Rudy Ray Moore

(Netflix Streaming, December 2020) So, do we officially have a subgenre of great movies about the making of bad movies, now? We had Ed Wood (about Plan 9 From Outer Space), The Disaster Artist (about The Room) and now Dolemite is my Name, which describes the making of Dolemite. I know; I know – Dolemite was conceived as a comedy and thus doesn’t quite rank as an unintentional disaster. But I watched it right before Dolemite is my Name, and it is a wretched film from a technical standpoint: rough script, amateur filmmaking, terrible audiovisual quality, approximative acting and substantial pacing problems. But what this fictionalized making-of accomplishes is to give us a look behind the scenes – at Rudy Ray Moore trying to find his voice on the comedy circuit, at black creators trying to put together a film appealing to their sensibilities, at a crew of student filmmakers working on their first production with a minuscule budget. Eddie Murphy gets one of his best roles in years as Moore, keeping some of his worst tics in check and playing a character for once. Dolemite is my Name is never as enjoyable as when it shows the amateur filmmakers putting together a movie – especially if you have a fresh memory of the original. It all amounts to a somewhat inspiring finale, although it’s made even better in that Moore surpassed his wildest ambitions in putting together Dolemite – the film may not be very polished or funny to contemporary audiences, but it was a massive hit back in the mid-1970s. For Murphy, too, the film feels like a success equivalent to Dolemite – it was a passion project for him, and it must be gratifying to get the kinds of notices that Dolemite Is My Name earned, seeing how its look at a bad film became a really good one.