Home :: DVD :: Musicals & Performing Arts  

Ballet & Dance
Biography
Broadway
Classical
Documentary
General
Instructional
Jazz
Musicals
Opera
World Music
The Buddy Holly Story

The Buddy Holly Story

List Price: $24.95
Your Price: $22.46
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 2 3 4 >>

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Gary Busey was on point in hit&miss film
Review: while this film&it's take on Buddy's life leaves alot of error in time spots Gary Busey brings His only true noteworthy Performnace for His Entier Career here to me.Gary Busey to Me has always been like a Poor Man's Nick Nolte&Never quite getting what He was meant to do on the Big screen right but here He has all of the right formula&shows more depth here than at any other time that I have watched His other works.Buddy Holly was a very Talented Artist.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Busey's A Marvel, But History Also Has Its Claims
Review: You become accustomed to Hollywood taking too many liberties with the actual stories of the famed and infamous alike; in music, you could ask Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey brothers, all of whom had their life stories sentimentalised and bowdlerised to the quick once Hollywood got its mitts on them. Likewise with Buddy Holly. The liberties taken with the Texas rock pioneer's actual story may have made for audience-gripping moviemaking, but history has its claims as well - and there was no need whatsoever to gussy up the Holly story, unless someone figured that because he was one of the few early rock stars who could claim a background of reasonable stability and, for the most part, parental support and empathy, Buddy Holly as a film subject would have been as boring as Buddy Holly the musician was exciting.

But there remains one reason to indulge "The Buddy Holly Story" after just over two decades - Gary Busey's performance as the long tall Texan with the thick-rimmed glasses, the toothy smile, and the deceptively gripping songs and rippling guitar style remains one of the most unpretentiously electrifying you will ever see given of an actual music star. Busey made a very credible Holly, both when cranking out his versions of Holly's signature music and in portraying the shyly confident young man offstage, and it remains the most earnest and thorough performance of Busey's career; it garnered him an Academy Award nomination as Best Actor and he deserved the nomination. He played every facet of Holly - the musical confidence, the unprejudiced amiability, the striking romantic (slightly twisted though the scripting is, it is nevertheless true that Buddy Holly really did ask his girl friend's aunt, who'd raised her, for her hand in marriage), the enthusiastic performer - with a surety and a thoroughness he's been hard pressed ever since to equal.

Holly himself might have been spinning in his grave over the telling of the story - and it only begins with the point that even the uninitiated knew (and know) that the Crickets were a quarter for most of the time they worked with Holly. But Holly might yet have said of Busey that he'd done him justice in spite of what he had to work with, even if he'd wished Busey could have delivered that justice in a more appropriate presentation.


<< 1 2 3 4 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates