RECORDED DELIVERY
A critical guide to the week's videos
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Your support makes all the difference.The Nutty Professor (12) CIC, rental, 11 April (above). After a disastrous career dive which saw slick Eighties wunderkind Eddie Murphy go slack in lame vehicles such as Vampire in Brooklyn, the comedian bounces back, under a mountain of latex. In this remake of Jerry Lee Lewis's 1963 comedy, Murphy plays porcine Professor Sherman Klump who snaffles a wonderful elixir which transforms him into babe magnet Buddy Love. The remaining film is a battle between brains and balls, libido and likeability, with Murphy turning in a frenetic, knockabout performance. The humour's about as broad as Klump's backside, but if you're fond of Murphy's smug, home-boy humour (he plays a further five characters so there's plenty of it) and computer generated farce, it's a riot.
Tin Cup (15) Warner Home Video, rental, 11 April.
Without real athletes, sports movies generally work best when they're dealing with social peripheries of the game: the locker-room politics, combustible managers, wives and ragtag supporters. Few directors are better at handling this milieu than Ron Shelton, director of this smart and funny romantic comedy, which sees Kevin Costner as a gifted but hot-headed amateur, going to seed on a run-down golf range somewhere on the outskirts of Hicksville. Enter love interest Renne Russo and old rival Don Johnson (well cast as a slimy slacks-and-polo-shirt man) to rouse Tin Cup from his beery stupor and get him reaching for his irons. A film that makes golf sexy - no mean feat.
Courage Under Fire (15) FoxGuild, rental, 14 April. Meg Ryan, better known as the ditz-princess of romantic comedy, stars as a winsome chopper pilot in this war drama. Donning combat fatigues and prettily smudged make-up in a blatant (and unsuccessful) bid for Oscar- winning seriousness, Ryan plays Karen Walden, killed in the Gulf war and up for a bravery medal if Colonel Sterling (Denzel Washington) decides she's worthy. To do so, he must sift through conflicting reports of her final rescue mission, which means a flashback fest of feisty Ryan versus chicken-shit Ryan. The message is that reality depends on your perspective. Director Edward Zwick's film could probably be best described as glib, sentimental and deeply unconvincing.
Liese Spencer
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