Pop Smart - How Eddie Murphy’s Dave looks like Woody Allen
I probably won’t be able to see Eddie Murphy’s Meet Dave this week, but the premise looks promising. Originally titled Starship Dave, the film presents Murphy in two roles. Dave, a seemingly ordinary man walking the streets of New York City, is in fact a starship built to exactly resemble a human being. Murphy also plays the ship’s tiny captain, commanding a bridge of similarly diminutive aliens who control Dave’s actions. Not surprisingly, “Dave” comes across as wildly eccentric, like Steve Martin’s All of Me meets the hero of a wacky alien comedy such as “Mork & Mindy.”
If the premise of a human being being “operated” from the inside by a band of controllers looks familiar, Woody Allen’s already done it in his 1972 anthology comedy Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask). In the last and best chapter, “What happens during ejaculation?” Allen depicts the internal “crew” of an unseen man on a date that goes, uh extremely well. Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds lead the crew that controls the brain, blue collar-type workers in the stomach labor to digest the incoming meal (“Italian food? Jesus CHRIST!”), etc. Allen plays one of numerous sperm, preparing to be deployed like parachutists: “What if he’s masturbating? We could end up on the ceiling!” You can watch it in its entirety on Youtube:
Meet Dave opens this Friday, July 11.