Nobody is likely to reinvent the biographical pop music documentary, so the difference between good films in the genre generally just boils down to taste.
You love Bill Withers, or Streisand or Hendrix, Dylan or Keith Richards or Linda Ronstadt, that increases your engagement with the film.
Maybe not Neil Young, or especially David Crosby. But as has been proven, you can make a pretty good film about how nobody loves David Crosby.
So for a fan, “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice” is a lot more than a quick trip through her career and her life, even if it offers few deep insights into her psyche and to others might seem just an exercise in Boomer musical nostalgia.
For the Beastie Boys/Beyoncé/Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift generations, she probably barely moves the needle.
But man, there was no bigger star of her day, no greater interpreter of pop, folk, country and even Mariachi standards spanning many generations, no bigger voice than Linda Ronstadt.
“Linda could literally sing anything,” her “Trio” colleague and admirer Dolly Parton says. And yes, she could.
She did it with little of what today passes for “showmanship” — a little girl-next-door sexiness, the occasional Cub Scout uniform stage costume. Ronstadt became a superstar, a pioneering Woman of Rock, with just that voice — big and soft, a multi-octave range, glorious phrasing, a “song stylist” so “sharp” as onetime rock critic turned filmmaker Cameron Crowe puts it, that it didn’t matter who actually composed the songs, Ronstadt took “ownership” of them.
And at the peak of her fame, she backed away from Arena Rock tours and dabbled in operetta, Mexican folk ballads and classics from the Big Band Era “Great American Songbook.”
Kevin Kline, her co-star in “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway and in the movie, recalls hearing her at the first rehearsal, this “bel canto soprano…celestial, yet Earthy…She made me cry.”
He wasn’t alone.
“The Sound of My Voice,” made for CNN Films and reaching theaters through Greenwich Entertainment, tracks Ronstadt’s life in the standard ways. The now 73 year-old retired singer goes back generations to her Mexican grandfather and father, singers both — to her maternal inventor-grandfather, and the maternal grandmother who had the illness that ended Ronstadt’s singing career — Parkinson’s Disease.
That’s the bittersweet arc of the story — a musical childhood, a circuitous path to fame, glory topping glory, then an abrupt end to life on the stage.
Rondstadt was a wondrously versatile folk rock/country rock star who grew up on operetta and “Canciones de Mi Padre,” left Tuscon for LA so that she could form a band, had a hit and promptly broke up the band to become a solo superstar, always marching to a “Different Drum.”
Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Celluloid Closet”) didn’t find much controversy in her story, just a woman who sang for years before getting a foot in the door and who achieved fame as an adult, poised, articulate and quite smart woman. How else could she have fronted an all-male band, held her own with pushy record companies and producers?
Yeah, she backed into many of her hits (she hated the arrangements of “Different Drum” and “You’re No Good,” and others). That she owns those miscalculations just adds to her lifelong disarming charm.
Look at these old TV interviews, fencing with interviewers, politically astute (especially while dating California Governor and presidential aspirant Jerry Brown), getting her way in a sexist, male-dominated business.
And then there’s the music, the songs that made her “The Queen,” Bonnie Raitt marvels, “the Beyoncé of her day.” Lilting love songs such as “A Long, Long Time,” growling covers of “When Will I Be Loved?” and the like — duets, trios, Mariachi, all leading to record-setting sales and Grammy after Grammy after Grammy.
She wasn’t the greatest torch singer ever, but she didn’t embarrass herself by tackling ballads and torch songs made famous by Sinatra and others on a couple of “Great American Songbook” CDs, released just as digital recording arrived to preserve that wondrous tone and range for all time.
I used to take her “What’s New?” compact disc around to electronics stores, choosing audio gear and speakers for myself and friends just by how well the brand reproduced Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.
Her contemporaries, a critic or two, and many many collaborators show up in “The Sound of My Voice,” with Don Henley recalling how The Eagles basically formed out of her road band in the early ’70s, record label chiefs such as David Geffen suggesting the shy Ronstadt “lacked confidence” (as if), collaborator/songwriter and former lover J.D. Souther delivering anecdotes about her eclectic musical tastes and her approachable, exotic allure.
