I don't disagree with the basic racism seen in things like the movie review you mention, but I think the nostalgia and redemption they mention isn't necessarily a desire for damaging stereotypes.

Murphy originally built his career on things like "Raw," "48 Hours," "Beverly Hills Cop," etc.  All fairly edgy, none of them particularly family friendly.  Now, besides small roles like "Dreamgirls," his career is based on "Shrek," "Doolittle" and "Nutty Professor."  All basically cuddly Disney roles.  He's gone from one extreme to another.

I've heard similar nostalgia about Ice Cube, who went from gangster rap to "Are We There Yet?"  Admittedly, that could be the same basic racism.  But the same has been said about Robin Williams, going from pretty R-rated comedy to "RV."

These are all people to started their careers doing adult, edgy and yes, raw, material, who've lost that edge, in the eyes of many fans.  People want that back.

So, while I think you're entirely right about the racism of Hollywood and critics, I think there's more to it, as well.

I agree with almost all of this, but I think you sort of mischaracterize some of Murphy's career- he went from "threatening thug" roles not to mostly respectable ones, but those of the clown. I mean, the Donkey in Shrek is nothing but a minstrel. I'd read it as the critics viewing a "dangerous black man" role as somehow more authentic than a "funny black man." Still, neither speaks very highly of society, nor of Murphy.

I get so sick of the criminal character being played by a minority, and the movies with a (mostly) all white cast.  Or, when a person of color finally does appear, their purpose for being in the movie has something to do with stereotypes about their ethnicity.  It's definitely racism. 

The reason Edy Murphy was typecast as a criminal in the first place, all those years ago, was because he was black.

This is the same reason I hated Training Day with a passion. In addition to being an idiotic movie, it was also chock full of stereotypes, and the fact that Denzel Washington got an Oscar for this (but somehow, never got one for his other amazing roles, i.e. Glory, Devil in a Blue Dress, Cry Freedom, Mississipi Masala etc) just makes it doubly sad.

It's essentially saying that the only roles that black actors/actresses get rewarded for are those that play to racial stereotypes or where they play bit characters to the redemption of white main characters (The Help, The Secret Life of Bees etc). I lost quite a bit of respect for Denzel Washington after that movie. The irony is that he had gotten on Samuel L Jackson's case a few years back for his liberal use of the n-word in his movies (I think in Pulp Fiction)

Eddie Murphy is talented, he showed his talent most recently in Dreamgirls. He also did a pretty good turn in Bowfinger. Does he really need the money/acclaim that bad?

Won't be wasting my money on this dreck!

Damn, he was awesome in Blade.

After you've acted in a fat suit for comic effect, everything you ever do will be a comeback. (Relatively speaking.)

The movie was hilarious. Eddie Murphy was a great choice for the part. He wasn't just "a jive talking thug." Did you miss him dressing up in a suit and conning his way into the hotel? Also as the post before said, he's played a detective, a prince, a professor, etc... Art imitates life. That's the job. The characters worked. If you have a problem with the characters. Do what it takes to move the minority out of service industry jobs to higher positions instead of blaming Hollywood for calling it like it is. Besides there were plenty of white service workers as well,  and a latino. Stiller was in a suit, but he still was a service worker, blue collar like the rest. What I really like is the pride and professionalism they all had. I worked in grocery stores, in a cleaning crew, and in a preschool... but no matter where, I always took pride in my work. So often service workers are depicted as idiots with no pride. This was a refreshing change. It was like "Look we are human!"

I feel like anything that challenges preconceived notions of what various minority groups are is deeply threatening to Hollywood. It's pretty complicated to sort out who is responsible for what, but at the very least society and media feed off each other to perpetuate and strengthen stereotypes. After a while depicting people differently becomes next to impossible due to this ossified line of thought: "but we've always shown asians as kung fu masters or dragon ladies, it's what the audience wants!"

Hence why Asian-American cinema flourishes not within Hollywood but in regional film festivals.

My whole take on this Eddy Murphy thing is this: Is it stereotypical? Yes. Is Hollywood to blame? Yes. Should Murphy be held accountable as well? Absolutely. 

