El Cantante (2007)

"El Cantante," starring Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, is what I expected it to be: an extremely superficial, television-level biopic with great music and entertaining concert footage. It has some extra value as one of the rare American films about Latinos, and for this reason I think an effort should be made to see it. We're certainly not going to get better Latino-American movies if we don't support the precious few that do get made. But the shallowness of the film cannot be denied.Jennifer Lopez is intriguingly positioned as one of the only Latin pop stars well known in white America. She's as famous as Madonna, which is a stunning achievement on her part. She could substantially broaden the horizons of the white community by in a sense teaching them about Latin culture. That strikes me as a very important cultural enterprise that could also have important socio-political implications.With this film, as superficial as it is, Lopez and husband Marc Anthony have introduced a broader audience to Puerto Rican legend Hector Lavoie, who teamed up with Willie Colon in New York City in the 1970s to create the rhythmic, percussive style that came to be known as salsa.As an example of how films like this can expand white horizons, I left "El Cantante" seriously wanting to know more about Lavoie, Colon and the rest of the salsa scene.At the start of the movie, Hector is already an adult and already a singer. We meet him in Puerto Rico when he is about to embark on his move to New York. The vast majority of the film takes place in New York, where he meets the woman who will become his wife and lifelong partner. We watch him meet Colon and explode onto the salsa scene. Additionally, we are along for the ride when he discovers heroin, which would be his undoing.There are a couple of moments where it's suggested that the couple might have been bisexual, and that perhaps this is how he caught the HIV virus, which killed him in the 1980s. If he was indeed regularly having sex with men, the film certainly blurs that out of the story. But that's really neither here nor there. The important thing to know about Lavoie is that he was a musical genius. And more Americans should know this.Kudos to Lopez and Anthony for trying to bring his story to a wider audience.