By Seventeen years after whispering, "We should have done 'Virginia Plain' at that karaoke bar," to Scarlett Johansson and wandering off into the Tokyo bustle, Bill Murray's teamed up again with Sofia Coppola for On the Rocks.
He's playing Rashida Jones's dad in Apple and A24's upcoming comedy-drama, and he convinces her that the best way to sort out her lingering doubts about her husband's suspiciously long work trips is to chase him across New York in a vintage Alfa Romeo.
It's a very nice car. But what other takeaways are there?
That's a very nice car
Looks like an Alfa Romeo Giuletta Spider from the early Sixties to us. Without wanting to go all Clarkson: very, very, very nice.
It's not very A24-ish
If we've learned anything from A24's films it's that you should never, ever, ever get in a car. You'll either decapitate your sister or accidentally end up in a Swedish death cult. This might be a pointer that the home of prestige horror and arthouse dramas is looking to expand into something a bit more knockabout.
Rashida Jones makes a very different foil for Murray's schmooze
Drawing comparisons with Lost in Translation are probably going to end up being moot, seeing as they look like extremely different films, but there's clearly a bit of overlap insofar as they're both about women being caught between distant partners and Bill Murray's lounge lizard moves. If you were looking forward to some extension of Lost in Translation's sighing, wistful kookiness, you might want to tweak your expectations. Even just from the trailer, you can see Jones' wry, sceptical perspective is the polar opposite of Johansson's awestruck mooning. Plus, he's Jones' dad.
Behold: The Marlon Wayanaissance
Marlon Wayans has been on a run of absolute stinkers. Sextuplets, Fifty Shades of Black, A Haunted House 2: bad, bad, bad. He's White Chicks and spoofs with diminishing returns. Now though, judging by the very brief moments we see him in the trailer, he's the kind of actor you can chuck into a Sofia Coppola film as a slightly absent dad with an easy charm and, perhaps, a secret to hide.
Wayans' reinvention as an actor of substance is quite a turn-up, but a very welcome one. Hey, if Adam Sandler can do Uncut Gems, clearly anything's possible. It would still have been interesting to hear the conversation between Murray and Wayans about Wayans' recent comedy Naked, a time-loop caper which is basically Groundhog Day if Phil Connors had been starkers in public every time he woke up.
The other Bill was robbed
Murray's basically in a league of two when it comes to older men who can sauce their way around without being completely objectionable. Look at that silk scarf, straight out of Bill Nighy's oxblood valise. Come on. Give that back. Nighy would've drily flirted his way through this role with even more panache.
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