She ain't no actress....she having a hard time reading the damn cue cards
DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (2019) Starring Eddie Murphy (drops 10/25)(Update Thick Sister Added)(thread)
- Thread starter fonzerrillii
- Start date
Man this movie was good af
Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Wesley Snipes, Martin Lawrence in same shot
Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta is the home of two sequels currently in production, with Murphy's Coming 2 America and the next installment in Smith and Lawrence's Bad Boys series, Bad Boys for Life.
The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Decade
Plus: Sean is joined by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to talk about their new, Eddie Murphy–starring film, ‘Dolemite Is My Name’
www.theringer.com
The ‘10s are nearly over, and horror has been one of the decade’s most dominant genres. Chris Ryan teams up with Sean to break down the very best the genre has had to offer and where it’s going in the coming decades (2:08). Then, Sean is joined by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to talk about their new, Eddie Murphy–starring film, Dolemite Is My Name, and their long history capturing what they call “the fringe history of America” in their screenplays (52:21).
Eddie Murphy’s New Netflix Film Is His Latest Prestige Play. Will It Work?
With ‘Dolemite Is My Name,’ the actor-comedian has returned to the well that brought us successes like ‘Dreamgirls’ and turkeys like ‘Harlem Nights.’ It’s good enough for us, but is it good enough for him?
www.theringer.com
‘A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood’ Is a Surprisingly Risky Biopic
As down-the-middle as a movie starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers may sound, Marielle Heller’s film is full of big swings
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‘The Irishman’ Is (Almost) Here, Eddie Murphy Is Back, and ‘Diego Maradona’ Scores
Plus, Oscar-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia joins to discuss the making of his new film, ‘Diego Maradona’
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The Five Most Anticipated Movies of the Fall Festivals
Sean and Amanda discuss Netflix’s strategy for rolling out big new movies and then talk upcoming film festivals
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dope to see eddie give wes his props. he can do everything.
you can also see that wes is frustrated with the game because black actors dont work together.
he was on sway saying that he doesnt understand how denzel en him dont got a movie together
This movie was good!!..I'm feeling it!!...Damn good good movie!!..
Who’s Afraid of an Eddie Murphy Comeback?
By Dave Schilling
Dolemite Is My Name allows Eddie Murphy to reclaim a potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. Photo: Netflix
In the new Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name, a dramatization of the real story behind a 1970s blaxploitation classic, Eddie Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore is faced with the daunting task of performing a sex scene in front of the ragtag crew he’s assembled to bring a soon-to-be-cult movie to life. Moore is a paunchy, middle-aged, borderline sexless man who has nonetheless made a career out of boasting about his sexual prowess, posing nude with models on the covers of his raunchy comedy albums. But now, he’s being asked to illustrate that imagined prowess for the camera. Instead of playing the scene for titillation, Moore decides to lean into the joke. He rocks the bed violently, causing pictures to bounce up and down on the walls. A piece of the ceiling falls. Dolemite’s libidinous power is off the charts. He might not look like much, but under the right circumstances, he can make the Earth move.
Black masculinity in movies, especially comedies, was and remains a dicey subject. When the original Dolemite was released in 1975, only eight years had passed since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became the rare Hollywood movie to depict an interracial relationship. In that film, Sidney Poitier plays an eerily perfect example of an upper-class African-American man, nary a rough edge to be found. The image of John Prentice would go on to define black sexuality in pop culture for years after, and while the line from Poitier to Will Smith is not a clean one, an idea persisted: for a black actor in 20th century Hollywood, placidity was the key. Otherwise, you don’t get the girl. Outside of romantic dramas, many of the great black comedic film actors of the era were pulled into this cinematic paradigm. Richard Pryor was a massive star for years, but in movies like Brewster’s Millions, the white female co-lead was his cheery confidant rather than a lover. Before Bill Cosby was outed as a sexual predator, he appeared in movies like Leonard: Part 6 and Ghost Dad, where he was a doddering parental figure rather than a romantic lead.
