Posts Tagged ‘Rudy Ray Moore’

Dolemite

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-American director whose first film, 1925’s THE SALVATION HUNTERS, is considered by some to be the first American independent film. He worked with Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes, he discovered and bedded Marlene Dietrich, Robert Mitchum threatened to throw him off a pier, he directed 25 movies including THE LAST COMMAND, THE BLUE ANGEL and THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, and his influential films and stubborn dedication to directorial vision made him a hero to proponents of the auteur theory. Also he had a son named Nicholas Josef von Sternberg who was the cinematographer for DOLEMITE.

While DOLEMITE is arguably not as accomplished a picture as THE SCARLET EMPRESS, it does follow in von Sternberg’s spirit of independence, and that’s part of what appeals to me so much about the works of my man, the legendary Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last month.

I don’t know about other places but in these past 10 or 15 years young white people in Seattle have picked up the adjective “ghetto” to mean low rent or shoddy. It kind of bugs me because I don’t know how the “ghetto Safeway” that doesn’t have the best selection of organic foods is comparable to the actual experience of living in poverty and segregation. But I think “ghetto” is a pretty good adjective for the life works of Rudy Ray Moore, because he seemed to maintain the same ethic from beginning to end, the ethic of a club singer who learned a poem from a homeless man, reworked it into a standup act, started pressing his own comedy records and selling them out of the trunk of his car, made a cottage industry of underground XXX comedy records like “Eat Out More Often” and used those profits to make a series of scrappy low budget movies shot in his house, at a night club where he performed and in the parking lot of Ralph’s. (more…)

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Long Live Dolemite! Vern on Rudy Ray Moore

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

Friday night I saw Rudy Ray Moore perform at The Funhouse in Seattle. If you’re not familiar with Rudy, he’s a legendary comedian, maker of x-rated comedy records, who paved the way for his contemporaries like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx to do their thing by carving words like pussy and motherfucker about ten thousand times into vinyl. But it was his string of self-financed, low budget blaxploitation comedies like Dolemite, The Human Tornado and (my favorite) Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law that put him on the map for most of us. Those movies are built around his persona, the arrogant, unbelievably shit-talking chauvinistic badass with a knack for hilarious insults and rhymes. Like his movies, his act is mostly built around the traditions of the dozens and toasting. He tells stories in rhyme and picks out people in the crowd to talk shit about (which most people take as a great honor).

I never saw Rudy Ray in his hey day, but I did see him here a few years back. That was a polished, old fashioned show with a band of local musicians who he probaly hadn’t met, but he handed them sheet music and they knew what to do. He did all his classics (Dolemite For President, Signifyin’ Monkey, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw, etc.) to the music and even sang a few songs. At first the pure filthiness and sexism of the whole thing was almost overwhelming, it kind of felt like he had gone around slapping people at random, everyone was in shock. I remember there was a young woman playing in the band who didn’t look too happy at all this talk about pussies and dicks. And there’s a joke he does about “a deaf and dumb bitch” that is about the worst thing anybody ever said. But then slowly it seemed like that woman in the band started to get to a point where it was so ridiculous she started to laugh and by then most of the audience couldn’t stop laughing.

This show was pretty different. The Funhouse is a weird place for Dolemite to show up. It’s right across the street from tourist central at the Space Needle, but they say it’s “Seattle’s oldest surviving punk club.” It looks like a shithole from the outside, with a big, ugly evil-clown head on the front. But inside it looks like a ’50s diner, complete with stools and checkered tiles. The stage is maybe a foot tall, probaly less, with a small area to crowd around and do whatever you do as a card carrying member of a punk club. (more…)

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Shaolin Dolemite

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Every so often a picture comes along that is so good as a concept, who the fuck cares if it works as a picture. This is a type of picture that may not be that great to watch, or may even get boring as hell by the end, but you are so happy it exists that you want to own it, memorize it, hang it up on your wall, make it into a t-shirt. You want to tell everybody it’s your favorite movie even though you’d be lying your ass off, because you fell asleep at the end and didn’t even feel compelled to rewind and see what you missed. But still, you loved it.

