In A Very Murray Christmas, on Netflix Friday, Murray stars as a cocktail-swigging, lounge-singing version of himself, whose plans to tape a live holiday TV special from the hotel are dashed when a blizzard rolls into town. “He knows how to bring joy”.
Advertisement
Bill Murray has been known to have some eclectic taste in music.
First to arrive is Paul Shaffer who provides the musical backbone for the proceedings and a number of Christmas classics are performed.
A Very Murray Christmas might not pan out to be the next It’s a Wonderful Life, but that’s okay.
Sadly, Murray, along with director Sofia Coppola, seems to miss this point.
“I don’t want to say too much”, she offers.
[Laughs] I was always surprised that became such a thing. “But it was fun, because that gave us a way to create a world where anyone could drop by”.
Having never worked with Miley before, the actor wasn’t sure what to expect.
Miley used a range of hashtags and lovely emojis, but it’s the #mylastredcarpet 4eva which most caught people’s attention and has led to much speculation about the singer’s plans for the future.
It was coming out of the tradition of those TV variety shows, which didn’t have a lot of logic to them. “Like that one with Bing Crosby and David Bowie; it’s so unnatural”.
We wanted to have all our favorite musicians, so we asked if they’d come do a song. Rolling Stone notes that Phoenix specifically approached Mike Love with an interest in the song, and he chose to fine-tune it a little for them by revising the lyrics and tinkering with the musical arrangement.
The holiday special is streaming on Netflix now.
“She can sing. I thought she was a knucklehead insane girl that you’d want to go on a road trip with, but she can sing!”
“Do You Hear What I Hear?”. There’s also Maya Rudolph channeling Darlene Love for “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” in a fantastic solo effort, and a dream-or, more precisely, a drunken stupor-sequence featuring George Clooney and a radiantly entertaining Miley Cyrus. How’d Shaffer get involved, anyway? But I like the idea of places like Netflix and Amazon where there are no parameters and it can be anything. That’s all it takes – it sounded like fun. I was just excited Bill was up for it! He loves to sing, and he’s got an uncanny sense of what he can make play. A Very Murray Christmas keeps it simple: a little melancholy, a little amusing, a little sweet, just like its star. He somehow finds the actual emotion behind the cliché.
Advertisement
“I wasn’t anxious about George, because he wasn’t around when the joke was happening, even though that could be scary”, Glazer said. Then with all the people we had showing up, all these great talented people.
