El Cantante
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DVD details
Actor: Jennifer Lopez, Marc AnthonyBrand: LOPEZ,JENNIFER
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 116 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-30
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video
DVD Reviews of El Cantante
DVD Review: The Jennifer Lopez Show
Summary: 1 Stars
Yeah, no kidding this was produced by Lopez herself. The whole thing is like one extended Jennifer Lopez video.
"Look at me, I'm shaking my booty. Look at my hair, look at me smiling, look at me with my period makeup. Look how sexy I am even snorting coke in my wig! I'm even hot in the '70's"
Every scene seemed like an opportunity for Lopez to showcase how gorgous and hot she is...oh, and the director encourages it! In every scene he makes sure to capture Lopez makeup and hair and clothes even if it has no impact whatsoever on the story line. Even if showing her makes no sense. There she is.
This movie was irritating on so many levels. You know that music they play in Mexican Restaurants? Well this whole movie features that kind of white noise. At first it made me hungry for con queso and chips. After that, it just kept reminding me that salsa is really not so great of a musical genre. It all sounds the same and it's hopelessly trite.
And lastly, Marc Anthony. This man is so bad. Such an ugly little rat faced monkey that it was impossible for me to believe he was any sort of 'ladies man' let alone a Latino Rock Star. Are you kidding me? He'd be great as a creepy character actor playing a small role as a janitor or maybe even a pervert of some sort. But to give him 2nd billing in a Jennifer Lopez movie and show him almost as much as Lopez...it made me completely disgusted by this skinny and hideous little man. He's like Gollum sans the cute.
Just skip this J.Lo show and check out a real 'poor me, I'm famous' movie like 'Walk Hard- The Dewey Cox Story'.
DVD Review: If you love Salsa, you must see this
Summary: 5 Stars
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony both do a phenomenal job in this movie. Jennifer Lopez became her character and once again gives a shockingly good performance. She is an actress that hasn't been given the accolades she deserves. Marc Anthony was also amazing. His singing was top notch as was his acting. If you love Salsa music, this is a must see.DVD Review: Love it!
Summary: 5 Stars
Great movie, I love JLO's and Marc combination! they are a great couple! The movie was awesome! Jennifer Lopez performance is one of the best! Thumbs up!DVD Review: A Solid Movie
Summary: 4 Stars
I am not a J-Lopez fan, not much of today's salsa fan and I consider Mark Anthony a great salsa singer but only a tepid actor. Having established that, I love '70s salsa (salsa that you could dance AND listen to) and grew up listening to Hector Lavoe. After watching this movie I realized that I had in fact caught -quite by accident- perhaps the last radio interview Lavoe gave before he died in the early `90s. None of the drama here got was even hinted at during that radio interview and the movie explains why.
J-Lopez is by far the most over-rated celebrity ever but in this movie she gives an unimpeachable performance, she's solid. In the first two minutes she draws you in and the movie manages to show her different sides, inconsistencies and develops her into a complex character. Mark Anthony earns his money too; he's funny and introspective. Director Leon Ichaso is hit-and-miss in recreating the characters' torrid relationship but made a beautifully artsy movie; it was good to FINALLY see a director using the palate of Caribbean colors to full effect in film.
There are a few duds in El Cantante though, and they cost it a few stars.
1) The film runs longer than it needs to; after a while it begins to rehash and overkill the points it's trying to make.
2) "Puchi" (Lopez) is supposed to be a feisty yet uneducated girl from the barrio but her dialogue is often above her experience, as if she had years of therapy and has all kinds of insights to share. I loved her part of the script but it is above the experience the character is supposed to have had.
3) The use of fragmented scenes bespeaks of Lavoe's losing sight of reality through drug use, but it is overdone and sometimes without clear purpose. It also runs -inexplicably- throughout the movie, not just after Lavoe's first use of hard drugs.
4) Lavoe sang a lot about social issues (i.e. "Juanito Alimana") but this gets no mention in the movie.
5) Anthony is a great salsa singer in his own right but his sounds NOTHING like Lavoe's nasally/throaty voice. Either sing like him or dub someone who does.
6) One is led to believe that Lavoe's partner, Willie Colon, faded into obscurity after leaving the combo. In fact, Colon hooked-up with Ruben Blades and became even more famous than Lavoe ever was. He then went solo and recorded his own songs. I confess I didn't even know Lavoe and Colon had collaborated so closely originally, since Blades/Colon were THE legendary duo, recording perhaps the most famous salsa classics together. This movie was made not because Lavoe was the most famous salsa singer but because of the tragedies in his life.