That picture is, of course, Shaolin Dolemite.

This piece is from 1999 but yes it’s the same Dolemite from the ’70s, Rudy Ray Moore the famous toast artist and standup comedian who created the classic films Dolemite and The Human Tornado as well as Petey Wheatstraw the Devil’s Son in Law and Avenging Disco Godfather. If you’re not familiar with Dolemite this is one of the icons of the blaxploitation era. He is more underground than Shaft and Superfly because his pictures were lower budget and sloppier and he directed some of them himself. But he had a strong type of appeal because he drove around in limos with a gang of beautiful women on each arm, but he was kind of this little chubby guy. He would kick everybody’s ass using this real slow, awkward fat guy karate. I mean worse than Steven Seagal.

What Dolemite had going for him was the same thing that the better rapping artists have today, which is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you can do a good job of SAYING that you’re cool, then that means you ARE cool. And Dolemite was cool. He could rhyme up a storm about funny stories or how he’s gonna kick your ass and that was what made him a badass, the verbal techniques as opposed to any traditional badass qualities such as asskicking, etc. Because when he did kick somebody’s ass it looked so funny it would have been (more) laughable if the guy couldn’t rhyme so good. (more…)

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Rudy Ray Moore: Rude

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I’m sure most of you motherfuckers know that Rudy Ray Moore is one of the pioneers of independent Cinema, one of the greatest orators of our times and easily the rawest presidential candidate of the last two decades. What you might not know is that in addition to his fine collection of pictures (Dolemite, Petey Wheatstraw, Avenging Disco Godfather, etc.) Mr. Moore has a live concert film in the style of the Eddie Murphy standup pictures he did back when he was trying to copy Richard Pryor instead of dress up in a bunch of funny disguises and fart.

This was released on the “video” cassette format in 1988, the same year that Die Hard hit the theaters. But it looks to ol’ Vern like it was filmed in the early ’80s, not sure about that bud. At any rate he mentions Reagan so it was probaly a little before ‘88 in my opinion.

Anyway, Rudy tells a lot of jokes about dick and pussy and he calls out people (obvious plants) in the audience and says how ugly they are. He is best when he’s rhyming, “rapping” as he calls it about the legend of Dolemite, or Shine (the black folk hero who supposedly escaped the Titanic ’cause “he was a swimmin sonofabitch”). When he rhymes, he almost goes into a trance, his neck starts poppin back and forth and he snaps and gyrates and slides across the floor like James Brown, keepin the rhythm. (more…)

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Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-In-Law

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I always wanted to see this one but never got around to it back in the day, and now it is available on DVD for the first time since its original release, as well as the first time ever. And it was worth the wait, because this is the best picture I have seen Mr. Rudy Ray Moore involved in.

Rudy plays Petey Wheatstraw, a famous comedian and rhyming Badass much like Dolemite without the criminal record. In the introduction he is a godlike narrator in some netherworld rhyming about all the great things he can do because he’s the devil’s son in law. Then it shows him being born on a stormy night. First thing he does is bite the doctor. He comes out looking about 13 years old and beats the doctor’s ass for slapping him.

But then for some reason he is just an ordinary comedian and there is an explanation for how he becomes the devil’s son in law. What happens you see is Petey is putting on a show at the same time that two flamboyant fat businessmen Leroy and Skillet (played by Leroy and Skillet) are putting on their review. Leroy and Skillet are very competitive so they send their thugs after Petey’s friends who are putting up signs to advertise the show. There is a struggle and a little boy, no more than 13 years old, gets shot and killed.

I thought damn, they would NEVER do that kind of shit in a movie these days. Right at the beginning a little kid gets graphically shot and killed. It’s a real downer. Then there is a very sad funeral scene and all the sudden, a car pulls up and the thugs get out and machine gun every last motherfucker at the funeral! Ladies and gentleman we are talking Cinema with balls. (more…)

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