“I’m gonna
be a star. And stars don’t fall outta
the sky do they?”
There are times when a movie transcends
the screen and spills into your life by other means. For “Star Wars” it was action figures and
being able to re-create scenes from the movies.
“Superman: The Movie” it was comics, finding new and better stories than
in the movies. And for the 1987 film “La
Bamba” it was the music. From this little
bio-pic about musician Ritchie Valens who died way too young in a plane crash
in 1959, became for me, a journey to discover great 50’s rock, from Chuck
Berry, and Buddy Holly all the way up to, at the time, the present with Michael
Jackson and Madonna and all that fell in between.
The film
written and directed by Luis Valdez starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Richard
Steven Valenzuela whose name was cut to Ritchie Valens in a pretty funny scene tells
the story of a musically gifted teen who quickly rises to fame in the late
fifties. We see Valens growing up in
slight poverty working to help support his single but equally hard working mother
played by Rosanna De Soto who is wonderful in the film. The most stand out is the performance given
by Esai Morales as Bob, Ritchie’s half-brother who I had only known before as ‘Paco’
in the awesome Sean Penn film “Bad Boys”.
Valens trying to make it on the local music scene is discovered by a
small label owned by Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano) which puts him on the fast track
to stardom all the way to the stage of American Bandstand. The drama of the film still works with the
mother obviously favoring one brother over the other, which leads to heavy
scenes in a mostly light movie. And
while the writing hasn’t aged too well, the performances by the predominately
Hispanic actors still makes the movie extremely enjoyable and watchable after
25 years. All the songs by Valens are performed by Los Lobos who bring fresh
life to fun pop songs. Again enough
cannot be said about the outstanding performance given by Esai Morales. People play drunks all the time in films, and
some have sold it better, but Morales seems so authentic, and bold it has
become one of my favorite performances ever by an actor re-watching these films
for this blog.
This became
one of those films the whole family would watch together, I remember my female
cousins swooning over Lou Diamond Phillips, and me mocking him, though secretly
wanting to be him. Being Mexican you
could identify with the characters and dream that if this all could happen before
for people like them, it could happen for us. Also as I said at the start “La Bamba” is one
of my favorite 80’s movies, mostly because of the impact it had on me beyond the
film. I don’t go out and buy movie
soundtracks anymore unless it’s just the score, but I will go back and buy this
soundtrack, along with the originals and remember the gift that Ritchie Valens
and Buddy Holly left us. The music never
died.
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