Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

I was debating whether or not I wanted to review this, because, while it is essentially direct to video, it doesn't have a direct to video feel. This would have been a theatrical movie 10 years ago, but in the current movie landscape, the traditional big movie houses are looking for the next Marvel-type franchise that they can make a billion dollars worldwide on, so Netflix swoops in to fill the void, and now we have something that only got a token theatrical release so it would qualify for award season, then goes to Netflix streaming, which fits exactly our definition of direct to video: something that does the bulk of its damage on the home viewing market.

Dolemite Is My Name follows the life of Rudy Ray Moore, played by Eddie Murphy, first as he develops his character Dolemite for his stand-up act, and then later as he produces his Dolemite movie with very little budget and resources. Every time he hits an obstacle, he perseveres, until ultimately his film is made and screened in movie theaters to huge success.

This was fantastic. Eddie Murphy is great, bringing us back to the 80s and 90s R-rated Murphy, but at the same time, giving that touch of feel-good that we got from his more family oriented PG films of the 2000s. And that's ultimately for me what makes this work so well, it's an R-rated Disney-uplifting-based-on-a true-story-type movie, but it doesn't lay it on too thick, so that when we need it to be poignant, we can enjoy it without it feeling too sappy. Beyond that, it has so many hilarious moments, with such a talented cast that is all invested in the project and doing their best to make it succeed. Yes, ten years ago this would have been a theatrical release, but at least Netflix is there to fill the void so this gets made at all in the modern movie making climate, and who knows, maybe without a big studio sticking their nose in, we get this the way it is here.

We've never had Eddie Murphy on here before, and what makes this whole straight to Netflix thing so odd, is we're not getting Eddie Murphy in some DTV action yarn shot in Michigan with 50 Cent and Bruce Willis in it like we do when most big screen actors go DTV; that's not what this movie is on any level, it's the real deal. It's something that we're going to have to look at more on the DTV Connoisseur, because we also have Martin Scorsese making movies for Netflix. Do we review  The Irishman too? And what does that mean for future DTV flicks when something like this is swimming in the same pool as they are? I think part of it is, with me only doing one movie a week, those yarns shot in Michigan or New Orleans with Bruce Willis or whoever on the tin will probably get squeezed out if they don't have a Hall of Famer in them, or if they don't generate the buzz a movie like Avengement did. When you also factor in all the past DTV flicks from the 80s and 90s I still need to look at, movies like Dolemite Is My Name and The Irishman totally change the calculus for us.

Of the many names in this film, the one whose work we've seen most here on the DTV Connoisseur is Wesley Snipes, who plays D'Urville Martin. I heard Michael Jai White in a recent interview say "when people see you kick someone in the head, you get known for kicking people in the head," which meant, "if you do action, you get typecast as an action guy," and I think to some extent that happened to Snipes, so it was great to see him among so many great comedic actors hold his own and show us his range beyond action again. With the Black Panther movie having so much success, I think people forgot that Snipes was already playing an African American Marvel super hero on the big screen in the late 90s/early 2000s. Those Blade movies were a lot of fun, and they were a lot of fun in large part because of how great Snipes was in them.

As we discussed in the Gerald's Game post, which was another Netflix original we looked at, you can't get this movie on DVD or Blu-Ray. You either pay $13 a month for a Netflix account, or you're out of luck. So on the one hand, it's fantastic that Netflix is filling the void while the big movie houses are looking for the next billion dollar property, on the other hand, I can't just plunk down my $20 and have this to watch whenever I want, I have to pay $12 a month in perpetuity--and then who knows if Netflix ever decides to take it down. I also need to have an internet connection to watch it, so if you go to a camp or cabin in the woods that has no internet, you can't show your friends the movie that haven't seen it yet. If you have an Eddie Murphy collection, you can't add it to that, just like you can't add The Irishman to a Martin Scorsese collection you may have. That part troubles me, that we're so beholden to Netflix, especially with a movie that's so great like this and how much a Blu-Ray with all the extras would make it that much better. (Jen showed me a Stranger Things DVD from Netflix she saw online, so maybe these will come out on DVD and Blu-Ray eventually.)

