![]() ![]() Movie rating: 7.3 / 10 (1992) Directed by: Richard Pryor. As foul-mouthed as ever, Pryor touches on most of the same topics as in his previous live shows. Your thoughts?Īs some may remember, Pryor made the fascinating 1986 autobiography Jo Jo Dancer, This is Your Life Calling, with its unsparing look at the kid born not in a trunk but a brothel. Part live stand-up performance, part documentary, this film is one of comedian Richard Pryors later stand-up performances. Who would you cast? What are the instances when biopics work? For me, too many are like VH-1 "Behind the Music" episodes with the ritual meteoric first act, burnout second act and either death or resurrection in the third act. Still, if Flickgrrl was casting director the role would have gone not to Murphy but to Don Cheadle, who, unlike the solidly-built Wayans, is wiry and wiry like Pryor. and others recount the culture-defining influence of Richard Pryor - one of Americas most brilliant, iconic comic minds. If I remember correctly, Gene Wilder said that Pryor was cast to play Bart, but a couple days into shooting Richard was nowhere to be found. ![]() When the filmmaker and star could not come to terms, Condon cast Marlon Wayans, youngest of the talented brood of ten, and a funnyman who, like Pryor, has what LA Times reporter Geoff Boucher calls both art-house and outhouse cred (i.e., Requiem for a Dream and White Chicks.) Flickgrrl likes Wayans' crack that Bill Cosby was the Martin Luther King of comedy and Pryor the Malcolm X. Condon, who elicited such a terrific - and Oscar nominated- performance from Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls, had hoped to cast the funnyman as the late comic Richard Pryor (a huge influence on Murphy's standup comedy). While Flickgrrl is not generally a huge fan of biopics, she makes an exception in the case of writer/director Bill Condon, who made the resonant Gods and Monsters (about horrormeister James Whale), Kinsey (about the mid-20th century American sexologist) and Dreamgirls (a musical suggeted by the careers of Berry Gordy, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye).
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