Chely Wright: Wish Me Away (2011/First Run DVD)/Kiss Me (2012/Wolfe DVD)
Picture: C Sound: C+/C Extras: C/C- Main Programs: B-/C
Here are
some new titles dealing with lesbian life today…
Bobbie
Birleffi and Beverly Kopf co-directed Chely
Wright: Wish Me Away (2011), a new biographical documentary on one of
Country Music’s best female vocalists in decades. Not just recycling the sounds of bad 1970s
Pop/Rock/Country (and adding electronic music to boot), she was sexy, beautiful,
glamorous and… lesbian! However, she
kept that last part to herself for years and while she was having hits, this
nearly destroyed her.
This 96
minutes look at her life, coming out and finding happiness (despite a backlash
from the ever-increasingly Right Wing, phony, shallow Country Music industry)
in the face of fame and loneliness. It
is one of the more interesting stories in all of recent music you have not
heard and ironically, a woman who is one of the few artists to advance that
music genre is scorned. They need all
the help they can get and I guess bravery, honestly and individuality are just
not in Country Music like they used to be.
Extras
include text bios, a photo gallery and featurette Chely At Home With Her Wife.
Alexandra
Theresa Keining’s Kiss Me (2012) is
a drama from Sweden
about an architect (Ruth Vega Fernandez) who has a nice, solid, smooth
professional life until she meets Frida (Liv Mjanes) who she falls in love
with, finds out she is a lesbian and they get totally involved with each other.
Unfortunately, Mia is engaged to her
boyfriend Tim and now she has to make some serious decisions quick. Is she really lesbian or just having a severe
infatuation? Does she also love
Tim? Could this complicate Mia’s Father
marrying Mia’s Mother?
You can
see how melodramatic and complicated this gets and while the actors are good
and locales nice, the film becomes as mixed as it sounds with some clichés and
some passages of scenes that do not help explore the multiple interconnecting
situations or try to explore new ground despite covering ignored ground. I even believe the actors and this could have
become a disaster or spoof of itself easily.
However, it stops short of really working and is worth a look only if
you are really interested. A trailer and
Music Video are the only extras.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Chely
and 2.35 X 1 image on Kiss are about even as the former has location video
issues and its share of vintage low-def analog footage, but the latter has poor
Video Black, a lack of depth and detail issues.
I wonder if a Blu-ray would improve that. Both also come with lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and
2.0 Stereo mixes, but the 5.1 in both cases sounds better. In Chely’s
case, it brings out the music best, while in Kiss’ case, it brings out the sound period as the sound is pretty
low to begin with so be careful of volume switching when viewing.
- Nicholas Sheffo
