Murray was ostensibly on the show to promote his upcoming projects – the movieRock The Kasbah and the Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas – but spent more time talking about the Chicago Cubs, who are trailing the New York Mets 2-0 in the National League Champion Series. That place is Hollywood, and Barry Levinson’s Rock the Kasbah is an inadvertent document of it.
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A rep for Lewis declined to comment (always a dead giveaway that a few boots-knockin’ is going down), but the songstress reportedly stuck close to Bill’s side throughout a recent premiere party for his new film Rock the Kasbah. The movie even carries a dedication to her. Yet Salima is basically a cipher, even though she’s the one who has the talent and endures the death threats. The idea of parachuting Bill Murray as a washed-up ’60s rock tour manager into the nightmare of contemporary Afghanistan no doubt seemed like too promising a fish-out-of-water story not to pursue.
Bill Murray’s latest star vehicle shares a director with Good Morning, Vietnam, and boy, does it ever show. This is how celebrity couples talk to each other, as imagined by someone who’s loved Lewis and Murray since he was a teen.
Despite this and the fact that Kabul is in total lockdown, Richie is so conditioned to greet all adversity with hippie-era mellowness and a sense of music-business entitlement that his first move upon arrival at the woefully un-Majestic Hotel is to ask for an upgrade.
Yes, Glazer does the bare minimum and allows Afghan Star’s host to say what everyone’s thinking, snapping, “You do not lecture me about courage, about my country” when Richie lays out the case for letting a woman onto the show. That’s about how I felt after reading its star, Bill Murray, is reportedly dating Jenny Lewis, the former Rilo Kiley leader who released one of 2014’s best albums.
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Oh yeah, and Rock the Kasbah’s race and gender politics are about 30 years out of date. Though she is culturally forbidden to sing in public, Richie recognizes a potential great when he hears one, and helps smuggle her to Kabul to compete on “Afghan Star”, a real-life singing competition show that swept the nation a decade ago. Suddenly, the film aims for political firepower, and is soon wholly out of its depth, despite Levinson’s past ability to skewer these kinds of situations easily. And how about Leem Lubany as a Pashtun teen girl tied to strict Muslim rules of conduct. Rock the Kasbah puts that truism to the test, though, and comes dangerously close to proving it wrong. But one plane trip to Kabul later and Rock the Kasbah has already settled into a depressingly one-note groove as a culture-clashing circus act, the pinnacle of which is Deschanel’s would-be singer barfing up a storm at the sight of all the turban-wearing men in her midst.
