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Stars and salsa forever Charting the trail of Latin pop queen Selena by JULIANNE PIDDUCK
Selena's life reads like a made-for-TV movie. Texas, 1981: Papa Quintanilla, a would-be doo-wop singer, gets his kids on stage the minute he discovers his nine-year-old has the makings of a torch singer. The kids may prefer Donna Summer, but daddy knows Mexican-Americans can only make it big by singing in Spanish. More all-American than Beaver Cleaver, Selena learns Spanish and digs deep into her wee corazón to find Latin rhythms. So move over Priscilla, Queen of the Desert! "Selena and the Dinos" grow up on the road in the belly of a big bus, hitting the big time in Mexico and the American Latin market. With her very own fashion line, Selena earns not only mega-bucks, but the adoration of millions of Latin-Americans who want their own "material girl." Gregory Nava (El Norte, Mi Familia) draws Selena's picture-postcard 23 years into more than two hours. What could be a really, really bad film gets made (mostly) more than watchable by Jennifer Lopez's (Money Train, Blood and Wine) winsome and voluptuous Selena and veteran actor Edward James Olmos as Selena's father. I was sort of weirded out by the familiar American dream at work here--Selena is absolutely sanitized for mass consumption: the child Selena singing "Over the Rainbow," an aggressively happy family (whatever happened to sibling rivalry?) and romance with the sweetest heavy metal guitarist ever imagined. This film plays like The Partridge Family meets The Bodyguard. Fortunately there are glorious, dizzy musical moments on stage. And that's it, that's where it grabs youthe music does, right in the pelvis. There's no escaping Selena's catchy Latin pop, the dizzy neon lights and the costumes, oh, the costumes! When Selena beams out of the family drama zone and out into MTV land, Nava finds the groove, and Selena finds immortality. Selena is now playing. Check film listings for showtimes |
When you're young, beautiful, a rising star and you die young, you are the stuff of legendand of lucrative biopics. Selena had it all: the voice, the looks, the duds, the moves. A huge star in Mexico, Grammy in hand, she was destined for Gloria Estefandom when a fan shot her in 1995. The biggest surprise here is that Madonna didn't somehow muscle in to snag the lead as the Tejano singing star.