Carole King: Natural Woman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Carole King: Natural Woman Blu-ray Movie Review

Still Beautiful

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 26, 2016

Forty-five years after the release of Carole King's signature album, Tapestry, it may be impossible for anyone who wasn't there at the time to grasp the extent to which the record's song list became the soundtrack of everyday life. You didn't even have to own Tapestry. Wherever you went, someone was playing it.

The singer-songwriter's career provided the inspiration for Alison Anders' Grace of My Heart (1996) starring Illeana Douglas as a thinly disguised version of King, but nothing compares to the impact of the musical Beautiful: The Carole King Story, which opened on Broadway on January 12, 2014, and is still going strong. Beautiful completed a career revival that included King's receipt of the Library of Congress Gershwin Award for Popular Song and continued with her being a 2015 honoree at the annual Kennedy Center Honors. On February 19, 2016, the PBS series American Masters broadcast an hour-long portrait entitled Carole King: Natural Woman, which has now been issued on Blu-ray by Virgil Films.

Natural Woman focuses on King's early life, beginning with her Brooklyn childhood and exploring her early work as a songwriter (with first husband Gerry Goffin) for an array of performers including the Shirelles, Aretha Franklin, Little Eva, James Taylor and the Monkees. Even the Beatles recorded a King/Goffin composition ("Chains") for their first album. Director George Scott sketches an evocative portrait of the period's music industry, when few artists wrote their own material, thereby creating opportunities for talented composers like King, who initially had no aspirations beyond writing music.

Following King's split with Goffin, she moved to Los Angeles, where she began performing and recording. The documentary peaks with the creation and release of Tapestry in 1971, which won four Grammy awards (Album of the Year; Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female; Record of the Year, "It's Too Late"; and Song of the Year, "You've Got a Friend"). Scott then fast-forwards through the next four and half decades, with a few nods to King's often-turbulent private life, until the present when she re-emerges to be celebrated as a living legend and a champion of her adopted State of Idaho. The interviewees included Douglas McGrath, who wrote the book for Beautiful; fellow songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill; producer Lou Adler; manager Peter Asher; and musicians Russ Kunkel and Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar. King's daughter, Sherry Goffin Kondor provides childhood memories.

Carole King: Natural Woman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Virgil Films presents Carole King: Natural Woman on a 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray that accurately reproduces the contemporary interviews shot on HD video. The vintage recordings of performances and interviews are of lesser quality, some filmed, some taped, but they appear to have been digitally massaged to look their best. The one-hour program has been encoded at 29.99 Mbps, which is more than sufficient.

Carole King: Natural Woman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo soundtrack does a fine job of reproducing the interviews and the excerpts from older performances (most of which appear to have been recorded in mono).

Carole King: Natural Woman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras consist of four solo performances from the Seventies. The sources appear to be standard-definition video that has been up-rezzed, and Virgil has gone the extra mile of encoding the audio in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0.

• "Tapestry" (480i; 1.33:1; 2:43).
• "So Far Away" (480i; 1.33:1; 4:17).
• "I Feel the Earth Move" (480i; 1.33:1; 2:55).
• "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman" (480i; 1.33:1; 3:40).

Carole King: Natural Woman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As both a tribute to King and a snapshot of the music industry in a bygone era, Carole King: Natural Woman is worth seeing, although I doubt that it has a high "rewatchability" factor. The Blu-ray's biggest attraction is the four classic performances in the extras, which, as far as I know, did not air on PBS. On that basis, recommended.