Murphy has been surfing on easy (disingenuous, uninspired) money for decades. I understand that challenging a system is no easy task, but that is no excuse for not challenging yourself. 

I haven't seen the film yet but when I first saw the trailer a few months ago (at the screening of another problematic Hollywood hit, The Help) it basically screamed everything you touch on.  I wonder if anyone has any thoughts about Gabourey Sidibe's role and whether it too is a product of the racist, sizist Hollywood that as Americans we've come to know and love.

Eddie Murphy has played a large variety of roles, but the fact remains that he does a certain character type -- not a criminal, but a fast-talking smooth guy -- very well, just like James Spader does snob/jerk very well and people prefer to see him in those roles, too.

And now my 80s nostalgia bone demands to see them together in a film. Matthew Broderick can show up and play the quirky guy who's taking a day off work.

The prevailing Hollywood stereotype has for some years now been Black mayors, police chiefs, senators, etc.  They are always dignified and never corrupt.  The villian, on the other hand, is the powerful white guy with the John Edwards hairdo. 

And why would a 'racist' movie studio create a 'Black thug' with so many redeeming features?  Wouldn't a stereotypical ghetto criminal be violent, dumb, unwitty and uninteresting?  A better question might be why Hollywood is always pedalling the noble thief stereotype?  

...and we haven't even mentioned Gabourey Sidibe as a Caribbean-sounding maid who is funny because she's fat AND sexually aggressive. Ha. Ha. Ha. 

The idea that the movie industry is rewarding Black actors for playing only stereotypical roles is really disturbing--I will watch out for this in the future. 

To be fair, the Shrek sequels, the Nutty Professor, and all of his fat-suit movies were absolutely awful. (YMMV.) Those comedies had no bite to them, so perhaps critics are seeing this new movie as a return to when Eddie Murphy actually made *good* movies. I certainly can't remember the last time he made a movie that made me laugh instead of cringe. Then again, I don't think Tower Heist will be a good movie, either.

The world is full of evil, injustice and shit but that doesn't make any body obligated to making more of it.
Eddy murphy has tried for years too portray good creative and positive roles.
None of those movies were promoted as well as this heap of crappy pile of cliches (the token black: criminal, or the maid or bitchy civil servant).  What do you expect from hollywood. All they do is crap on values, art, integrity, worth, scholarship, sobriety, decency, logic minorities and religion. 

Too many movies and tv shows are about base, crude, cheap laughs, violence, occult/witch craft, fantasy and political correctness.
I mean, we watch them push these absurd sub-culture types like swingers, drug abusers, criminals and perverts; for what?    What good is it for our society or our country?  Many if not most of the people who follow these life styles really aren't happy.  They are dupes, fools, fashion victims and conformist of the worst kind.
When I heard the following I thought wtf thanks hollywood.

According to the cdc over 2000 new cases of hiv are diagnosed in people under 20 years of age (in 2009).    Also a fact: prisons are full of minorities. Our governments keep cutting back on education and police only making the preceding point worse.

Having seen Tower Heist I think I can comment here, and maybe shed some light on why I had a bad taste in my mouth after it (although it is funny). The main characters are definatly the four white men, Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick, Casey Affleck and Alan Alda, with an interesting turn by Tea Leoni as FBI agent and love interest (because the one white woman is super-woman). Eddie Murphy is a wise-cracking small time hood who calls his girlfriend 'bitch' and double-crosses his partners. Oh and Michael Pena is the 1/4 Cherokee-Latino character who is a idiot and has only worked in BK (Burger King) before the tower. My main problem was with the Gabourey Sidibe character who is introduced as looking for a husband because her working visa is up, she is depicted later (having knocked out an FBI agent) with a gun (because only the black characters have guns) while eating cake. She is also brought into the heist because her father taught her to crack safes, so she flirts with Murphy briefly (because only black characters can be attracted to each other, and only Murphy can be attracted to Sibibe), but what happens to her and her visa having been attached to the crime is forgotten.

OK, first off, in a typical genre film, every character is a stereotype, stock character, or recycled trope. Our values certainly inform which ones we regard as "negative" stereotypes, but if we're looking through the lens of the tradition of black American cinema and comedy, I have to say - "not so fast!"

