Product Description

A nearly bankrupt aspiring movie producer-director is about to take one last shot at fame and fortune. To hit the big time, the hapless dreamer recruits a motley crew of aspiring misfits, including an eager nerd, an ambitious actress and an over-the-hill diva.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10090 in DVD
• Brand: Universal Studios
• Released on: 2000-01-18
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 97 minutes

Amazon.com
Filmmakers often remark that it's just so hard to make a bad picture that few would take on the challenge if they weren't so naive. Steve Martin's Bobby Bowfinger is cut from that pattern, one of those sweet, indomitable operators of Hollywood who seem to be descended directly from Ed Wood (of Plan 9 from Outer Space infamy). To resurrect his ramshackle existence, Bowfinger opts to film his accountant's sci-fi spectacular, Chubby Rain, about aliens invading in raindrops. The snag is he needs to attach action megastar Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), an actor so paranoid he counts the K's in scripts to uncover possible Ku Klux Klan influences. When his effort fails, Bowfinger hits on an ingenious scheme to film Ramsey without his knowledge, throwing his actors at the hapless star whenever he appears in public. Only Kit begins to believe he's being hounded by aliens for real, and runs hysterically to his guru (Terence Stamp) at a Scientology-clone group called MindHead, where people walk around in fine suits wearing white pyramids on their heads. Deprived of his star, yet not to be undone, Bowfinger hires a look-alike, Jiff (also Eddie Murphy), to fill in. The tone of the picture is sometimes flat, rather than deadpan, but that's nitpicking. The farce is quick and engrossing, and populated with terrific performances, especially by Eddie Murphy, whose dual role as Kit and Jiff showcases his character-building gift, and by Martin, whose Bowfinger, part con man and part would-be visionary, manages to capture your sympathies. Heather Graham's would-be actress cheerfully sleeps her way to the top like she knows she's supposed to, and Christine Baranski plays her shopworn method actor with myopic self-absorption. --Jim Gay

From The New Yorker
The new Steve Martin picture is written by Steve Martin; it also stars Steve Martin in the title role. If that makes it sound like a vanity project, fear not; this is probably the least vain movie of the year. Martin disperses gags and characters with a generosity that borders on the manic. Bobby Bowfinger is a small-time, not to say failed, movie producer in Los Angeles who grabs at one last chance: he decides to make a movie without informing the star-Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), at once the most heavily protected and the most uncontrolled actor in Hollywood. It's a great conceit, and it flows naturally into a series of turbid set pieces, as Bowfinger and his fellow-hopefuls (played with a will by Christine Baranski and Heather Graham, among others) lure the hapless Kit into scenes that will (a) cause him to react like an action hero, and (b) drive him crazy. The climax feels a little undernourished, maybe because no one would actually line up to see Bowfinger's amateur efforts, however sly his technique; but the comedy is so genial, and is directed at such a gallop by Frank Oz, that you can forgive it almost anything. With Terence Stamp as a mental-therapy guru, otherwise known as a fraud. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Non stop laughs
This has got to be one of the fuuniest movies I have seen in a long time. I was laughing so hard that I was crying. My friend was the one who wanted to go see this movie. I was very very skeptical about his choice. I thought that this movie looked so stupid and I had no intentions of spending $6.50 to go and see it. But I was dead wrong. In fact I spent $6.50 two more times. The movie is about Bobby Bowfinger, who is played by Steve Martin, a movie producer that is going through some hard times when he thinks that his bad luck has come to an end, when he reads the script of a movie he thinks will be big. He wants a big time actor to star in the movie. So he offers the role to Kit Ramsey, played by Eddie Murphy. Kit turns him down, so Bowfinger decides to make him the star of the film without him knowing he is being filmed. Bowfinger also puts together a bunch of no name actors to be in the movie and interact with Kit Ramsey without Kit knowing that it is a movie. Thats all I'm going to say. So if you want to see a movie that is very funny and original then check out Bowfinger. I am very anxious for this movie to come out on dvd.

