Reviews

This was probably the most disappointing documentary I have ever seen, and was certainly the worst documentary ever made about a subject so deserving of retrospection and reappraisal. The documentary as it stands, doesn't even deserve to be called a documentary. It's more of a featurette, something that would be more at home as a bonus feature on a DVD/BluRay to a better film. It's short, quite short, significantly less than an hour. A lot of the running time is given over to boring, over-played stock footage, that is accompanied by narration by a woman, I assume Betty herself but there no indication, that is, poetic, but willfully obscure, and rarely ever gives us any facts. In the end, we don't really learn anything about Betty that we didn't already know from reading her wikipedia page. There almost no discussion about her music, the very thing that made all of us, her die hard fans, fall in love with her. They spend time discussing how raunchy it was, and ground breaking it was from a sexual sociopolitical view point, but they never discuss the actual music, or how the band worked in the studio, or how Betty would write the songs and collaborate with her band. Betty doesn't even appear in the documentary herself, save for one blurry close-up shot of one quarter of a face, that we're left to assume is Betty, but we can't be sure. Her voice is featured once in the film, in a scene where her former band calls her on the telephone and we hear her on speaker. Spoiler, they don't get any answers from her either. The movie is a collection of missed opportunities, and poor execution. The only positive thing about the whole film is there is a few seconds of actual concert footage of Betty from the 1970's sprinkled through out the film, but it's not enough to make this film worth watching.