BEFORE: August is here, and I'm hoping that a new job comes along with the new month. Before that, however, comes the format breakdown of the movies I watched in July:
5 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Shattered Glass, The Virgin Suicides, The Onion Movie, Zeroville, Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation
5 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Miss Firecracker, Everything Is Copy, Downhill, I Used to Go Here, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
5 watched on Netflix: Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, Hillbilly Elegy, The Woman in the Window, The Runaways, I Am Divine,
1 watched on iTunes: The Operative
2 watched on Hulu: Bad Reputation, Zappa
2 watched on Hulu: Bad Reputation, Zappa
1 watched on HBO MAX: Cinema Verite
19 TOTAL
19 TOTAL
Today's linking's easy, Dolly Parton carries over from "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart", where she was seen singing "Islands in the Stream", written by the Brothers Gibb.
THE PLOT: The life, career and music of Dolly Parton are reflected in interviews with friends and companions and the artist herself, interlaced with clips of Parton's performances.
AFTER: I'm only 6 or 7 films in to the Big Summer Music chain, and now I'm sort of getting hit with the sameness of it all - every documentary about music legends is starting to feel very similar. It's all get famous, get rich, get stoned (or drunk), then get dead - in some cases, at least. Joan Jett's still with us, as is Barry Gibb, and a perhaps surprising number of musicians who played at Woodstock in 1969. But then, how boring is a Dolly Parton doc going to be when she's only completed half of the cycle, to my knowledge she never had a drinking problem or drug habit.
She also gets pitched here as a "very smart" person, but I hear that accent, and then suddenly I've got a disconnect. How many smart people, honestly, have a Southern drawl, do you know what I mean? Maybe that's my Yankee upbringing, some Civil War leftover that's ingrained into my upbringing that allows me to think I'm smarter than all them good ole boys down South. But then, I know that Dolly has donated millions over the years to philanthropic medical causes, like hospitals and cancer centers and AIDS-related charities, literacy causes and she helped fund the COVID-19 research that helped create the vaccines that are working now, or at least they would be if everyone would simply get their shots. So Dolly basically gets a pass from me - except you can't pitch yourself both as "a very smart person" and also "a simple country girl", I'm just saying, those two things just don't go together.
So I'm left with what is essentially a Dolly Parton concert here, arranged mostly chronologically, through her years on Porter Wagoner's show on the magic pitcher box, then a few years making movies, and of course, touring, touring, touring. But just like a concert, you can't just play the hits straight away, you've got to save them for the encore, right? Like the Rolling Stones can't open with "Satisfaction", they've got to make you think they maybe aren't going to play that one (as if...) so they save that one, plus "Start Me Up", and maybe "Sympathy for the Devil", for the very end, and they make you get up and cheer until you're hoarse, you've got to DEMAND those songs. God, the Stones are such whores - but then, so is every band. Their fragile egos just couldn't take it if there were a few people in the audience who said, "OK, I heard the big hits, the last songs are probably going to be stinkers, so let's head out and maybe we can get to the car and get on the expressway before we get stuck in a traffic jam." Seriously, I think the Stones have enough money now, they're not losing ANYTHING if anyone leaves early after paying full price, so what's the big deal?
The three Dolly Parton songs that everybody wants to hear are (apparently) "Jolene", "9 to 5" and "I Will Always Love You" - so they save her performance of that last one for the very end of the documentary (but they tease you with Whitney's version about halfway through...) and they dole the other ones out. "Jolene", of course, came around a couple years after Dolly broke out as a headliner act, and then there's a BIG section of this film devoted to making the movie "9 to 5", probably because Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are both still alive and available, with a TV show of their own to promote. Oh, sure, there's the sexual harassment angle, because that film was ahead of its time, and the topic got bigger as time passed - this was the first film where three women formed their own #MeToo movement, and ganged up against their boss.
But come on, nothing about "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas", what about the plight of the sex workers in the Lone Star State? Anybody? No anecdotes about working with Burt Reynolds? He was a big star back then, and that was a BIG, popular movie? Could it be that the movie was just a big exploitative, with Dolly rocking a corset for the majority of the film? Something to be embarrassed about? She wore almost the same exact outfit in a social media post that she wore on the cover of Playboy back in the day, so what's the big deal? Also, no footage from "Rhinestone", no stories about working with Sylvester Stallone? OK, THAT she's embarrassed about, at least we know where the line is being drawn, I guess.
Also mention of the album she made with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris? I remember that was HUGE... I guess maybe that'll be in tomorrow's documentary, though. Instead we get footage of the video for "A Hard Candy Christmas", and I guess any footage of her with Kenny Rogers would similarly have interfered with her image as a solo act, as a strong independent woman who didn't need to do a duet to have a hit. Still, another glaring omission that makes this all feel a bit by-the-numbers.
Also starring Mac Davis (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Whitney"), Lily Tomlin (last seen in "I Am Divine"), David Dotson, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Lloyd Green, Lydia Hamessley, Dave Haywood, Charles Kelley, Charlie McCoy, Kylie Minogue (last seen in "San Andreas"), Wayne Moss, Danny Nozell, Linda Perry, Hillary Scott, Mike Severs, Chris Stapleton, Kent Wells
with archive footage of Dabney Coleman (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Kevin Costner (last seen in "Whitney"), Whitney Houston (ditto), Miley Cyrus (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Elvis Presley (ditto) Carl Dean, Sandy Gallin, Porter Wagoner, Barbara Walters (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Jack White (last seen in "Shine a Light").
RATING: 5 out of 10 giant wigs
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