There are so many great names in this movie, but with only 8 paragraphs, I couldn't get them all, so I narrowed it down to one performance that I felt really tied the movie together for me, and that was Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Lady Reed. The movie overall does a great job straddling the line between raunchy comedy romp and syrupy sweet sentimentality porn to give us something in the middle that's very mature and never strays too far in either direction, and I think Randolph's performance embodies that. As a supporting character, a lot of her interactions with Murphy help to round out his character and give him more depth, but I think she also managed to make her come out of those interactions with more depth as well, and made us want to root for her too; and with all the silliness in the movie, we needed that depth to make this movie turn out the way Murphy intended.

I can't recommend this enough, which also means, if you don't have Netflix, I'm technically recommending you get that too. I don't know if it will eventually come out on Blu-Ray, but however you get a chance to see it, it's worth it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8526872

The Big Bang (2011)

If you hadn't already heard, Stars Play chose not to renew their agreement with Netflix to stream their films on Watch Instantly, meaning on February 29, 2012, hundreds of movies got the ax. That left me with a mad scramble to watch and capture images for no less than 11 flicks that I didn't want to miss out on so I could review them here at the DTVC. This is the first of those. I'm going to tag them with "Stars Play 11", to give them a unique distinction in the archives. So without further ado, The Big Bang.

The Big Bang stars Antonio Banderas as a PI in Vegas, called in to find a stripper for a former Russian boxer that just got out of jail. As he peels back the layers, though, things aren't what they seem-- when are they ever?--, and he finds he may have bitten off more than he can chew. But for a real hard boiled private dick, there's no case too tough to crack-- and end up with the dame in the process.



This was pretty fun. Don't get me wrong, it had a flashback exposition style that was tedious and intrusive at first, but got better as it went; and it suffered from those moments of self-indulgence that seem to plague so many Film Noir efforts made after the mid-90s. Overall though, the pros outweighed the cons. The cast was pretty good; the story, when it was allowed to be told without breaks, worked; Banderas was perfect as the lead; and it had this unique inclusion of physics references mixed in. I also really liked the use of color, some of the shots were really striking. Definitely worth checking out.

Most of my Antonio Banderas experience comes in his Pedro Almodovar flicks, which are all fantastic, and which he's is great in all of. He was much younger in those of course (except the recent The Skin I Live In), and the roles are much more off-beat than what he did here in the States, where he was much more of a traditional leading man. What I liked about his performance in The Big Bang, was that he was able to marry both aspects, the off-beat with the more conventional, to give us a great hard boiled Noir detective in a film like this that's a little out there. Without his performance, I don't think any of this works.



There are a whole host of other stars in The Big Bang. Snoop Dogg plays a porn director, which, is what it is-- one of those moments of self-indulgence I'd say, I mean, I don't see how him playing a porn director is any different from him performing on a Katy Perry track or appearing in a soft drink commercial. Two of my favorite That Guys, Delroy Lindo and William Fichtner, play police detectives putting the squeeze on Banderas. How do you not love those guys? Our Noir dames are Sienna Guillory and Autumn Reeser, both sufficiently hot and mysterious. Jimmi Simpson plays a young physicist prodigy working for Sam Elliott-- who we'll get into next. Finally, James Van Der Beek plays a crazy actor in a small part at the beginning. Cue the I don't wanna wait...

I don't know about you, but I've had it with this sententious, sanctimonious Sam Elliott voice-over work in bad commercials that we're constantly subjected to. It wasn't so bad with "Beef, it's what's for dinner", but now it's as if the shite he's peddling is somehow superior just because he says it's so; that instead of being a corporate shill, he's waxing poetic about some mythical blue collar way of life that's just dripping hypocrisy considering the big business source. Anyway, it was good that his character in this was totally full of shit. It was as if the character was based on the real him-- here's this pompous ass spouting off this "better than thou" BS, and in the end is revealed for who he is. Whatever happened to the legendary bouncer mentor from Road House? Maybe when "it was tails", it killed more than just his character, it killed his tact too.



