No Bit

I had the pleasure, or eventual lack thereof, to watch Norbit last night before I bleached my brain with a night out at a MOCA show.

I admit I laughed a bit in the beginning, and every single time I covered my mouth, surprised at myself. Perhaps there was something in my brain that new later on I'd regret laughing in the first place.

To say Norbit is mean would be an understatement. It's a film that thinks awful of just about everybody, so maybe I should be happy about that. However it seems to take most of its hatred out on fat black women, who don't have enough awful stereotypes about them. You see, Norbit, who's an idiot savant without the savant, is a put upon skinny man who is strongholded into a marriage with Rasputia, that's right, her name is a play on Rasputin, get it? Har har har.

If you didn't get her evilness from her name then you get it from her actions, whether she's verbally or physically abusing Norbit. I don't know, perhaps in another film, spousal abuse would be funny. But just because it's woman on man abuse doesn't make it so, it just makes it sad.

If it's not Rasputia who's being awful then it's the horrific Chinese caricature Mr. Wong played by Eddie Murphy himself. This portrayal of yellowface only stems to serve the belief that black people can get away with racist behavior that white people cannot. Had a white person been in black face talking about chicken and watermelon, all hell would have broken loose and rightfully so. So why is it okay for Murphy to do it?

The film is tedious overall and not really funny. Norbit finds salvation from his wife in the form of Thandi Newton though why on Earth she's in this film is beyond me. From the look of the sets I can't believe this film cost more than 40 million so I can't believe that she got paid much. Murphy is the real criminal here, because until I saw the credits I was lead to believe that this was just another horrible opportunity for him to dress in fat drag he'd stumbled upon and then I saw that he not only came up with the story (with brother Charles, "Charlie Murphy! Murphy), but he co-wrote the script and produced this mess. Which makes his Oscar loss justifiable for me.

I know, I know; Norbit shouldn't have any bearing
on the work he did on Dreamgirls but this really just goes to show that for actors, what works usually come after they win the Oscar show that they probably shouldn't have gotten it in the first place. None more so than Halle Berry and Cuba Gooding Jr. I'd bet money that had Catwoman/Perfect Strangers come out before the Oscars she might not have been able to get up there and perform her crying. Ditto for Gooding Jr. and Snow Dogs. The same would go for Charlize Theron and "Aeon Flux," And I'm pretty sure everyone understands Kim Basinger's win for L.A. Confidential was a total fluke.

Maybe that should be a rule from now on, you don't get your Oscar until they see what's coming behind it. Because at least in the case of Murphy, people didn't like what came before it.