Category: 2010s

After watching Streetwise, I had wanted to see this follow-up to the life of Erin Blackwell. There had been a couple of other short updates over the years. I wish I had watched those before seeing this one as they provide a much better introduction than immediately starting with Erin’s more recent life. This film jumps between original footage from Streetwise to the shorts to recent footage with little division or clarity even to which of Erin’s ten children are being featured. I wish they had chosen to include an intro similar to the Up series and then jumped into the current update instead of interspersing the timelines. While there is evidently a pattern to be seen from generation to generation, there is no commentary on that or any other contemporary issues that could be explored with the subjects. The film stays solely in the Where Are They Now category.

My first exposure to Rose Marie was watching Match Game reruns. Having never watched The Dick Van Dyke Show, I wasn’t even aware she was part of the cast. It was only in recent years that I saw a bit of her singing as Baby Rose Marie and was completely surprised to discover they were one and the same person. I’m glad that they were able to make this film before she passed on because her nine decades long career spans so many aspects of show business from radio to television to stage to film. As a biopic, it stays mainly on the glossier side of things, only lightly addressing the child exploitation and mob tie aspects of her career, but it’s great to see interviews from so many nonagenarian performers, such as Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, Peter Marshall, and Rose Marie herself.

My take from this is that in some (many? all?) Orthodox Jewish communities to counter their young adults going off on a Rumspringa, they send the teenagers/twentysomethings to Israel to try to reel them back to the faith. In this movie, one woman who didn’t experience this conversion tries to investigate why many of her […]