Quick thoughts under the jump:
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At the start of Black Knight my partner predicted that there would be a scene where the King or a Duke or whatever would declare that he and Martin Lawrence were "Royal Homies!" It didn't quite get there, but at one point Martin does do an impression of Rodney King being beaten before quoting "Can't we all just get along?" in order to rally the forces of the deposed Queen to retake the kingdom from the King and his evil advisor. The movie's conceit is that Martin Lawrence is a selfish dude working for a small mom & pop castle themed amusement park being put out of business by another sellout corporate owned castle themed amusement park that won't even provide jobs to the community. He falls into the moat while cleaning it and awakens in medieval England, where he uses his street smarts to gain favor with the king and lead a rebellion against him. It is so stupid, it is one of the dumbest fucking things, a relic of the impassioned stupidity that is a hallmark of turn of the century film comedy. Another scene features the royal court singing "Dance To The Music," an almost perfect parallel to the Shrek Karaoke Dance Party feature at the end of the Shrek VHS tape, also released in 2001. The movie is fucking horrible. Also we are watching this awful John Adams miniseries starring Paul Giamatti and directed by Tom Hooper. I bring this up cause in that show Tom Wilkenson plays Benjamin Franklin, and he shows up here as this heroic drunk who helps Martin, and the whole time he's around I remember he plays fucking Ben Franklin too and it pisses me off. The whole thing is all a dream because this is a hack movie, but at the very very end he falls back into the moat and wakes up in Roman times facing off against lions in the Colosseum. This did make me laugh very hard so congratulations, you got one.
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I saw Dolemite Is My Name when it came out and remember liking it a lot, but upon rewatch I feel like I undersold it a little. Written by the team behind Ed Wood, one of my favorite movies ever, the movie stars Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, a standup comic who breaks out by performing as the character Dolemite, a hard fighting hard fucking pimp based on the kind of dirty jokes told on the streetcorners. The movie is extremely funny and is part of a mini film genre I am guaranteed to love: people doing everything they can to make art that just isn't very good. The movie is almost a statement of intent by Eddie Murphy, a full throated defense of the kind of broad crude comedy that is his bread and butter, and tying it to a scene/comedy tradition that he drew from to become the biggest movie star in the world. It is also just an extremely great biopic, with every actor pulling their own weight and, like all great showbiz movies, cameos from everyone in Murphy's rolodex. (The best is probably Snoop Dogg, showing off his secretly stellar acting chops, as the house DJ of a record store.) Extremely touching and funny, one of the better movies to come out of the Netflix awards bait factory. If you haven't seen it I would highly reccommend!
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After these two movies my partner suggested Life, a movie I had never heard of before. The movie is produced by longtime Ron Howard collaborator Brian Glazer, which explains a lot. Told in flashback over two young prisoners burying the corpses of the main characters, the movie is a buddy dramedy about a bootlegger (Eddie Murphy) and a bank teller (Martin Lawrence) who are imprisoned down south in the 1930s for a crime they didn't commit. The film then transforms into a strange riff on The Shawshank Redemption, showing their tense relationship in the prison, their attempts at escaping, and the effects of the unstoppable march of time on them. It tonally is never really able to square itself. At one point there is a montage featuring black and white footage of the prison over the years as several members pass away one by one, and also they find time to show Eddie Murphy sneaking onto a nearby plane before comically crashing it into a field, and then after that being thrown into a torturous solitary confinement. It is the kind of movie that could only be made in the 90s, when the inevitable march of progress was all but confirmed, and you could show evil racist Southern sheriffs be taken down by misguided Southern wardens with a secret heart of gold. It's not even a bad movie, as far as such things go. But it is aggressively awkward in how it tries to handle itself, and it's hard to take it as a comedy when everything surrounding the plot is just so sad. At the beginning of the film I was wondering why Rick Baker was given such prominence in the opening credits, then I saw the old age makeup that was applied to both actors at the end and understood. Both Murphy and Lawrence have starred in films where they apply aggressive prosthetic makeup (Martin Lawrence in the Big Momma's House franchise, and Murphy in too many to count), so it is interesting to see this try to be applied to something beyond silly film comedy, to decidedly mixed results.
- Where the fuck is the sex scene in Dolemite that we saw them film in My Name Is Dolemite?! If you have seen the biopic one of the most memorable parts features Murphy as Rudy being nervous about filming a sex scene, and instead devising a way to make it fit in more with his comedy roots. So he stages a wild scene with the bed shaking and paintings being pulled up and down with wires ending with the entire roof collapsing in due to the power of his lovemaking. Wesley Snipes as D'Urville Martin (fucking perfect casting, we love you Wesley Snipes and your tax evading self) quips "Well, I don't know if it was tender and I don't know if it was sexy, but it was funny as fuck." So where the fuck is that in the actual movie?? Well it turns out it's not, it's from the sequel, The Human Tornado. Anyway, Dolemite is fucking Dolemite, it's a classic! If you are a cult movie enthusiast it is a must watch, and if you haven't seen then rectify immediately. It will also make Black Dynamite even funnier, which I thought was impossible.