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The Sapphires

Crit

Time for another installment of Dr. Blab's Advice to the Marginally Talented Filmmaker: look, you give me a few appealing characters, some of whom sing good renditions of Motown classics, and I'm gonna cut you a lot of slack. Even if your plot is nothing but cliché and predictability--even if you use Vietnam as a place to pretend to kill off a love interest when it's perfectly obvious that you will do no such thing--I'm gonna click 3 stars ("Liked It") in Netflix. But the moment you show us Bobby Kennedy telling a crowd that he has very sad news to report . . . NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is not a prop for your little jerry-built narrative. It's not a piece of stagecraft you slot in to allow the singers to hear an inspiring speech about how African-American soldiers need to be given something to hold onto or they might start wondering what they're doing in Southeast Asia. ("Should we go on?" one of them asks. Gee, I wonder whether they will?)

Fortunately, a few minutes later everyone's smiling again, and we don't even remember that Dr. King was shot. I'm sure I've seen in some point in the 5+ decades of going to movies a more cynical exploitation of one of the epochal tragic moments of my life and my country's, but I'll have to think about it for a few days and get back to you on when. Shameless. Unforgivable.

Trailers

• Unfinished Song--Ugh. Looks grotesquely sentimental, and anyway, we've seen a good nonfiction version of the old-folks-singing-young-songs bit, though I don't remember the title.
• Kon-Tiki--Spoiler alert: they make it across the Pacific!