7) Salsa does get overplayed in the movie. Yes, it sets the mood but this is supposed to be a drama, not 1/4 music video. A nitpicky aspect is that while the wardrobe is exquisitely adapted to the '70s and '80s, many of the salsa dance moves are blatantly contemporary. This won't be lost on anyone who dances salsa.
I have traveled a lot and from South Africa to London to Moscow to Japan, salsa is danced in ballrooms everywhere. For crying out loud, there was even a salsa combo in the early '90s of Japanese musicians ("La Orquesta de la Luz") who sang salsa in Spanish! This movie is about how that revolution started and how one of its most prominent singers became a victim of his own success.
A very solid 3 1/2 stars, finally an American-Latin movie with nuance (not many of those) but with a little way to go still. May there be more.
Saludos!
DVD Review: ho hum biopic
Summary: 2 Stars
**1/2
In 1963, Hector Perez was already a promising young singer in his native Puerto Rico when, at the age of seventeen, he moved to New York City to try and make a name for himself as a performer there. In no time flat, he was playing in clubs, had signed a lucrative recording contract with the Latin-flavored Fania Records, and had changed his name to the far more exotic-sounding Hector Lavoe. From the mid-1960s to his death from AIDS in 1993, Lavoe was an international sensation who helped to popularize the musical style known as "Salsa." But, as with most artists, he lived a life of self-destructive self-indulgence, marked by serial philandering and hardcore drug abuse. He also had a volatile relationship with "Puchi," the Bronx girl who became his wife and who narrates "El Cantante," the glossy movie about his life.
Despite the novelty of the milieu and an undeniable sincerity on the part of everyone involved in its production, "El Cantante" remains doggedly conventional, lackluster and superficial in its treatment of the kind of material with which we are all too familiar from previous biopics that have chronicled the rise and fall of artists of all categories and stripes. Marc Antony brings a certain ferocity and depth to his portrayal of the struggling celebrity, but real-life wife Jennifer Lopez is all fluttery overacting as the woman who stood by her man through good times and bad (mostly bad). The music is enjoyable, but I'm afraid we've all been down this road so many times before that "El Cantante" fails to stir either our passions or our sympathy for the sadly benighted couple and all that they're going through. You'd be better off buying the albums instead.
Description of El Cantante
In their dazzling first on-screen pairing, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony bring to life this riveting tale of romance and redemption based on the true story of salsa legend Hector Lavoe and the woman who kept him from falling over the edge. It's the 1970s and the salsa revolution is in full swing. Hector Lavoe (Anthony), is the singer, El Cantante whose voice can move millions and whose passion moves one woman, his wife Puchi (Lopez). But when the spotlight brings Lavoe's personal demons and addictions to light, it will take the incredible devotion of his wife to put him on the path to becoming the legend he was born to be.DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Deleted Scenes
Featurette
Though they don't look much alike, slight actor-singer Marc Anthony was born to play robust salsa sensation H?ctor Lavoe. In addition to similar ancestry and vocal skills, Anthony has been building a respectable cinematic resume with roles in Big Night and Martin Scorsese's Bringing out the Dead. The title of El Cantante comes from a number Rub?n Blades wrote for The Singer. Lavoe would make it his signature song. In the film, Anthony's wife, producer Jennifer Lopez, plays Puchi, the Nuyorican beauty who won Lavoe's heart. She narrates their story from the perspective of 2002 (the real-life Puchi passed away shortly afterwards). Leon Ichaso (Pi?ero) contrasts Lavoe's rise from Puerto Rican street singer to New York superstar with his fall from innocent immigrant to heroin-addicted ladies man. By the mid-1980s, Lavoe's popularity hit its peak, and Ichaso spends the rest of the time ticking off the tragedies of his final years: the break with trombonist Willie Col?n (John Ortiz), stay in a mental ward, etc. It's a dynamic portrait, and Anthony and Lopez work well together, but despite the urban setting and Latin-flavored soundtrack, El Cantante follows virtually the same trajectory as Ray and Walk the Line (Ichaso has also directed biopics of Jimi Hendrix and Muhammad Ali). His movie looks and sounds authentic, but Lavoe's story might've been better served as nonfiction. There's a sense that there was more to the man than what appears on screen. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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