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Coming to America (HD DVD)
Paramount // R // June 5, 2007 // Region 0
List Price: $29.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The Eddie Murphy onslaught of the past couple of weeks on HD DVD and Blu-ray draws to a close with Coming to America, a colossal box office hit that reteamed Murphy with Trading Places director John Landis. By 1988, Eddie Murphy had carved out a niche for himself playing...well, Eddie Murphy, basically. His filmography up to this point consisted almost entirely of sarcastic loudmouths, and in Coming to America -- leapfrogging off a concept by Murphy himself -- he gets to play against type as a polite, virtuous, impossibly wealthy African prince.
Prince Akeem (Murphy) hails from Zamunda, one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, and King Jaffe (James Earl Jones) has gone to great lengths to ensure that his son would want for nothing. Akeem can't take a step without a small army of nubile young handmaidens scattering rose petals in his path, and the monarchy even has royal bottom wipers on the payroll. On the morning of his 21st birthday, the long-sheltered Akeem has an aching desire to see what the world has to offer without a royal entourage or his father's hefty checkbook in tow. Jaffe shrugs it off as his son wanting to sow his royal oats before his arranged marriage, but Akeem doesn't have any interest in shacking up with a slavishly devoted fuck doll with no personality. He wants to find true love, so he and his kinda-sorta-not-really-all-that-loyal friend Semmi (Arsenio Hall) set out for America to the one place where he's certain to encounter a woman befitting his royal stature: Queens.
Akeem doesn't want someone hanging off his arm just because he's a prince with a few quadraseptazillion bucks in the bank, so he and Semmi pretend to be poor students from Africa. After shacking up in a rat-infested dive over a barbershop, Akeem and Semmi hit every bar in town in search of women, but Satan worshippers and she-males aren't exactly what they had in mind. Eventually Akeem bumps into the lovely Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley), and she crosses off every checkbox on his list: bright, vivacious, fiercely independent, cute as a button. Single, though...? Not so much. Lisa's dating the arrogant, spoiled heir to a jheri curl fortune (Eriq La Salle). Akeem tries to get closer to Lisa by getting a menial job at one of her family's fast food joints, but her money-grubbing father (John Amos) won't have his baby girl slumming it with one of his penniless employees. Akeem's a glass-half-full kinda prince, though, determined to win Lisa and her father over without revealing his royal heritage.
Like Trading Places and...well, just about every other movie Eddie Murphy made in the '80s, Coming to America was one of the decade's most inescapable comedies. If I had a nickel for everytime I've heard a "the royal penis is clean, your highness" or "damn shame what they did to that dog" or a half-screamed rendition of Soul Glo's ridiculously over-the-top jingle, I'd be able to buy a small Tahitian island and live it up like Brando. There's still a lot to like about the movie, most notably its particularly strong cast, but Coming to America isn't exactly the timeless comedy classic I thought I remembered.
Admittedly, part of the reason I'm not all that hot on Coming to America these days is that I've literally seen a couple thousand movies in the nearly twenty years since it was first released. Take a generic romantic comedy and a generic fish-out-of-water flick, add in some rubber latex so Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall can play another six or seven roles, mix vigorously, bake at 350°, and 45 minutes later, out pops Coming to America. John Landis brags in the disc's making-of featurette that part of the appeal of making the movie is that the characters could've been just about anybody; they could've told the same fairy tale story without Akeem being African royalty. A lot of the humor kind of feels that way too...kind of generic and faceless.
Although Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall are responsible for almost all of the movie's laughs, they get 'em after spending hours in Rick Baker's make-up chair playing a half-dozen other roles, including an obnoxious reverend, a proto-rock-your-world-Wanda, and a couple of vulgar, aging barbers. Hell, cut out all of the prince-playing-pauper stuff and gimme a movie with the three barbers. My favorite part of Coming to America growing up was the three of 'em bickering about legendary boxers like the 137 year old Joe Louis, and I'd just about rather save myself a couple hours and listen to one of the sound bites online instead.
Coming to America is kinda self-indulgent, trying to coast too much on its cast's charisma and suffering from a few too many scenes that don't seem to know when to end. There's really not two hours' worth of material here. The movie hasn't aged that well, and a lot of what was so unrelentingly hysterical sixteen or seventeen years ago seems kinda ordinary and uninspired now. I don't want to sound like I'm ragging on it too much, though; it's just that watching Coming to America again all these years later makes it seem like less of a classic and more like just another '80s comedy. Yeah, I know it has its fiercely devoted fans, but I'd suggest sticking with a rental and giving Coming to America a fresh look before shelling out another twenty bucks.
