The Sacramento Bee du lieu suivant : Sacramento, California • 50

20 TICKET THF SACRAMENTO BfE March 21 1997 IG OiViE RBSXO RiYJ DQQ Jennifer Lopez stars in the story of and her family -MOVtCMIVItW Selena 12 Cast Jennifer Lopez Edward James Olmos Jon Seda Constance Marie Jacob Vargas Lupe Ontiveros and Jackie Guerra Writer-director Gregory Nava Cinematographer: Edward Lachman Composer Dave Grusin Choreographer: Miranda Garrison Distributor: Warner Bros Running time: 131 minutes Cinedome Century Century (Fulsom) UA Roseville UA Laguna Sacramento Drive-in Holiday (Davis) Rated PG group plays the standards anyone? Abraham knows how important ethnic heritage is and how difficult it is for a Mexican American to be accepted as an American by other Americans and as a Mexican by other Mexicans So he insists that Selena learn Spanish and sing it phonetically The conceit works She is almost an overnight success And by the time she reaches young adulthood (and is played by Lopez) she effectively puts her Spanish selections over with a Tex-Mex twang song styling was utterly unique with a poignancy been described as if she had tear in her If what transpires in the film is true then entourage started out as something of a mom-and-pop operation much of the film has the family on a road tour on a bus and remained that way until the day she died at the hand of Saldivar (Lupe Ontiveros) who is dealt with evenhandedly as an affable troubled woman with an eerie obsession with Selena never bought into the purist mentality that says that only singers should do movie musicals First and foremost find someone who can act the role the singing can always be dubbed Lopez for example is not a trained singer and spends approximately half her time here lip-synching to original Selena tracks but she can certainly teach someone like Madonna someone who can more than carry a tune what it takes to truly inhabit a musical Lopez moves through her production numbers in a naturally musical fluid way and knows exactly how to emote a lyric It also helps that the best lip-syncher in the biz since the late Natalie Wood whose mouthing of the songs in Robert Wise and Jerome Side (1961) remains a textbook example of seamless movie-musical dubbing dramatic performance however that carries the film with the actress playing Selena as a girlish unformed young woman with flirty buoyant ways The performance never lets you forget that Selena was very young when she died and even younger when she became a singing sensation Director Nava and is in top form his take on the material being a youthful one Youth is the operative word here and the movie never assumes a morbid tone It is never a downer (The shooting of Selena is staged off-screen and Nava largely skirts it by having it referred to via a newscast) Instead the film moves with an off-the-cuff spontaneity with most of the dialogue consisting of family banter and small talk and most of the action what little there is a matter of the Quintanilla family members jiving each other Along the same line cinematographer Edward Lachman keeps things intimate filming it as if were one big handsome home movie And exactly what is a star-making role here and more than fulfills it The actress is so vital and commanding that she makes one spookily aware of the loss of the real Selena The movie opens effectively with one of last concert appearances with the singer doing Will a piece that gets the film off to a smashing start and also brings to it some gnawing bittersweet irony Then it jumps back in time to 1961 for a brief sequence about her father Abraham Quintanilla that depicts his own musical ambitions as the teenage leader of Los Dinos a trio of Latino guys who sing the standards The group get hired by white club owners because of who they are while the patrons of those clubs that do hire them are disappointed because their music more traditionally Hispanic Los Dinos last very long but be resurrected 20 years later as the Quintanilla family band with Abraham (Edward James Olmos) acting as manager to his kids son Abie on the bass and older daughter Suzie on the drums The youngest child Selena (portrayed as a child by the excellent Becky Lee Meza) is the singer And again the ByJoeBaltake Bee Movie Critic elena Quintanilla Perez the late Tejano music queen had a very good life a loving family a satisfying career a husband who was crazy in love with her and adoring fans who just get enough of her this good-natured optimism of her short life that filmmaker Gregory Nava dwells on in a leisurely paced pleasingly old-fashioned biopic The film traces gradual rise to fame under the tutelage of an attentive stage father and ends with her tragic shooting by her fan-club president Yolanda Saldivar on March 31 1995 Selena was 23 and on the verge of crossover stardom in the mainstream music world when she died As played by Jennifer Lopez Selena emerges as an unpretentious endearing figure who was just one of the kids in a family headed by a father who was a veritable Mama Rose Latin-style Lopez who has done some good work recently with Robin Williams in and with Jack Nicholson in and who recently replaced Sharon Stone in Oliver upcoming has I i 'Vt-.