Word: jo
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...Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling...
...FIRST scene of Jo Jo Dancer, Richard Pryor, who is comedian Jo Jo Dancer, whom we know is in fact Richard Pryor, looks mortified. He stares in sheer horror at his multiple reflections in a three-way mirror. Perhaps, I thought, having just seen the credits roll across the screen, this is the megalomaniac horror of a man who produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in this self-indulgent movie...
...painful to watch. The drug-addicted superstar cliche that we've seen three times in A Star Is Born, once in Lady Sings The Blues, once in Pink Floyd's The Wall, and who knows-how-many-times elsewhere is as touching and awful in Jo Jo Dancer's opening scene as it is anywhere else...
This could be, at first glance, a shocking, depressing and ultimately uplifting film. And to some degree it is. But Pryor proceeds to lose us the minute Jo Jo arrives at the hospital. Jo Jo's soul, in the form of a second and unclad Richard Pryor, emerges from his body and embarks on a journey through his past...
...play the victim of circumstances and earn more than a modicum of our sympathy without going all the way with it. He uses the movie to avenge all the people that did him wrong along life's proverbial dusty road, but he hides behind the alter-ego of Jo Jo Dancer...