Video: Encoded in VC-1, Coming to America's 1.78:1 high-def presentation is a solid effort but doesn't impress in quite the same way that Trading Places does. I don't mean that in a bad way; its palette is nicely saturated, there aren't any nicks or flecks on the source material, and the image is reasonably well defined. It's just that crispness, clarity, and the overall level of fine detail are all just fine. Nothing to hop around and cheer about. Not the least bit disappointing. Just perfectly fine.
Film grain is somewhat more pronounced here compared to Trading Places, but the compression generally seems to handle it well enough. Some stretches did look a bit noisy, though, such as some of the glimpses of Lisa's blue hat as she and Akeem go for a night stroll. Obviously this isn't anything to get up in arms about. The added resolution of HD DVD also makes some of the not particularly convincing matte paintings of the Zamundan palace stand out that much more.
All in all, it's a perfectly average presentation of a comedy lurching towards its twentieth birthday.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 remix is a little more uneven. The overall sound design is exactly what you'd expect, keeping primarily to the front speakers while leaning on the surrounds to reinforce the music and flesh out some atmosphere. Some effects, such as a celebratory fireworks display early in the flick, make better use of the multichannel setup, but those are few and far between. Some sequences that really lend themselves to that same sort of action in the surrounds, particularly Akeem and Semmi's bo staff brawl, are oddly silent. The music by Nile Rodgers is remarkably robust, and most of the sound effects come through well too. On the downside, some of the dialogue has a clipped, slightly jagged quality to it. Like the mostly unremarkable visuals, Coming to America sounded more or less the way I was expecting it to, and I don't think fans of the movie will feel let down.
A French 2.0 track and a monaural Spanish dub have also been tossed on along with the usual fistful of subtitles.
Extras: There's a lame joke in here somewhere about Coming to America getting the royal treatment, but I'll pass. Anyway, the theatrical trailer is the only high-def extra on the disc. Everything else is ported over in standard definition from the DVD, and the featurettes are either full-frame or letterboxed in non-anamorphic widescreen. One odd thing is that the audio quality on a lot of these extras is abysmal, suffering from that harsh, shrill sound you get with unusually low bitrate mp3s.
None of the actors appear in any of the newly produced extras, and about the only comments you'll get directly from Eddie Murphy or Arsenio Hall are from a five and a half minute set of interviews from 1989. They quip about how they first met, and Murphy touches on how the movie's plot dawned on him while he was on tour and what a welcomed change it was to be playing someone other than Eddie Murphy on-screen. Decent enough but nothing all that insightful.
Deborah Nadoolman and husband-slash-director John Landis put together a costuming featurette for Trading Places, a movie where the goal was for the clothing to not stand out to the audience. That wasn't the case for a movie with characters as exotic as the ones in Coming to America, and especially with the costume design being up for an Academy Award, they clearly have a lot more to talk about in the eighteen minute "Fit for Akeem".
The spotlight's aimed towards multitalented musician Nile Rodgers for "Composing America" (11 min.), which kicks off with a fawning recap of his career before settling into a series of interviews with Rodgers and John Landis as they touch on specific cues and how the music was approached for the film. There's also some behind the scenes footage of Paula Abdul on the set handling the choreography for an early dance sequence.
There's also a 13 minute look at the make-up effects Rick Baker used to transform Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall into...oh, a half-dozen or so other characters. Baker notes how some of his make-up was so good that the studio balked at the movie's lead actor being completely unrecognizable, and he also touches on the inspiration for some of the designs. Yup, that's Al Sharpton in Hall's preacher character. My favorite of the extras.
The last of the featurettes is the pun-tastic "Prince-apal Photography" (24 min.). It doesn't cut nearly as wide a swath as the retrospective on Trading Places, anchoring itself almost entirely around the cast. There are a few interesting notes, though: the origin of the name of Akeem's homeland, Vanessa Williams being the studio's first choice for a lead role, filming a nod to Trading Places that could've led to a battle royale being filmed at 10 below under a bridge, and trying to steer clear of McDonald's lawyers' radar. Like most of the extras on this disc, it's okay but isn't essential viewing.
A fairly extensive photo gallery rounds out the extras, but as it's mostly just shots from the movie rather than anything candid or revealing, the gallery didn't particularly grab my interest. Oh, and Paramount ditched the opening promo they've had on their HD DVDs since their first wave of releases, so after the studio logo, you're taken directly to the menu. Neat.
