Word: pryor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This 1940s Capraesque move has been pulled once too often to work in 1986. And Pryor-as-Dancer-as-Pryor's flashbacks and comatose delusions are too self-justifying and self-serving for anyone to believe them...
...Pryor presents us with a film that says, "Sure, I messed up my life with coke and booze, but it's all because my mother was a prostitute, my father was a brute, we lived in a brothel, and the bullies down the block beat...
...with a little help from the Good Lord and his own wits, Pryor managed to escape from it all, although not entirely unscathed. Pryor excuses his own drunken stupors and coke-induced delirium as vital relief from comic pain. After all, Lenny Bruce and scores (pun intended) of others set the precedent...
...THIS IS fine, except that Pryor wants to 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...
...Richard Pryor is a real and talented person; Jo Jo Dancer is a Hollywood cliche. After this sort of rags-to-riches-and-show-biz-and-bitches movie has been done so many times before, the only thing that could make this a story worth repeating would be a gossipy, autobiographical format. As it is, the audience endures Richard Pryor's revenge without being able to cross the tenuous line between fiction and fact. This half-hearted approach earns only a half-hearted response...