We forget that she used to sing barefoot on stage, a hippy-folkie who got rich and famous a decade after the ’60s were buried. We can’t fathom an era where female singers in the field were rare enough that they didn’t compete and back-stab, but bonded and became lifelong friends.
But we remember the songs, the albums full of material she heard, uncovered and made her own — tunes by the McGarrigle Sisters, Karla Bonoff, Warren Zevon and even Roy Orbison, The Everlys, Buddy Holly, The Eagles (“Desperado”) and The Rolling Stones.
Come to “The Sound of My Voice” for the nostalgia, if you must. But come away impressed by her decades of expert dissection of the singer’s craft in TV interviews, her unpretentious sophistication, and her defiant pursuit of work that that displayed artistry and artistic and personal integrity.
In the Golden Age of the singer-songwriter, she never really got her due. Industry acclaim, sure. “Cool” and “hip?” Not so much.
She earns even that cachet here, and so much more.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language and drug material
Cast: Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, David Geffen, Dolly Parton, Don Henley, Cameron Crowe
“Netflixable” is a movie fan’s euphemism for “time killer” or, in literary terms, “a beach book.”
It’s what we used to say when we’d see a movie with iffy prospects and mixed reviews.
“I’ll wait for it on cable…Redbox,” etc.
It’s the difference between a film that’s worth our trouble, going out and devoting the time and cash to seeing, and one that’s perfectly watchable in just “there,” “there” being “on Netflix,” terms.
That’s “Otherhood,” sort of a mash-up of “First Wives Club” and “Mom’s Night Out,” a comedy of too-easy one-liners, mother-to-mother bonding and mother and child reunions.
Drop a few F-bombs, show off a little cleavage and you’ve got “edge.”
Oscar winner Patricia Arquette,Angela Bassett and Felicity Huffman are three mothers who met in a playground in Poughkeepsie, decades before. They’ve stayed close, through a divorce, widowhood and into their AARP years.
But their boys? They’re at the can’t-even-bother-to-send flowers on Mother’s Day.
“I texted you!”
“I BIRTHED you!”
That omission sends widowed Carol (Bassett), piano teacher Gillian (Arquette) and affluently-remarried Helen (Huffman), after a few drinks, on a dash into New York, “pops in” on their adult sons being the perfect way to mend fences, right?
Carol’s son Matt (Sinqua Walls of TV’s “Power” and “The Breaks”) is doing OK, designing what he’s told Mom is a “sports magazine” but which is actually a “lad mag” — T & A tarting up whatever content they pack into it.
It’s called “All Balls.” Clever.
Mom catches him with some borderline underage model.
Helen’s son Paul (Jake Lacy of “Obvious Child”) never came out to her.
“Did you ever ask?” his lover (Frank de Julio) snaps back.
Gillian, who converted to Judaism when she married, has become a smothering Jewish mother stereotype, not seeing her failed-novelist son Daniel (Jake Hoffman) unhappiness, alcoholism and fresh break-up from Erin (Heidi Gardner) as signs of trouble.
“Stop dating shiksas!”
The sons all have screenplay shorthand stereotyping about them — Jewish writer, black jock, gay white window dresser. Thank heavens the movie isn’t really about them.
“Do you need directions home? I can show you how to Waze!”
It’s about the ladies. And after a GROANER of a start — “The key to a clean house? A DEAD husband!” — “Otherhood” settles into their situations, the limbo of motherhood once you hit your ’50s.
Ignored by their sons, subjected to a form of “inhumane emotional waterboarding,” by offspring who have “broken up with us,” they bond over bourbon, take action — have confrontations, confessions, meltdowns and makeovers.
Bassett plays a cute drunk scene in the club. Huffman has a nice hissy fit. And Arquette gets a little Jewish mama pushback that, being a stereotypical Jewish mama, flies right over her head.
“The problem is not that I meddled. It’s that I should have meddled SOONER!”
The stars, and the occasional winning one-liner, keep us interested, or as is the case with a film that’s “Netflixable,” at least keeps the TV on.
So none of this running yourselves down, MILFs.