In the pre–My Name is Dolemite career of Eddie Murphy, we see how hesitant Hollywood and audiences alike could be when it comes to black male sexuality on screen. You can count the number of sex scenes he’s performed on one hand — largely as the romantic lead in unpopular fare like Vampire in Brooklyn or Boomerang. Audiences never quite embraced his virility the way they fell for his wit, energy, and sexless charm in Beverly Hills Cop or Trading Places. The box-office grosses for Murphy’s romantic films paled in comparison to the mega-bucks successes of movies like 48 Hours. In Trading Places, it’s not Murphy but Dan Aykroyd who gets the girl at the end. In Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley is “just a friend,” eliminating any chance of him bedding the leading lady when the bad guys are all dead. Murphy’s biggest hits were R-rated films filled with provocative language, nudity, and violence, yet sex was less than an afterthought. Axel Foley could go to a strip club and crack wise around countless exposed breasts, but it was as if these things were happening behind glass.
The black movie stars that came after Murphy, now 58, had more success developing romantic personas. Namely, Will Smith, who could sublimate any threatening aspects of his persona to seduce Margot Robbie in Focus. Predominantly black romantic comedies like The Best Man began to spring up with more frequency. While all of this was happening, Murphy was either slathering himself in makeup for kids’ movies or struggling to keep up with Smith, now 51, in sci-fi comedies like The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Murphy’s superpower was extreme confidence and unflappable wit. Smith has that, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for vulnerability; he’s not especially tough or particularly menacing. Above all, he feels safe. In Coming to America, arguably Eddie’s most successful attempt at being a romantic hero, he has to play a naive fish-out-of-water to be credibly romantic to moviegoers. His inherent street smarts are negated by how alien his character is made to feel. The film was surely a triumphant moment in Murphy’s career, but the part was far from the flashy talker people fell in love with on SNL or in his stand-up concert films.
Part of what makes Dolemite Is My Name so revelatory is that it allows Murphy to play a character who was, unequivocally, sexual over four decades ago. It was, after all, the blaxploitation films of the 1970s that took Poitier’s portrayal of acceptable blackness and blew it all to hell. These movies were violent, crass, and explicit. They gave white audiences a glimpse of a different kind of hero. Dolemite, as with contemporaneous characters like Shaft, demanded a sexual gaze. But by the time Eddie Murphy became the most recognizable black face in late 1980s movies, mainstream acceptance of those transgressive stories had waned significantly. Movies reflected the new Reagan-era conservatism that gave us the non-threatening, buttoned-up Cosby Show.
Only in blaxploitation could black sexuality be truly unleashed. Of course, those blaxploitation characters usually had to be pimps or lotharios hopping from bed to bed. The original Dolemite film was about a falsely imprisoned pimp and nightclub owner coming back to reclaim his territory. His only real ally is another, female pimp named Queen Bee. Romance can be beside the point or blatantly irrelevant in blaxploitation; it’s sex as trade or sex as conquest, which plays into damaging stereotypes about black men that still persist. Nonetheless, in films like Dolemite and Superfly, there was something revolutionary — which Murphy brings to the fore. In a way, Murphy playing Rudy Ray Moore playing Dolemite presents an alternate universe version of the actor, who he might have been in an era when black sexuality was in vogue.
Because the role of Dolemite represents the antithesis of what Murphy did in Coming to America. (Murphy will be reprising both the roles of Akeem and Axel Foley in 2020’s Coming 2 America and the not-yet-dated Beverly Hills Cop 4, respectively.) Dolemite is brash, angry, clever, and unflappable, prepared to be the baddest, coolest person in any room. That’s who Eddie Murphy was in the 1980s, and that’s often what people expect from black men in America. It’s worth nothing that Moore himself was never married and didn’t have any children, which led to rumors that he might have been gay. If he was, it was a cruelly inhospitable time to live as an out gay man, particularly while portraying Dolemite. (Remember that comics like Murphy often used homophobic material to get cheap laughs in the ‘80s.) Black masculinity can be so retrograde, reactionary, and intolerant in part because of what we wrongfully deem to be our most redeeming qualities; our edge, our hipness, and our confidence is what some outsiders have decided gives us our worth. Part of the joke of the bed scene in Dolemite is that it dramatizes exactly what white audiences are afraid of, that black men are sexual dynamos that can make the ceiling collapse in your bedroom.
Dolemite Is My Name is Eddie Murphy reclaiming an aspect of himself that he seemed to have lost, that incredibly potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. It’s what made him one of the greatest, if not the greatest, black movie stars. It was when he downplayed it or saw it as a hindrance that his influence faltered. Playing Rudy Ray Moore allows Murphy, for once, to wield black masculinity without fear, to make the earth move with his power.
