"Dolomite Is My Name"

Back in the early 1970's, Rudy Ray Moore was an aspiring singer/actor/stand-up comedian living on the fringes - the very far fringes - of show business, trying to scratch out a living in Los Angeles.  Things were so bad, the disc jockey in a record store where Moore worked as an assistant manager wouldn't even play his records.

One day, Moore got the idea to take the ribald poems and stories passed on by the winos and junkies who inhabited his neighborhood, expand upon them and incorporate them into his stand-up act.  Wah-lah, Moore became a hit in the black club scene in LA, cut some hit comedy albums, traveled the Chitlin' Circuit throughout the south, and then became a really big hit in the Blaxploitation movies of the seventies that featured the character he created, Dolomite.  (Early rap and hip-hop artists credit Moore for inspiring them with his comedy tales told in rhyme and accompanied by the funkadelic music of the era.)

Moore's story is told in the Netflix produced movie, "Dolomite Is My Name" that stars Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore.  This is a pretty good movie, and Murphy, who is now 58 years old (talk about the passage of time!) and who has been absent from the movies for far too long, is positively terrific in this movie.  I have heard and read that there is some talk of an Academy Award nomination for Murphy, and it would not be undeserved.  It is certainly one of the better performances that I have seen this year.

The movie is funny, and, in its own way a bit touching, and worth seeing if only to take in Murphy's performance, but a word of warning.  The movie is rated R, and it is a strong R, for the crude and vulgar language throughout.   If a sentence of dialog did not include the F-word in it, it probably did include the M-F-word.  Sometimes this bothers me, but in the context of the story being told in "Dolomite Is My Name", I didn't have a problem with it.  However, I get it that this may mean that this movie is not for everyone.  There, you've been warned.

Two and one-half Stars from The Grandstander.

By the way, Eddie Murphy is set to host "Saturday Night Live" tomorrow night on NBC, no doubt as a means to promote this movie.  It will be his first time back on the show that made him a star since 1984.  It will be enough to get me back to watching SNL, something that I have not done regularly, well, since Eddie Murphy was a cast member.