The "jive-talking criminal" that Ms Heldman disparages is a great example here. Young people may recognize this trope - the streetwise, verbally flambouyant black antihero - as a Hollywood concoction, but it was largely absent from mainstream cinema until the emergence of Black independent film ("blaxploitation") around 1971. For the black filmmakers creating these works, and the black audiences flocking to see them at the time, the new trope was liberating. Black characters were no longer shoved to the background in servile roles or artificially ennobled in Sidney Poitier-ish white-redemption narratives; we were front and center in loud and angry revenge fantasies, empowered and badass, sneaky but not passive. The stereotype - a reactionary but uniquely black American creation - was a counterpoint to the despair of our real living conditions of the time and the brutality that blacks faced with little recourse in real life.

Most of the movies were pretty bad, and predictably Hollywood eventually absorbed and appropriated some of the tropes they produced - largely in order to wrestle the sizable black share of the audience back into its corner. And that's about where Eddie Murphy comes in. He combined the slick, handsome antihero popularized in early black cinema and underground culure with the confrontational and heavily racialized comedy style of his idol Richard Pryor. His character in "48 Hours" essentially drew from a lot of the era's established tropes in black culture, combined with a raw energy that was entirely his own. If it reads as a crass stereotype now, it's probably because it's so endlessly imitated.

 You may dismiss it as a "negative stereotype" if you want, but at least take a moment to contrast this bit of typecasting with Eddie Murphy's "success" as...a jive-talking donkey. I mean, really.  Hollywood has a much older tradition of using black speech and patois-tinged buffoonery for comic relief, and there was nothing Murphy did in "Shrek" that would've been out of place in a minstrel show.  "The Nutty Professor?" You've got to be joking. Murphy played half a dozen characters in that - one was a "comically" overweight professor (I guess fat jokes are ok now?) and the rest were the kind of black stereotypes that fill out minor roles in a substandard sitcom. I'll take the smooth-talking felon over that any day.

Back to my original point. The nature of genre fiction - including the narratives that recur in pop music - is such that characters are rendered in broad brushstrokes and sorted by type. Black artists are done no favors by supposedly well-meaning cultural critics who cry "racial stereotype!" every time we put a brown face on an established trope. By all means, support the artists working outside of the industry and producing non-genre work with complex and believable characters; believe me, those films abound every year and make almost no money.

By the way, Denzel Washington won his first Oscar in 1990 playing a soldier in the Civil War. If you can't be bothered to engage the history of black pop culture in a serious way, that's fine, but at least get your bloody trivia straight!

While I agree with your overall article, I think your argument regarding why this is considered a comeback is incorrect. In fact, Murphy's recent movies (of the past 10 years) have failed dismally at the box office - such as the Adventures of Pluto Nash, Meet Dave and others. In fact, Forbes recently listed him as one of the most overpaid actors in Hollywood, based on salary vs. movie payout. I think the more interesting question is why these movies failed and if it had anything to do with Murphy's characters. Granted there are alot of variables to consider, but it has been a while since Murphy has done a true adult comedy - and this is certainly related to his comeback. Now, the question is what does it tell us that this comeback character is based on racist notions? That is a very interesting question.

Um, I don't have the citation myself, but according to this review: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/4925-Tower-Heist the film was originally pitched by Murphy to star an all-black cast alongside himself. Assuming that's true it adds an... interesting other angle to the debate.

Just because a black person is playing a stereotypical "jive talking" felon in a comedy, doesn't automatically make the movie or the portrayal racist. In fact, I find it more racist that there are so few roles, comedic or otherwise for blacks in TV and film and that most of those portrayals are one dimensional characters or tokens put into the movie to showcase the "coolness" or progressiveness of white characters.

It's really overthinking the issue to talk about "how little has changed when it comes to the portrayal of black Americans in popular culture". The real tragedy is that Eddie Murphy has developed NO acting range in 30 years, and yet someone still pays him to make movies. 

Tower Heist (2011) Hollywood Movie Is a Fully Action, Comedy & Crime.