I took physics as an undergrad when I started out as an electrical engineering major. The final didn't have partial credit, and as a freshman, I was living off of partial credit, so that sunk me, and I ended up with a D+, my only grade that poor out of my entire college career. It also meant when I switched majors, I was the only anthropology major with Calc-based physics as his science gen-ed. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, physics isn't an entirely foreign subject to me, but not one I'm totally comfortable with. I was able to get a lot of the references though, like "Schrodinger's" painted on the side of the movie studio building, or the cafe named "Planck's Constant". As long as you're not making me write out page-long equations to find one value with no partial credit, I'm good.

I imagine this is pretty readily available on DVD, and I think it's worth checking out. Anchored by a fantastic Antonio Banderas performance, with an off-beat story, a nice supporting cast, and some sharp visuals, this is better than your usual DTV Noir. Plus you get the physics without being graded on it, which ain't bad either.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1307873/

Urban Menace (1999)

This is one that's always intrigued me. DTVC Hall of Fame director Albert Pyun's film starring hip-hop stars Snoop Dogg, Big Pun, Fat Joe, and Pyun mainstay Ice-T. I mean, I figured it would be hilarious, but I was still intrigued.

Urban Menace takes place in New York City and has Snoop as a form of archangel come back from the dead to wreak vengeance upon Big Pun and Fat Joe's gang. Caught up in this is King, a member of the gang who wants out and tried to work with the cops, but now has to go into an abandoned building and confront Snoop for his bosses. How will Snoop treat him as he's exacting his violent revenge on the rest of the gang?



This wasn't serious, was it? I mean, it had to be shot in a day, based on the poor quality. I'm not sure a gun was ever fired, instead the actors pretended to shoot and sound effects were added, a move I'm sure middle school kids use in their YouTube videos (if they had YouTube when I was in middle school, I know I would've done that). Most of the film was shot in this grainy style of film, which was weird. It's too bad, because there were some bright spots, both serious and silly. Ice-T did the music, which was really cool, almost like Miles Davis in Elevator to the Gallows-- almost. Snoop was pretty funny, especially watching him shimmy around while he was firing his pistols. You can imagine how great of actors Fat Joe and the late Big Pun were.

What killed this was a 72 minute running time, of which ten minutes were taken up with Ice-T's intro, and another ten were taken up with credits (I'm serious), so a 52 minute running time, and it felt like three hours. There was just a lot of nothing happening. One scene in the beginning had Big Pun and Fat Joe talking about this or that business thing, and it went on forever, or at least it seemed like it. A person would say something, then it would cut to a close up of Fat Joe, who would respond, then a close up of Pun, who would respond, then back to the guy. It was just hard to imagine that the guy who did Nemesis, Omega Doom, and Cyborg directed this too.



Ice-T played the narrator, something of a Ghetto Poet, Urban Philosopher, or Poet Laureate of the Cut. In the scenes where it was him just talking, as opposed to commenting on the boring movie, it was actually pretty cool. The thing was, as an actor, he was the only half-way decent talent in the film, and he ended up only being the narrator. The addition of him doing the music was great too. The problem was, it was supporting a boring movie.

Another bright spot was Pyun mainstay Vincent Klyn in a small role. We love Klyn here at the DTVC, more affectionately known as Warchild from Point Break. "Back off Warchild, seriously." He's done twelve films with Pyun, second only to Nobert Weisser's 14, but hasn't done anything period since 2004's Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon, also directed by Pyun. That's too bad.



This is one of two credited Pyun forays into the Urban genre, the other being Corrupt, which I haven't seen yet. There's also the Master P flick Bad Bizness aka More Mercy, which he wasn't credited on. I haven't seen either of those, but if this is any indication, I can't imagine they're great. Urban Menace isn't of the quality we've come to expect from Pyun, so if you see this and think "Oh, Albert Pyun, I loved Nemesis and Cyborg, you'll be sorely disappointed. I did read an article that was linked on imdb from Quiet Earth, a site that seems to be devoted to post-apocalyptic films, about Pyun's next film, Bulletface. Word on the street is he's releasing his films on his own now and re-releasing director's cuts some of the older ones, including Nemesis. Could be cool, but I'm not sure how reliable the site's info is, considering they said Bulletface would be out in January, and January's almost done, and Bulletface isn't out. Still looking forward to Tales of an Ancient Empire.

