North Texas Film Festival 2019: Dolemite May Be Bad But Dolemite Is My Name Is Great

The era of Blaxploitation cinema brought out a number of iconic fictional figures ranging from Shaft and Sweetback. Among that group is Dolemite, who wasn't always a figure of the silver screen. The figure of Dolemite started out as a live comedy personality crafted by Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy). Moore was a record store employee on the lookout for his big breakthrough all sorts of creative avenues, all of them leading down to dead end's. Then, he got a brilliant idea. He took slave jokes told by local homeless men, polished and refined them and would proceed to tell them to crowds as a new kind of stand-up comedy routine through a boisterous and fully confident fictional personality entitled Dolemite.

Dreamgirls Is Frequently Entertaining But Not Quite A Dream Come True

Certain movies have these massively iconic sequences that have, in many cases, managed to become even more famous than the movies they originally came from. Notice how the scene of Adolf Hitler breaking down from the Oscar-nominated 2004 German drama Downfall has garnered far more notoriety than the actual movie due to that scene being appropriated for comedic reasons so that the subtitles in that particular scene have Hitler reacting to more mundane modern-day circumstances. Such a phenomenon also includes the 2006 musical Dreamgirls, which has a certain showstopper musical number so powerful it eclipses the rest of the movie it appears in.

Shrek Review (Classic Write-Up)

A week ago today, Shrek turned fifteen years old. One of the biggest animated movies of all-time that shifted the entire zeitgeist of animated filmmaking officially turned fifteen..and no one seemed to care. Buzzfeed didn't write up a thousand articles about "21 Gifs That Make Shrek Totes Relatable", there was no release of the feature on Blu-Ray to commemorate the occasion. Hell, even the official Facebook page for the film made absolutely no mention of the anniversary. Granted, turning 15 isn't typically as big of a deal in the world of marketing as a movie celebrating its tenth or twenty-fifth anniversary of existence, but still, the absolute radio silence on the occasion struck me as shocking.