underrated
What lifts this film up and makes it not just funny but great is that lurking behind the facade of a light-hearted slapstick about movie-making is a fairly devastating satire of Hollywood and its denizens.Ê So on the surface you've got Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), B-movie producer/director, using his last $2000 to make the film, Chubby Rain, from a script by his earnest Muslim accountant.Ê Promised major studio backing if he can just secure the services of action-film superstar, Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), but realizing he's got no chance of doing so, Bowfinger decides to just surreptitiously include Kit in the movie.Ê This leads to some hilarious guerilla filmmaking, in which the other characters from Chubby Rain, to whom Bowfinger has not explained what's really going on, run up and interact with an increasingly bewildered and terrified Ramsey.Ê As we soon learn, Kit's frantic reaction to the dialogue and special effects of Bowfinger's invading-space-aliens film is exacerbated by some significant prior mental problems, which include an obsession with exposing himself to the Laker girls.

Also assisting in the production of the film are : a devious studio prop man, who steals everything from cars to cameras for Bowfinger; a seemingly fresh-scrubbed country girl, Daisy (Heather Graham); a serious, but bad, professional actress (Christine Baranski); Kit's twin, but excessively geeky, brother, Jiff (also played by Eddie Murphy);Ê a gaggle of illegal Mexicans, picked up at the border; and even Bowfinger's multi-talented dog.Ê All add to theÊ mayhem in their own ways.

But meanwhile, Kit turns out to be a member of a cult called Mind Head, led by Terrence Stamp in a funny turn, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Scientology.Ê Heather Graham's supposedly innocent character sleeps her way through the entire Bowfinger operation, whoring for more lines and a bigger role.Ê In the final scene of the movie she even turns up with a lesbian girlfriend, who just happens to be a major Hollywood player, summoning memories of Steve Martin's own relationship with a pre-Ellen Anne Heche.Ê And Graham's entire role appears to be an implicit critique of her own career which seems to be likewise based almost exclusively on her breasts.Ê Kit Ramsey's claims of racism in the industry are made fun of as he at one point adds up the "k's" in a movie script and divides by three to show his agent how often "KKK" appears.Ê Several other ostensibly good-natured bits that we can see on further examination have an edge to them include a scene where Bowfinger gets Jiff to run across a busy thruway by telling him that the cars are driven by stunt men, but which also shows how little he cares about the actor's safety, and a conversation where Jiff asks wonderingly why someone's willing to pay him just for looking like someone else, raises inevitable questions about an industry where mere physical appearance can mean millions.Ê In fact, the whole conceit of the story, that you could basically make a successful action flick without the big-salaried star knowing he'd been in the movie, and that everyone in the movie business is just using everyone else, is a pretty tough commentary on the current state of Hollywood.

This harsher undercurrent gives the movie a nasty, though subtle, edge that I really liked, but which some critics found off-putting.Ê Much of the potential tension is defused by Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy who give tremendous performances, Murphy in the seemingly tougher dual role, and Martin in the actually more difficult balancing act of making Bobby Bowfinger likable even as he cheats, lies to, and steals from everyone in sight.Ê The end result is a picture that works on two levels, one of mostly broad physical comedy, the other darker and more satirical.Ê Comedy is hard enough to get right, but to nail it above and below the surface is an exceedingly rare achievement; that it manages this unusual fate makes Bowfinger one of the best comedies of the '90s and vastly underrrated.

GRADE : A

Unjustly overlooked, well-worth it
No thanks to one of the worst promotional campaigns in history, "Bowfinger" died in theaters domestically, but may enjoy a well-deserved resurrection as a video cult item. That campaign, by the way, told us nothing about the movie and instead focused on Eddie Murphy's nerdish performance -- well, half of his performance, anyway -- which made no sense out of context. But the film itself is just shy of brilliance: Steve Martin plays a washed-up moviemaker of the Ed Wood school (he doesn't know he's bad, but he gives it his best anyway), who's guaranteed financing for the movie "Chubby Rain" if he can get one of Hollywood's biggest stars, Kit Ramsey (Murphy in bad-attitude mode). Since Ramsey wants nothing to do with Bowfinger, the filmmaker decides to have the movie shot on the sly, involving the actor without his knowledge or consent. This leads to some of the funniest scenes in any movie around -- which, alas, are not followed up as completely as they could be, but the fact that they got as far as they did is nothing short of wonderful. Martin and Murphy are both terrific; the rest of the cast is fun, too. This one deserved better.