Word: pryor
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...course, Richard Pryor does have the right to cull interesting events from real life, mix in some exaggeration and good old-fashioned melodrama and call it art. And, of course, it would be much more vainglorious and self-glorifying for anything called, say, Down and Out With Richard Pryor, to be more than a made-for-TV movie...
...that the audience can only piece together from the newspaper clips of a few years back. The first scene jumps from Dancer picking up his pipe and freebase right to Dancer looking like a mongrel in the hospital's intensive care unit. Unless we knew exactly what happened to Pryor, we'd have no way of knowing what has happened to Dancer. Freebasing was reputed to be a dangerously potent high prior to Pryor, but it was not a pyromaniac's delight until Pryor went running through Hollywood Hills in full flame...
...Pryor justice, once we get past the self-indulgence (no easy task) and the early scenes of a too-cherubic and too-naive young Jo Jo, the movie does become believable...
When we see Dancer dallying with his second wife Dawn (Barbara Williams), a radical and intellectual white beauty, we know the couple is a bi-racial conjugal stereotype, but it's clearly a stereotype with some factual basis. And the blow by blow (and blow and blow) of Pryor being lapped into the vortex of the Hollywood scene is painfully compelling. The scenes are nothing if not the typical cinematic version of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll in the fast lane, but once again the stereotype earns credence from its factual basis...
...watch Pryor and his conscience playing out the conflicts that led him from freebasing to selfimmolation (all to the thump of Herbie Hancock's throbbing drum), the audience can't helped being shaken by the montage of emotion. Anyone with any heart will fall for this scene, regardless of how many times it's been done before because this time we know it really happened. If only Richard Pryor didn't have to hide behind Jo Jo Dancer...