By Dave Schilling
Dolemite Is My Name allows Eddie Murphy to reclaim a potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. Photo: Netflix
In the new Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name, a dramatization of the real story behind a 1970s blaxploitation classic, Eddie Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore is faced with the daunting task of performing a sex scene in front of the ragtag crew he’s assembled to bring a soon-to-be-cult movie to life. Moore is a paunchy, middle-aged, borderline sexless man who has nonetheless made a career out of boasting about his sexual prowess, posing nude with models on the covers of his raunchy comedy albums. But now, he’s being asked to illustrate that imagined prowess for the camera. Instead of playing the scene for titillation, Moore decides to lean into the joke. He rocks the bed violently, causing pictures to bounce up and down on the walls. A piece of the ceiling falls. Dolemite’s libidinous power is off the charts. He might not look like much, but under the right circumstances, he can make the Earth move.
Black masculinity in movies, especially comedies, was and remains a dicey subject. When the original Dolemite was released in 1975, only eight years had passed since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became the rare Hollywood movie to depict an interracial relationship. In that film, Sidney Poitier plays an eerily perfect example of an upper-class African-American man, nary a rough edge to be found. The image of John Prentice would go on to define black sexuality in pop culture for years after, and while the line from Poitier to Will Smith is not a clean one, an idea persisted: for a black actor in 20th century Hollywood, placidity was the key. Otherwise, you don’t get the girl. Outside of romantic dramas, many of the great black comedic film actors of the era were pulled into this cinematic paradigm. Richard Pryor was a massive star for years, but in movies like Brewster’s Millions, the white female co-lead was his cheery confidant rather than a lover. Before Bill Cosby was outed as a sexual predator, he appeared in movies like Leonard: Part 6 and Ghost Dad, where he was a doddering parental figure rather than a romantic lead.
In the pre–My Name is Dolemite career of Eddie Murphy, we see how hesitant Hollywood and audiences alike could be when it comes to black male sexuality on screen. You can count the number of sex scenes he’s performed on one hand — largely as the romantic lead in unpopular fare like Vampire in Brooklyn or Boomerang. Audiences never quite embraced his virility the way they fell for his wit, energy, and sexless charm in Beverly Hills Cop or Trading Places. The box-office grosses for Murphy’s romantic films paled in comparison to the mega-bucks successes of movies like 48 Hours. In Trading Places, it’s not Murphy but Dan Aykroyd who gets the girl at the end. In Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley is “just a friend,” eliminating any chance of him bedding the leading lady when the bad guys are all dead. Murphy’s biggest hits were R-rated films filled with provocative language, nudity, and violence, yet sex was less than an afterthought. Axel Foley could go to a strip club and crack wise around countless exposed breasts, but it was as if these things were happening behind glass.
The black movie stars that came after Murphy, now 58, had more success developing romantic personas. Namely, Will Smith, who could sublimate any threatening aspects of his persona to seduce Margot Robbie in Focus. Predominantly black romantic comedies like The Best Man began to spring up with more frequency. While all of this was happening, Murphy was either slathering himself in makeup for kids’ movies or struggling to keep up with Smith, now 51, in sci-fi comedies like The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Murphy’s superpower was extreme confidence and unflappable wit. Smith has that, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for vulnerability; he’s not especially tough or particularly menacing. Above all, he feels safe. In Coming to America, arguably Eddie’s most successful attempt at being a romantic hero, he has to play a naive fish-out-of-water to be credibly romantic to moviegoers. His inherent street smarts are negated by how alien his character is made to feel. The film was surely a triumphant moment in Murphy’s career, but the part was far from the flashy talker people fell in love with on SNL or in his stand-up concert films.
Part of what makes Dolemite Is My Name so revelatory is that it allows Murphy to play a character who was, unequivocally, sexual over four decades ago. It was, after all, the blaxploitation films of the 1970s that took Poitier’s portrayal of acceptable blackness and blew it all to hell. These movies were violent, crass, and explicit. They gave white audiences a glimpse of a different kind of hero. Dolemite, as with contemporaneous characters like Shaft, demanded a sexual gaze. But by the time Eddie Murphy became the most recognizable black face in late 1980s movies, mainstream acceptance of those transgressive stories had waned significantly. Movies reflected the new Reagan-era conservatism that gave us the non-threatening, buttoned-up Cosby Show.
