Best of Enemies Movie Review

“That was a time when television was still a public square, when Americans gathered and saw pretty much the same thing. There’s nothing like that now.”

“The ability to talk the same language is gone. More and more we’re divided into communities of concern. Each side can ignore the other side and live in its own world. It makes us less of a nation. Because what binds us together is the pictures in our heads. But if those people are not sharing those ideas, they’re not living in the same place.”

Those quotations above reverberate for me long after hearing it in Best of Enemies, the documentary about the Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley television debates ahead of the 1968 election. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville wrote and directed the documentary, an examination of the series of ten debates between Vidal, a liberal author, and Buckley, a conservative pundit.

Short Cut Movie Review: 20 Feet from Stardom

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

20 Feet from Stardom celebrates some of the unsung heroes of pop music, especially in the early decades. These are the background singers whose voices we hear in early girl groups and songs by artists as disparate as Sting, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ike and Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, and on and on.

Their vocal stylings helped fill out the music of the rock-and-roll generation. We sang along to their parts on the records and they were rarely, if ever, credited. Let’s keep in mind that instrumentalists find themselves in similar situations, adding guitars, keyboards, or drum tracks to songs without so much as a “thank you.” They are studio musicians and that’s what they’re paid for. But in the early 60s some of these women were the actual singing voices behind the more stylish and sexy figure that the record companies preferred for TV and album covers.