I was looking forward to this about an actress and person I've long admired, but I found this to be somewhat disappointing. There's little here that is new other than some audio tapes that are sometimes hard to understand, and not terribly revelatory, and some nice home movie clips of when she was young. She was quite the force to reckon with, highly intelligent, charismatic and uniquely beautiful. The film clips are wonderful, though almost all too short with many overlooked entirely. Some of her comments are insightful and she was a woman way ahead of her time and an actress unlike any other. Just ask whoever is trying to impersonate her here, which is one of the major problems with this documentary. The narration by a person attempting, poorly, to sound like her and to present this in sort of a first person narrative just doesn't work very well at all nor does a person pretending to be her from behind, in the shadows, etc. I nearly turned this off due to these contrived annoyances, but I still find the subject matter interesting despite reading about her for decades. I was hoping to learn something new, but perhaps she has been covered so much for so long that there simply is nothing new. Most of the balance of the narrative is presented by those who were not close, if at all, to her simply due to time marching on. Still, she was a fascinating and strong woman who lived a life most of us can only dream of. One of the more prominent comments from her, the real her, made here is about how lucky and appreciative she was to have the parents she did. We too can thank them. Odd near the end, this is not a very strong piece of filmmaking which I get the impression mostly exists due to the existence of those old scratchy audio tapes.
Review of Call Me Kate
