The Funky Art of Self-Invention -- Friday Review by Mike N.

   It's Friday!

    I'm up early to still land my review piece for the week a little later than my usual 3AM auto-publish.  Why?
   Something that had limited theatrical release back on October 4th (necessary to let the film be eligible for any awards), but broadly released today on Netlix: Dolemite Is My Name.  (118 min., Rated R for profanity, nudity, sexual situations and references)  It dropped at roughly midnight Pacific time, so 3 AM here in the East. It was closer to 4 when I started watching it, having set my Friday alarm a few hours early.
  2019 appears to mark the start of a come-back trail for Eddie Murphy. This year will see him begin filming a reprise his role from Coming To America via a sequel (to be released December 2020), and returning to host Saturday Night Live the week before Christmas, all before staging a national stand-up comedy tour next year. Ahead of all

this, though, he's gotten to play a role he's reportedly been after for a while: Rudy Ray Moore.
  Moore was a self-created and -promoted comedian, musician, singer, dancer, actor, and producer. He had an almost underground career as a stand-up comedian, producing comedy albums between 1959 and '64. While working in a record store in Los Angeles in 1970, he overheard a homeless man named Rico who was spinning raunchy tall tales about someone named Dolemite. Moore began making recordings of the stories, then assuming and embellishing the identity of Dolemite both for a series of self-produced comedy albums and night club appearances. In some of the performances he would recite sexually explicit rhymes to the accompaniment of jazz and R&B musicians, and so has over the years been credited with being a major formative influence for rap stars including Snoop Dogg - who has a part in this movie, albeit not as himself. While the albums were too obscene - from the titles to the album covers and the recordings themselves - to be broadly promoted, they were widely circulated in black, urban neighborhoods.

  Moore gained broadest fame via a series of blaxploitation films in which he brought Dolemite to the screen as an unstoppable, high-fashion, trash-talkin', over-the-top, karate-kicking, ghetto hero pimp with a kung-fu clique of prostitutes. This kicked off with the eponymous Dolemite (1975).
  It's important to keep in mind that when he launched this shoestring-financed film career he was a paunchy man fast approaching his 50th birthday, who despite having put himself out there since the '50s remained an underground act unknown to the mainstream.
   A scene early in the film sees Rudy walk out on a group of friends who are having some fun at his expense. When one of them follows him to apologize, letting him know they didn't mean anything more than just having a little fun, Rudy asks "Hey, man, how'd my life get so damn small?" He started reaching for his star in the 1950s, believing he was going to be the complete entertainment package much as Sammy Davis Jr. was. Instead, he found his "part time"/"side" gig working at a record store had become his main one, aside from getting to do 5-minute MC spots at a local club.
  Appropriately enough, the screenplay was written by the team of Scott Alexander and Larry Kraszewski, whose credits include 1994's Ed Wood -- a personal favorite -- the biopic of another self-promoting, self-styled man who dared to create and recreate himself in broad strokes, including embarking on a film career where he wrote, directed and starred in his own productions. Very different men with hugely different styles, to be sure, but both of them with the hubris to believe in themselves, to not realize how crippling their lack of knowledge should be, and take that dream repeatedly to the world.
  As entertaining as Moore's Dolemite persona is, most of the appeal in this biopic centers on Moore himself, his hunger to be something larger-than-life. The film's tagline is "Make Your Own Legend."
  I'm guessing that some of this has to oddly resonate, at least in a funhouse mirror way, with the film's star, Eddie Murphy. His career reached a broad peak in the '80s - television, movies, and comedy tours, all of which were hugely successful, all while he was still in his twenties -- only to fall into a long string of lesser-remembered projects over most of the thirty years that followed. Here he is, fast-approaching 60, reinvigorating and relaunching himself when so many nobodies have already written him off.
    The film's cast includes Wesley Snipes, Keegan-Michael Key, Craig Robinson, Tituss Burgess, Mike Epps, DaVine Joy Randolph, and Chris Rock, along with the above mentioned Eddie Murphy and Snoop Dogg.

    An enjoyable trip back through time, and up the ladder of success with an underdog.
    As a bonus, the closing credits include clips from the actual Dolemite movie, which play off well against the versions we just saw in this biopic.It lends a little more authenticity, as in letting the uninitiated know "hey, we didn't make this up!"
           Time for me to roll into my official day. I saw the movie, pulled this piece together, and put together a crock pot of chili all before heading out to work. May the remainder of the day be at least half as productive!                                        -- Mike Norton

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