Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

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Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 10-12-2019, 05:01 PM:

At the Teaneck Theatre, Teaneck, New Jersey

*****

In the early 1970s, Rudy Ray Moore was a Los Angeles record store manager and sometime comedian who self-recorded raunchy comedy albums featuring naked pictures of himself on the cover (my favorite title: Let’s Eat Out More Often). Moore parlayed this material into a successful nightclub act that played to black audiences in the south, but he wanted something bigger, so with his earnings he financed and starred in the 1975 blaxploitation picture Dolemite, about a drug-running pimp and strip club owner who is sprung from prison after promising to help the feds, but who instead uses his freedom to take revenge on those who have crossed him. For those who have never had the pleasure, the film is a miasma of ludicrous screen writing, wooden acting and laughable continuity errors, but one which nonetheless found an appreciative audience with urban film-goers when it first came out.

Dolomite Is My Name is a well made and very funny look at Moore’s life and the making of the film. Eddie Murphy is great as the lead, but he winds up playing Moore as a better actor than he actually was. To its credit, the picture jokes about the fact that the original movie makes no sense at all story wise, and that the pudgy Moore, playing a supposed kung-fu master, could barely lift his leg knee high. I would also mention that the picture overstates the success of the original, while popular then in the same way that The Room is now, the blaxploitation genre was well under way by the time it premiered, and you’d have a hard time naming a movie that points back to it as an influence.

The original Dolemite is currently on Amazon Prime. It's had to watch with a straight face, but you may enjoy this more if you watch a few minutes of the original.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 12-04-2019, 10:22 AM:

I watched it, not exactly by choice, but because guests wanted to see what Eddie Murphy is doing now-a-days. Turns out, I found it quite enjoyable and have to give kudos to Murphy for developing the character with some convincing depth. He has a good script to help in that regard as well.

The film really is about the sheer power of one's ability to achieve by shear will. Moore is able to accomplish as much as he did by a combination of belief in one's self, self delusion, and by being a bit of a con artist. At times he simply refuses to accept his limitations which are more than obvious to the people around him and to us, the viewers. He created his own reality and that certainly accounts for the success he was able to generate.

It is an interesting character-study of a person who did quite well given how things could have gone in a totally negative direction if it weren't for his tenacity and his ability to ignore reality and still press on. I'd say it is a good watch not to mention it made my guests happy, so that was a plus. And it comes with Amazon Prime so...you know, free-ish.