It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

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John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer.

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