Post by Heavy Metal on Mar 19, 2011 8:48:49 GMT -5
Too awesome for work.
Dolemite (1974)[/size]
Dolemite, motherfucker!
N’s Rating: You heard.
Additional Notes:
I loves me some seventies culture. The eighties were my formative years, but I have to be real. They were fluff. The seventies was a lousy decade to live in, but in my uneducated opinion it was one of the most important periods of time for art. Case in point; it was the only era where Dolemite could possibly be made, and it would be a sadder world without it.
A lot of elements had to come together and if any one of them had been the tiniest bit off, film as an art form would look a lot different. The overseas markets were seriously opening up. The ink was still wet on Jack Valenti's bargain with Mephistopheles and so he hadn’t buttfucked the industry with the iron dick of his rating system yet. The biggest contributor was probably television, killing off local one-screen theatres and leaving them desperate to find a way to compete. Artists not only had more freedom, they were being encouraged to use it and create something new and… different. Not surprisingly, they were like kids with a new toy.
Now take all that, and add in cultural shift, social tension, and an overall dislike for authority left in the wake of the Nixon administration. The result, you will find, is a primordial stew from which would come the next stage in cinematic evolution.
It was the era of the grindhouse. And it was gooooood.
Before the eighties came in like Helen Lovejoy in pastel hot pants, the renegade artist was king. Cue the inevitable game of lurid one-upmanship. And if ‘sploitation’ could be appended to it, it was cinema gold. Nazisploitation, nunsploitation, sexploitation (quite a lot of that for some reason), and of course, blaxploitation.
Blaxploitation, unlike most of the rest, was considered a serious cultural phenomenon. It was just as bug fuck insane as everything else, but even Blackenstein was played (mostly) with a straight face. I find it a fascinating genre, but then again, two of the first naked breasts I ever saw both happened to belong to Pam Grier. That might have something to do with it too. Anyway, since everybody was using lunacy as a selling point, it might not be obvious to the uninitiated that Dolemite is a parody.
For a bit of history, Rudy Ray Moore (1927-2008) was a comedian who did party records. Very early in his career he was working in a store where a homeless man would do ‘toasts’ for spare change (a toast being sort of a prehistoric form of rap). One day he heard one about a superfly pimp and, by his own admission, filched the character for his act. It turned out that people kind of liked it. His first album was self-produced, sold by hand to pedestrians, and wound up in the top 25 of the Billboard charts anyway. See why I love this era?
Getting to the point, the late and greatly lamented Rudy Ray Moore was a comedic genius and this has kung-fu hookers in it.
Dolemite, the South Central superpimp, is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s not in jail for being a South Central superpimp, but rather for stealing a half a million bucks in cocaine and furs. Mitchell and White, the cops who planted the stuff in his car, are on the take from a rival pimp named Willie Green.
In a meeting with Dolemite and his old partner Queen Bee, the prison warden explains the following: Dolemite has been in prison for two years, and street crime has not gone away. Therefore, he must not have been the problem. Yep. The feds suspect there are corrupt cops involved and there is some huge plot going down in his old turf. Since Dolemite is his name and fucking up motherfuckers is his game, the warden offers a full pardon if he’ll go vigilante and get to the bottom of it all.
If you can accept that logic, then congratulations. You have achieved the right mindset to enjoy Dolemite and may now sit back and drool a little. If you’re still having problems, you might wish to pause the film and go put your willing suspension of disbelief somewhere it won’t get hurt.
The next day, four of Queen Bee’s girls show up in front of the prison with a limo and some respectable pimping clothes. Dolemite’s barely finished getting his groove on in the back seat before they’re attacked by a Cadillac full of unidentified, gun-totin’ white guys. He makes short work of them of course, and keep your eye on their parked car. Not only does it teleport fifty feet, it transforms into a different car. Dolemite’s clothes magically change too. I love this movie.
Arriving at Queen Bee’s ‘massage parlor’, Dolemite learns that his pride and joy, the nightclub called The Total Experience, is now owned by Willie Green. After framing him up, Mitchell and White would bust the club every week until Queen Bee ran out of money and had to sell it. She did, however, hold enough back to send all the girls to karate school, so he has a pre-made army at his disposal.
What follows is a long spell that mostly serves to get crazy characters and naked boobs on the screen. We’re introduced to a separatist minister who runs guns and isn’t abstinent when it comes to really ample booties. Dolemite interrogates Creeper the Hamburger Pimp and if you can translate a dozen words of Creeper’s side of their six-minute dialog, you’re better at this than I am.
Mitchell and White are still on Willie Green’s payroll, and continue to be a nuisance but never pose a real problem. They attempt to bust Dolemite on phony charges again and are soon pulling his Hush Puppies out of their ass (quoting here). They successfully bust him for kung-fuing some of Willie Green’s thugs into the great beyond, but he’s out again in the next scene, consequence free.
Dolemite recovers a secret stash of ill-gotten gain and pays off Willie Green, reclaiming the Total Experience and thrashing a few henchmen because he’s fucking Dolemite. But it turns out the city mayor (Daley, no less) is also on the take from Willie, and it’s all leading up to opening night and a battle royal starring Dolemite’s lethal ladies.
No doubt, there are a LOT of problems and it’s not hard to see that nobody knew what the hell they were doing. All sorts of plot threads are introduced and either dropped or left flapping in the breeze when the credits roll. I’d estimate a collective thirty minutes is devoted to full song and dance performances and a few of Moore’s toasts (not that much of a problem if you enjoy sweet funk and soul). Nobody can stage fight at all, let alone in platform shoes, and there are so many visible boom mikes I thought they’d formed a union.
But now I ask you, who cares? It’s kung fu hookers. There is nothing involving kung fu hookers that anyone should complain about. Dolemite is such a labor of love that only a rat-soup-eatin' born-insecure honky motherfucker could remain unmoved by it.
