s shoot this fucker!
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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