Only in blaxploitation could black sexuality be truly unleashed. Of course, those blaxploitation characters usually had to be pimps or lotharios hopping from bed to bed. The original Dolemite film was about a falsely imprisoned pimp and nightclub owner coming back to reclaim his territory. His only real ally is another, female pimp named Queen Bee. Romance can be beside the point or blatantly irrelevant in blaxploitation; it’s sex as trade or sex as conquest, which plays into damaging stereotypes about black men that still persist. Nonetheless, in films like Dolemite and Superfly, there was something revolutionary — which Murphy brings to the fore. In a way, Murphy playing Rudy Ray Moore playing Dolemite presents an alternate universe version of the actor, who he might have been in an era when black sexuality was in vogue.
Because the role of Dolemite represents the antithesis of what Murphy did in Coming to America. (Murphy will be reprising both the roles of Akeem and Axel Foley in 2020’s Coming 2 America and the not-yet-dated Beverly Hills Cop 4, respectively.) Dolemite is brash, angry, clever, and unflappable, prepared to be the baddest, coolest person in any room. That’s who Eddie Murphy was in the 1980s, and that’s often what people expect from black men in America. It’s worth nothing that Moore himself was never married and didn’t have any children, which led to rumors that he might have been gay. If he was, it was a cruelly inhospitable time to live as an out gay man, particularly while portraying Dolemite. (Remember that comics like Murphy often used homophobic material to get cheap laughs in the ‘80s.) Black masculinity can be so retrograde, reactionary, and intolerant in part because of what we wrongfully deem to be our most redeeming qualities; our edge, our hipness, and our confidence is what some outsiders have decided gives us our worth. Part of the joke of the bed scene in Dolemite is that it dramatizes exactly what white audiences are afraid of, that black men are sexual dynamos that can make the ceiling collapse in your bedroom.
Dolemite Is My Name is Eddie Murphy reclaiming an aspect of himself that he seemed to have lost, that incredibly potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. It’s what made him one of the greatest, if not the greatest, black movie stars. It was when he downplayed it or saw it as a hindrance that his influence faltered. Playing Rudy Ray Moore allows Murphy, for once, to wield black masculinity without fear, to make the earth move with his power.
Dolemite Is My Name Gives Eddie Murphy the Material for a Comeback
By David Edelstein
Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski give Eddie Murphy his best material in decades. Photo: François Duhamel/Netflix
Everything clicks in the comedy Dolemite Is My Name — it’s almost alarming how easily, breezily, larkishly the film goes down. Eddie Murphy plays the comedian and singer Rudy Ray Moore, who arrested a mid-career fade-out in the 1960s by developing an alter ego called “Dolemite,” a pimp, libertine, and fabulist with roots in black American folklore. The movie, directed by Craig Brewer from a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, connects Moore’s obscurity in early scenes to the passing of an era. The old-style vaudeville houses have closed and are decaying along with the cities surrounding them. What turns people on now are outlaws. Heroes aren’t just hustlers but resplendent hustlers, colorfully flouting the old, accommodationist ways. If the system is crooked, they’ll be crookeder — joyously, filthily, libidinously so. So, Dolemite is commercial dynamite.
If Dolemite was Moore’s restart button, Moore is Murphy’s. The actor’s swift rise to stardom in the early ’80s came from playing underdogs who were so obviously top dogs that there was no real suspense — only the glee of watching Murphy put down or vanquish one racist adversary after another in blockbusters like 48 HRS, Beverly Hills Cop, and Coming to America. From the outset, he projected such comfort with his stardom and resentment at having to make himself available to press or fans that there was also glee in some quarters when his films began to tank. “Look, children, it’s a falling star!” exclaimed David Spade to a photo of Murphy on a Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live that prompted an angry call from Murphy, who reminded Spade that SNL was on the brink of extinction when Murphy helped give it a second wind. Murphy might have lost an Oscar for Dreamgirls when voters were reminded that he wasn’t inclined to stick around for other actors’ close-ups, returning to his fortress of trailers while stand-ins played his scenes. It was sobering. So, coming from behind is new for Murphy. There’s an extra-textual element of fear in his Moore as he vainly pleads with a DJ (Snoop Dogg) to play an old record. Murphy will never not be a poor man, but if wealth were enough, he’d be happy doing animated movies like Shrek. He needs new challenges.