Conclusion: Not exactly the legendary laugh riot I mistakenly remembered it being, Coming to America is an okay comedy with an okay high-def presentation, okay audio, and an okay set of extras. That many "okay"s in an HD DVD review means Rent It.
Prince Akeem (Murphy) hails from Zamunda, one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, and King Jaffe (James Earl Jones) has gone to great lengths to ensure that his son would want for nothing. Akeem can't take a step without a small army of nubile young handmaidens scattering rose petals in his path, and the monarchy even has royal bottom wipers on the payroll. On the morning of his 21st birthday, the long-sheltered Akeem has an aching desire to see what the world has to offer without a royal entourage or his father's hefty checkbook in tow. Jaffe shrugs it off as his son wanting to sow his royal oats before his arranged marriage, but Akeem doesn't have any interest in shacking up with a slavishly devoted fuck doll with no personality. He wants to find true love, so he and his kinda-sorta-not-really-all-that-loyal friend Semmi (Arsenio Hall) set out for America to the one place where he's certain to encounter a woman befitting his royal stature: Queens.
Akeem doesn't want someone hanging off his arm just because he's a prince with a few quadraseptazillion bucks in the bank, so he and Semmi pretend to be poor students from Africa. After shacking up in a rat-infested dive over a barbershop, Akeem and Semmi hit every bar in town in search of women, but Satan worshippers and she-males aren't exactly what they had in mind. Eventually Akeem bumps into the lovely Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley), and she crosses off every checkbox on his list: bright, vivacious, fiercely independent, cute as a button. Single, though...? Not so much. Lisa's dating the arrogant, spoiled heir to a jheri curl fortune (Eriq La Salle). Akeem tries to get closer to Lisa by getting a menial job at one of her family's fast food joints, but her money-grubbing father (John Amos) won't have his baby girl slumming it with one of his penniless employees. Akeem's a glass-half-full kinda prince, though, determined to win Lisa and her father over without revealing his royal heritage.
Like Trading Places and...well, just about every other movie Eddie Murphy made in the '80s, Coming to America was one of the decade's most inescapable comedies. If I had a nickel for everytime I've heard a "the royal penis is clean, your highness" or "damn shame what they did to that dog" or a half-screamed rendition of Soul Glo's ridiculously over-the-top jingle, I'd be able to buy a small Tahitian island and live it up like Brando. There's still a lot to like about the movie, most notably its particularly strong cast, but Coming to America isn't exactly the timeless comedy classic I thought I remembered.
Admittedly, part of the reason I'm not all that hot on Coming to America these days is that I've literally seen a couple thousand movies in the nearly twenty years since it was first released. Take a generic romantic comedy and a generic fish-out-of-water flick, add in some rubber latex so Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall can play another six or seven roles, mix vigorously, bake at 350°, and 45 minutes later, out pops Coming to America. John Landis brags in the disc's making-of featurette that part of the appeal of making the movie is that the characters could've been just about anybody; they could've told the same fairy tale story without Akeem being African royalty. A lot of the humor kind of feels that way too...kind of generic and faceless.
Although Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall are responsible for almost all of the movie's laughs, they get 'em after spending hours in Rick Baker's make-up chair playing a half-dozen other roles, including an obnoxious reverend, a proto-rock-your-world-Wanda, and a couple of vulgar, aging barbers. Hell, cut out all of the prince-playing-pauper stuff and gimme a movie with the three barbers. My favorite part of Coming to America growing up was the three of 'em bickering about legendary boxers like the 137 year old Joe Louis, and I'd just about rather save myself a couple hours and listen to one of the sound bites online instead.
Coming to America is kinda self-indulgent, trying to coast too much on its cast's charisma and suffering from a few too many scenes that don't seem to know when to end. There's really not two hours' worth of material here. The movie hasn't aged that well, and a lot of what was so unrelentingly hysterical sixteen or seventeen years ago seems kinda ordinary and uninspired now. I don't want to sound like I'm ragging on it too much, though; it's just that watching Coming to America again all these years later makes it seem like less of a classic and more like just another '80s comedy. Yeah, I know it has its fiercely devoted fans, but I'd suggest sticking with a rental and giving Coming to America a fresh look before shelling out another twenty bucks.
