The Karen Carpenter Story (1989)

Very best movie i ever watch

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Nice review by Tom Barrister. Just finished reading Little Girl Blue, very interesting biography. This movie leaves out a lot of details, and glosses over a few major moments in Karen's life. Specifically, the extent to which she went to hide her anorexia (as someone said she was the most honest person except she would lie like a trooper about her anorexia), her solo album which was criticized by Richard among others and scrapped, and finally her disastrous marriage to a gold digging liar. As for lots being filmed then scrapped because of the family, Richard was an executive producer and guess he was trying to protect the family, especially his mother. I read somewhere the family was sorry they helped make the movie because they think it wasn't fair in parts. IMHO the movie does a good job overall portraying the success, talent (that voice!) and tragedy of KC. Like Tom Barrister said in his review, a voice like that comes along every few decades. ps my favorite song is Superstar. THAT VOICE!

I have been a Carpenters fan since the first time I heard "There's a kind of hush". This is just a picture, and you cannot ask it to fully portrait the complete life of Karen in details. The main things are in the film: her wishes and fears, their career and their family. The fist time I watched the movie it brought tears to my eyes, I couldn't believe that behind that incredible and lovely voice there was so much suffering. As for the cast, I can say Cynthia Gibb and Louise Fletcher made a great job. Mitchell Anderson... well, let's say he was very bad characterized. In a few words: If you like Carpenters and their music, and want to know a little more about their lives, you have to see this movie!Jorge

This was the movie that started an all out love affair with the music of the Carpenters for me. I was 15 at the time and one of my teachers show this movie to us as part of our week long study on both anorexia and bulimia.I fell in love with Karen's voice and continue to this day to expand my ever growing collection of CD's. However back to the movie.Personally when I saw this movie the first time I thought what a tragic loss the world suffered when Karen passed on after thinking she had gotten over her illness. But at the same time this movie also spurred me on to do more research in to her life. As I read more and more I came to realize that this movie does NOT do justice to Karen's story either as a singer or her personal problems. It just skims over her life giving use very little actual facts in loo of telling the viewer a sugar-coated version of the events leading up to Karen's premature death at the age of 32.*** Spoiler Warning ***For instance, Karen's wedding and marriage is reduced to about 5 minutes of film time. There is next to no dialog between she and he. Notto mention that they changed his name. Karen was married to Tom Burris not Bob Knight. Also she was not divorced as the movie shows her to be. Karen was in the process of divorcing Bob (Tom) at the time of her death. She was set to sign her final divorce papers on the same day that she had her heart attack. She was still a married woman at the moment of death. In real life Tom went to Karen's funeral and during the visitation took off his wedding ring and threw it in to her casket much to the shock of her grieving parents and brother.Then there is the issue of just what sort of abuse Karen was doing to her body during her more then 7 years suffering with anorexia. At the time that she seeked out help in New York the singer was ingesting up to 100 laxatives daily and compounding it with abusing thyroid medication to speed up her heart and thus burn more calories.Karen's solo album witch is touched on when Richard goes in to rehab for his sleeping pill addition is all but dismissed. Karen in real life like in the movie did seek her brothers blessing before starting the project. Richard grudgingly gave it to Karen but he did ask her to get help instead for her eating disorder. When the solo album was complete Karen was very proud of the songs on it. But A&M ( Karen's label) was not. So she choose to shelve the album and back to working with Richard on what would be come their final studio album during Karen's lifetime.Another glaring false part of the movie is where Karen is on stage and she collapses. THAT NEVER HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE!!! That was pure fiction to get the viewers attention.The music in this movie is all of Karen's actual recordings and for that fact alone this movie is worth watching. Cynthia Gibb does a wonderful job of lip-syching. I was also told that she took drumming lessons from Cubby O'Brian ( He was Karen's shadow drum while on stage just so she could look like she knew what she was doing.While not a movie I would tell you to watch it's worth a boo for the music content alone..

One of the better made for TV biopics, I just wish it had told us more. I have read many biographies and seen other things about the Carpenters, and this movie did what it could, based on the constraints placed on it by the family. Cynthis Gibb did a wonderful job trying to bring Karen to life. One of my disappointments is that there was not more insight into Karen's anorexia. In the reading I have done about the disease (especially Cherry Boone O'Neill's wonderful book, Starving for Attention) anorexia appears to be a disease of control. Karen saw her weight as one thing in her life that she could control. She felt that she was being controlled in every other aspect of her life. Don't get me wrong, I believed she truly loved the music, but she felt she had little control over her career. She truly loved her family, but they did not express it well, and she didn't know how to make her family understand her. The film could have touched so much more on that. I treasure the music I have of the Carpenters and wish she was still alive to contribute more to music today.