Don't fall for this. It's not great work from Pyun, and the cast that seems funny isn't enough to cover for the snoozefest that we're served. I probably shouldn't even have reviewed it, but Pyun's a Hall of Famer, and we gotta take the good with the bad, and the bad with the very bad. Again, Pyun is the only DTVC Hall of Famer ever to comment on the blog, and we love him for that, but I have to be honest and call it like I see it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0196181/

Hot Boyz (1999)

This film has some first grade talent: Busey, C. Thomas Howell, Snoop, Jeff Speakman, Master P, and Clifton Powell. I figured it couldn't go wrong. The only thing that could derail it would be if it ignored that great talent and focused on someone else, like Silkk The Shocker. They wouldn't do that, would they?

They did. Hot Boyz is about Silkk as a dude in LA whose girlfriend is wrongly accused of killing a cop. Gary Busey and C. Thomas Howell are corrupt cops that want to catch the other corrupt cop that really killed the cop, not Silkk's girl. Anyway, they want him to go undercover and get evidence, but as he does, his girl is killed in jail by that bad cop. Silkk goes over the deep end, and he and the boys he grew up with start their own gang and kill hundreds of people. Then the net finally drops, but for some reason Silkk, after killing hundreds of people, is let out of jail on a technicality.



What? Where do I start? First, I understand Master P wanted to use this film to showcase Silkk the Shocker so he could make more money off him, but when he surrounded him with the talent he did, it left us wondering why they were all playing second fiddle. Snoop Dogg as an underling in Silkk the Shocker's gang? Not a chance. And Master P himself has a great scene where he's being interrogated-- but it's his only scene, and it just left me wanting more. Why weren't Master P and Snoop Dogg just kicking ass and taking names in some kind of new age Fred Williamson-type flick?

The plot was ridiculous. First, killing off the girl was a bad move. Then having him start a gang when he was unbelievable in that role was dumb. Finally, having an epilogue where Silkk gets out of jail leaves the story with a "huh?" kind of bad after taste. Baller Blockin' this definitely wasn't. They knew better than to kill off the girl, they made the cops sufficiently corrupt, and the overall level of charm was higher.



This was all right as far as Busey went. He's first billed, which is slightly misleading. Silkk was supposed to be the star. Obviously I think Busey should be in any movie as much as possible, no matter what it is. I absolutely loved Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler, but each would've been that much better with Gary Busey in them. Speaking of which, why doesn't Busey have an Oscar? He should've gotten best supporting actor in 1991 for Point Break over Jack Palance, but that's neither here nor there...

There isn't much C. Thomas Howell. He plays a detective that works under Busey. With the momentum from The Da Vinci Treasure, I was hoping to build on it with another great performance-- and he was good-- but there just wasn't enough here to work with. Like Master P and Snoop Dogg, they all did well, I just wished they could've been in it more. Silkk the Shocker should've been the one with the limited role.



Because this and Baller Blockin' were both made by competing New Orleans rap outfits, I thought it necessary to compare the two in an earlier paragraph. One thing the two have in common is Anthony Johnson, the guy who plays the crackhead in Friday. The only thing is on imdb he's not listed in the credits of Baller Blockin', so you won't find it on his bio. As with everything else in Baller Blockin' they use this comedic actor much better than Hot Boyz did. The crazy cop was funny, while the stuttering, jealous member of the gang didn't work for me. One of his best attributes is his fast speech, so making him a stutterer ruins that.

This movie was sauteed in wrong sauce right from the start, from conception to production. Every good move they made was coupled and trebled by myriad bad moves. I just don't get people who make movies sometimes. Avoid this, and watch Baller Blockin' and then Point Break again instead.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0191191/