Writers Alexander and Karaszewski give him his best material in decades. With Ed Wood, the pair essentially created the ironic biopic subgenre, in which American go-get-ism is combined with mediocrity and/or a talent so antibourgeois that it flouts the biopic’s wholesome aesthetic. Self-actualization is valued over quality in a way that subtly evokes Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life, in which doubt, hesitation, or shame are the qualities that keep a person from advancing to a higher plane of existence. The intoxicatingly inept Wood, the defiantly sexist smut-monger Larry Flynt, the punkish provocateur Andy Kaufman are true existentialist heroes, carpe-ing every diem, creating themselves out of nothing. Murphy’s Moore is a rejoinder to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous assertion that in America there are no second acts. It’s a comeback as well — at least in film — for the Hustle & Flow director, Brewer, who didn’t find his commercial mojo until Empire.
In outline, Dolemite Is My Name is as straightforward as a rags-to-riches tale can be. Moore hears stories of a pimp called Dolemite from a homeless man, whom he plies with cash and booze for more and more details. He builds the character while staring at himself in the mirror, putting together his garish costume (ruffled pink shirts, an Afro wig, an elegant walking stick) the way clowning students do when turned loose on piles of old clothes and props. I don’t think Murphy is faking his delight in showing Moore finding his persona. Is there anything more rewarding for a performer like Murphy than nailing a character, making it seem as if that person has always existed in the ether, waiting for the genius to come along and invoke him/her? For Moore and Murphy, making club audiences scream with happiness and then embarking on the black vaudeville “Chitlin Circuit” is reactivating old muscles and finding a new potency. And Moore doesn’t simply invent the character — he invents the means of reaching the public. Spurned by record labels for material judged obscene (this in the age of Deep Throat), he records his act himself in his grandma’s house, getting his audience toasted to simulate the feel of a raucous nightclub. For Alexander and Karaszewski, it wouldn’t be American without a degree of deception.
Despite the threat of poverty, Dolemite Is My Name isn’t deep or dark. It has the buoyant, let’s-put-on-a-show feel of Ed Wood. Moore quickly builds a surrogate showbiz family, in one club inspiring Lady Reed (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) to put her offstage wit to work onstage. (“I’m so grateful for what you did for me,” she tells Moore in a tearful moment, “cause I’d never seen nobody that looks like me up there on that big screen.”) Stirred by the success of Shaft and Superfly while dismayed by Billy Wilder’s lame The Front Page remake, Moore dreams of making it in film and convinces a playwright (Keegan-Michael Key) with pretenses to pen an outlandish action script with “titties” and kung fu, then woos an alcoholic name actor, D’Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes), both to appear in the film and direct it. (This is also a comeback of sorts for Snipes, who embraces his camp side in the manner of Val Kilmer at his most dissolute.) Dolemite Is My Name has the glee of a John Waters movie in which it’s freaks-versus-squares, with freakishness the only healthy design for living.
The final twist is that Moore, reminded that he’s a little pudgy and “no Billy Dee Williams,” is happy to turn his Dolemite film, mid-shoot, into a slapstick comedy. This is another aspect of the modern Horatio Alger story, in which dignity is jettisoned for the sake of fame but is considered well lost. Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite never broke through to a white mainstream, but is now having, pace Fitzgerald, his third act. Like Ed Wood, like Tommy Wiseau, like Tonya Harding, he’s the subject of an award-worthy biopic with an A-list star. He has arrived.
Lol
This masterpiece didn't get the props it deserves when it came out. I hope that changes in the future.
Movie was horrible, at no point did I see Dolemite in Eddie Murphy, all I could see was Eddie Murphy trying to play Dolemite but being Eddie Murphy
Movie was a fucking masterpiece ….. there always has to be one
Shut the fuck up Pookie.
I think bow finger came out in 98 also wasn't "Life" r-rated?
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Actually Bowfinger and Life came out in 1999.
In the movie Rudy ray Moore didn't know karate but h was in the army when he was younger wouldn't he have known a little hand to hand combat?
Watched the original dolemite movie on YouTube it's a super risingly good movie. They also have weststrw and the human tor afo for free.
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