Video: Encoded in VC-1, Coming to America's 1.78:1 high-def presentation is a solid effort but doesn't impress in quite the same way that Trading Places does. I don't mean that in a bad way; its palette is nicely saturated, there aren't any nicks or flecks on the source material, and the image is reasonably well defined. It's just that crispness, clarity, and the overall level of fine detail are all just fine. Nothing to hop around and cheer about. Not the least bit disappointing. Just perfectly fine.
Film grain is somewhat more pronounced here compared to Trading Places, but the compression generally seems to handle it well enough. Some stretches did look a bit noisy, though, such as some of the glimpses of Lisa's blue hat as she and Akeem go for a night stroll. Obviously this isn't anything to get up in arms about. The added resolution of HD DVD also makes some of the not particularly convincing matte paintings of the Zamundan palace stand out that much more.
All in all, it's a perfectly average presentation of a comedy lurching towards its twentieth birthday.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 remix is a little more uneven. The overall sound design is exactly what you'd expect, keeping primarily to the front speakers while leaning on the surrounds to reinforce the music and flesh out some atmosphere. Some effects, such as a celebratory fireworks display early in the flick, make better use of the multichannel setup, but those are few and far between. Some sequences that really lend themselves to that same sort of action in the surrounds, particularly Akeem and Semmi's bo staff brawl, are oddly silent. The music by Nile Rodgers is remarkably robust, and most of the sound effects come through well too. On the downside, some of the dialogue has a clipped, slightly jagged quality to it. Like the mostly unremarkable visuals, Coming to America sounded more or less the way I was expecting it to, and I don't think fans of the movie will feel let down.
A French 2.0 track and a monaural Spanish dub have also been tossed on along with the usual fistful of subtitles.
Extras: There's a lame joke in here somewhere about Coming to America getting the royal treatment, but I'll pass. Anyway, the theatrical trailer is the only high-def extra on the disc. Everything else is ported over in standard definition from the DVD, and the featurettes are either full-frame or letterboxed in non-anamorphic widescreen. One odd thing is that the audio quality on a lot of these extras is abysmal, suffering from that harsh, shrill sound you get with unusually low bitrate mp3s.
None of the actors appear in any of the newly produced extras, and about the only comments you'll get directly from Eddie Murphy or Arsenio Hall are from a five and a half minute set of interviews from 1989. They quip about how they first met, and Murphy touches on how the movie's plot dawned on him while he was on tour and what a welcomed change it was to be playing someone other than Eddie Murphy on-screen. Decent enough but nothing all that insightful.
Deborah Nadoolman and husband-slash-director John Landis put together a costuming featurette for Trading Places, a movie where the goal was for the clothing to not stand out to the audience. That wasn't the case for a movie with characters as exotic as the ones in Coming to America, and especially with the costume design being up for an Academy Award, they clearly have a lot more to talk about in the eighteen minute "Fit for Akeem".
The spotlight's aimed towards multitalented musician Nile Rodgers for "Composing America" (11 min.), which kicks off with a fawning recap of his career before settling into a series of interviews with Rodgers and John Landis as they touch on specific cues and how the music was approached for the film. There's also some behind the scenes footage of Paula Abdul on the set handling the choreography for an early dance sequence.
There's also a 13 minute look at the make-up effects Rick Baker used to transform Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall into...oh, a half-dozen or so other characters. Baker notes how some of his make-up was so good that the studio balked at the movie's lead actor being completely unrecognizable, and he also touches on the inspiration for some of the designs. Yup, that's Al Sharpton in Hall's preacher character. My favorite of the extras.
The last of the featurettes is the pun-tastic "Prince-apal Photography" (24 min.). It doesn't cut nearly as wide a swath as the retrospective on Trading Places, anchoring itself almost entirely around the cast. There are a few interesting notes, though: the origin of the name of Akeem's homeland, Vanessa Williams being the studio's first choice for a lead role, filming a nod to Trading Places that could've led to a battle royale being filmed at 10 below under a bridge, and trying to steer clear of McDonald's lawyers' radar. Like most of the extras on this disc, it's okay but isn't essential viewing.
A fairly extensive photo gallery rounds out the extras, but as it's mostly just shots from the movie rather than anything candid or revealing, the gallery didn't particularly grab my interest. Oh, and Paramount ditched the opening promo they've had on their HD DVDs since their first wave of releases, so after the studio logo, you're taken directly to the menu. Neat.
Conclusion: Not exactly the legendary laugh riot I mistakenly remembered it being, Coming to America is an okay comedy with an okay high-def presentation, okay audio, and an okay set of extras. That many "okay"s in an HD DVD review means Rent It.
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