“We’re middle-aged women in New York. We’re practically invisible!”
I chuckled here and there, got a kick out of Carol’s encounter with a transgender bouncer (showing baby pictures of “my son” in the tub gets you Instagrammed). And there are some touching moments in the finale.
The moral to the story? Don’t forget Mom on Mother’s Day or her birthday.
Would I go out to see “Otherhood?” No. Nor should you. And we don’t have to.
It’s not all that, but it’s perfectly “Netflixable.”
MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual references and brief nudity
Michael Waltrip is an affable NASCAR retiree and Fox Sports color commentator, much like his older brother, NASCAR legend Darrell Waltrip.
And like Darrell, Michael has a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve. That, and Michael’s connection to one of the star-crossed moments in NASCAR history, makes him a somewhat compelling subject for a documentary, “Blink of an Eye.”
That’s how long Waltrip had to celebrate his unlikely victory in the 2001 Daytona 500, breaking an epic 462 starts-zero wins streak that, let’s face it, if not for his magical surname, might have ended his career before he ever got his chance.
The fact that as he crossed the finish line at that 2001 race, just ahead of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. that Jr.s dad — Waltrip’s idol and the team owner who finally gave him the chance to drive a winner — was having the wreck that killed him, make Waltrip’s breakthrough victory the most bittersweet moment in NASCAR history.
Dale Earnhardt, #3, died on the track on Feb. 18, running interference, blocking other drivers who might have caught Waltrip, “The Intimidator” being intimidating one last time.
“Blink of an Eye,” directed by a veteran of documentaries about surfing (“The Lost Wave”) and motorsports (“Unchained: The Untold Story of Freestyle Motocross”), focuses on Waltrip, his home movies, his reminiscences, those of his curmudgeonly but proud older brother, and of other motorsports figures (Richard Petty, Richard Childress, etc.) who watched Waltrip’s career and remember that fateful way he finally landed his first win.
Waltrip has a self-effacing candor that engages, remembering his brother dismissing his racing dreams, “lightning rarely strikes twice” — until the kid started winning, right from his first outing in a go-cart — and almost admitting that his name opened a lot of doors for him.
“I showed up as Darrell’s little brother!”
Mentored by Richard Petty, jumped into a NASCAR Winston Cup career where he became a hard-luck driver and something of a self-described punch line — Mr. Third Place — Waltrip’s last great bit of good fortune was befriending the rough and tumble “blue collar” champion Earnhardt, the driver who took over the sport when “The King” (Petty) retired.
“Blink” touches on Earnhardt’s life, and one of the film’s shortcomings is that it doesn’t give us more of that. But that’s another film, you say to yourself. This one is about one day, one season, and three men — one who didn’t survive the year’s opening race. That season provided another memorable moment which longtime NASCAR fans can get teary-eyed about, one that also involved Waltrip and the younger Earnhardt and Daytona.
Oddly, Waltrip is the one who gets choked-up talking about Dale Sr. Dale Jr. has more control of his emotions, which might separate the two as drivers. That makes one wonder if Jr.’s experience of his father was radically different, or if Dad brought on Waltrip to push the kid.
That points to the biggest shortcoming of “Blink of an Eye.” It’s a seriously unchallenging documentary, one that has no contrary voices suggesting why Waltrip never won before Earnhardt took him on (More hard luck? Nobody says so, nobody asks.) and as it lapses into hagiography, the film borders on “NASCAR Sanctioned” and “Official Myth-Burnishing.”
Because the biggest challenge missing from the film is one involving that day, m the series and “the company” itself.
The film sugar-coats, glosses and does not dwell on Earnhardt’s grisly death, and none of its narrow range of interview subjects sits far enough removed from the subject to address any of this.
Journalists? One who cozied up to Earnhardt Sr. and became an employee is the only one here.
This is another subject one can lump into the “That’s another film” category, and give filmmaker Paul Taublieb a pass on that, as well.
Then he sticks a grating closing credit on how “NASCAR redoubled its safety efforts” after Earnhardt’s death, and thus, no driver has died on the track since.
