The New Normal
A couple days ago, I put on the Disney Family Singalong, a day after it aired live on ABC. It was a 50-minute special streaming on Hulu with — surprisingly — no ads. And hey, it was Disney music sung by pretty talented musicians and actors, and also Josh Gad. (I kid. Mostly.)
I’m not writing this post as a way to criticize the special, because, frankly, it’s above and beyond criticism. This was, like most of the live-ish content being made now, cobbled together on the fly, with varying levels of success. (The opening number, in which Derek Hough, his girlfriend whose name has escaped me, and Julianne Hough lip-synced and danced to “Be Our Guest” was not a great singing performance, but it was more complex in terms of how everything was staged, shot, and edited, compared with some of the other stripped-down performances.)
The special was perfectly cute and nice and well-spirited, and it brought with it the crushing realization that this is what the new normal for live entertainment is going to be for a while. I’d seen bits and pieces of late-night talk-show fare filmed with similar lo-fi technology over the last month, but something about, say, the image of Beyonce Knowles singing “When You Wish Upon a Star” (masterfully, of course) from what might as well have been her bathroom, streaming the video so that it can be played on national television, made things hit home.
The only non-life-related thoughts I had regarding the special were really quite frivolous. My wife and I were both baffled by the fact that a) a number of songs from the film Frozen were featured, b) one of the stars of the film performed on the special, but c) none of the people from the film Frozen…sang a song from the film Frozen. Like, was Kristen Bell busy? Jonathan Groff? Idina “Adele Dazeem” Menzel? It was weird. Weird, too, the realization that Luke Evans’ voice is incredibly powerful, a fact that wasn’t remotely evident from watching him in the execrable live-action/CG remake of Beauty and the Beast.
Anyway. The special was nice. Within the limitations of the situation we all find ourselves, it was decent. I wonder how enjoyable specials like this are going to be six months from now, when that’s all we have in terms of something new.
Your Recommendation for Today
Eddie Murphy has the capacity to be very funny. I say that as a reminder to myself, because most of what he’s done in the last 20 years would seem to prove me wrong. But the year when he began to shift his cinematic priorities to more family-friendly fare produced at least one entertaining title.
Dr. Dolittle is, all told, fairly slight. It’s familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1990s and watched lots and lots and lots of titles where someone who’s a big workaholic learns to appreciate his family thanks to a series of extraordinary circumstances. What makes the movie work, aside from its brevity (85 minutes including credits), is that this cast is just stacked, both in terms of live actors and voice performers. Murphy, Oliver Platt, Richard Schiff, Ossie Davis, Chris Rock, Norm MacDonald, Albert Brooks, John Leguizamo, and I didn’t even mention an uncredited Paul Giamatti yet.
It’s a great cast, and Betty Thomas does a solid enough job bringing together live actors and talking animals. There’s an admittedly odd balance between the family-friendly nature of the film and the sense that Murphy and his fellow SNL alums are chafing at the possibility of making something more scatalogical and raucous — as in the weird running gag about one of Dolittle’s patients being a shellfish addict in spite of having…a shellfish allergy — but it’s funny.
Now, it’s not as funny as this from the musical version of Doctor Dolittle, but what is?
