Product: Cadillac Records [Blu-ray] (2008)
Rating: 3.0
A good showcase of why musicians stay broke; Not quite accurate
Synopsis:1. A poor white guy has a girlfriend and has Big Dreams. He starts out as a junkyard owner and then moves into nightclub work. After his club burns down, he is able to put his money into what became Chess records.2. He signs a bunch of earthy, gritty black musicians from various places who make some hit singles.3. Said black musicians just have tons of problems through which Chess helps them all. These problems form a big chunk of the movie.4. The label signs Etta James (later in the movie) and she has a drug addiction and sells everything in the house.5. Chess finally sells the label (for whatever reason) and then dies.Review:1. One unintended benefit of this movie was to show that color had NOTHING TO DO with why these musicians stayed broke so often. They were up singing and grinning every night and seemed to not be able to count very well. And had nothing to show for all their hard work. (Contrast this with someone as canny as Ray Charles.) These people were driving around in Cadillacs and flat broke.2. The plot was enough to keep me interested-- if only to find out how many inaccurate things I could spot. The acting was decent and earthy --although I wonder if Muddy Waters ever really sounded like that in real life (like he had a mouth full of hay after gargling with sulfuric acid). I sure haven't seen any interviews where he sounded like that. Those Southern accents were also a bit over the top. (Oh the irony of black actors in a movie doing bad black accents.)3. There was not nearly as much information in this movie as there *could* have been, and that is probably the weakest point.Inaccuracies:1. Little Walter DID NOT die on the floor of Muddy Water's house.2. The film made us believe that Chuck Berry was jailed ONLY for having sex with an underage girl. It turns out that he had a criminal record from before and had been in the hoosegow before. So, what might have been a probation or a lighter sentence turned into a heavier sentence because of recidivism. And apparently he was a slooooow learner. He went to jail *again* in the 70s for tax evasion.3. This one is questionable. Was Etta James' mother really a prostitute? I've not been able to find anything to that effect.4. Leonard Chess did not fall dead right after selling his label, but three months later.5. Was Etta James *ever* as slim and attractive as Beyonce Knowles? All the photos in which I've ever seen her (no matter what age) show her as short and, um, rubenesque. (At one point, she was 400 pounds-- and under six feet.)6. The narrator referred to where some of the characters were initially working as "plantations." Um, sorry, but two things: 1) Plantations were about 100 years before the action of this movie; 2) No single character in the movie was old enough to have been born on a plantation or into slavery. The accurate word was "sharecroppers," but I guess that was a small detail that was lost.Final verdict:This is worth a matinee fare or a rental off the New Releases shelf. It was interesting (for a first watch), but not worth more than a single movie ticket (as in, not enough for a date).