The Intimidator, as loyal a company man/driver as he was, would have almost certainly used a phrase about bovine excrement over that.
NASCAR’s reaction to those stories and Earnhardt’s death was to strong-arm Florida’s legislature to change laws regarding open public records, so that nobody would know exactly how Earnhardt died, and the NASCAR/France Family empire could escape culpability (HANS was widely used in other racing circuits).
Laws regarding death certificates and the like were bent to shape NASCAR’s ass-covering, using Earnhardt’s widow as their public face for this assault on watchdog journalism and safeguarding the public.
That example just highlights how myopic, “officially sanctioned” and white-washed “Blink of an Eye” is.
Sure, the fans get the myth that they want to believe. That doesn’t mean it’s true, or that it’s good for them, for corporate accountability and for the role of a press in a free society.
This unchallenging “Hollywood” version of that tale is too incomplete to be definitive.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violent death in a car race, the 2001 Daytona 500.
Cast: Michael Waltrip, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Darrell Waltrip
Credits: Written and directed by Paul Taublieb. A 1091 Media release.
He’s older now, pushing 50. And if Mr. “Black don’t Crack, we smoke it” hasn’t matured — not a lick — so be it.
Marlon Wayans remains a screen comic in search of a sketch comedy show that can contain his special gifts. Those would be mimicry and the ability to “sell” himself as a woman, a tiny man and even — when the movie called for it — one of two “White Chicks.”
“Sextuplets” is a star vehicle which has him playing a husband awaiting, with his wife, on the birth of their first child. As he is adopted and has no “family history” in terms of genetics and health prospects, his cranky judge of a father-in-law (Glynn Turman) tracks down his birth records for him.
Turns out Alan was one of SIX kids his birth mother had. He has just enough time to tell wife Marie (Bresha Webb), allowing just enough time for us to get our minds in that “Klumps” frame-of-mind, before Alan is meeting the five siblings he never knew he had.
“Maybe one of them changed his name to Idris Elba! We do have strangely similar features. ”
“Sextuplets” is about Alan connecting with the doltish lump Russell, whom his mother kept, and convict and sometime pole dancer Dawn, terminally ill hustler Little Pete, crooked identity thief Ethan, and so on.
Wayans had a hand in the script, which features limp “Jeffersons,” “What’s Happening” jokes, and a “Different Strokes” sing-along.
“It’s like a Tyler Perry movie in here!”
We learn that the siblings share a loathing of avocados –“Tastes like soft-boiled silly putty” and that “Black people don’t wear flip flops.”
Alan’s white pal (Michael Ian Black) is here to use outdated African American slang — “On fleek,” “The Bomb,” “off the chain.”
“We don’t say that!” Anymore.
Gold-toothed thug Ethan is all about “white people credit” and “You got REPUBLICAN money,” because he’s all about the cash.
The film is, sadly, rarely funny. Wayans and his screenwriters roll out his least-interesting, most Eddie Murphy as a “Klump” character first, and saddle the picture with him. That horse is lame.
Dawn is the stand out, a hilarious impersonation of an easily-affronted African American big screen stereotype. Oversexed, unethical and damned if she’s going to be “judged” by the likes of you, she is too many Leslie Jones characters on “Saturday Night Live” to count. More to the point, she’s funny.
The rest of “Sextuplets?” Played, no matter how much verve brings to his various roles.
Disney owned the summer with a string of billion dollar hits. Nobody else did nearly as well at the year to date is 6% down, summer to summer down 2%.
Putting this much of the Hollywood business under one roof –Walt Disney/Marvel Studios/Pixar/Disney Animation/Lucasfilm — is bad news.
Sony earned a $billion from a “Spider-Man” sequel.
Staggering numbers nothing original came close to. When the public decides it’s over comic book films, “Star Wars” or animated classics remade, if it happens all at once, the Mouse will be in deep.
Not a good weekend for John Travolta in the movies.
It’s been obvious for a few years now that JT has a future… in streaming and cable.
His big screen career has been on a slide, but selling a single ticket per showing in 52 theaters as “The Fanantic” opens is news he needs to see, writing on the wall that he needs to read.
Movie Nation 