Dolly Parton: Here I Am

1/5/2025

Dolly Parton is an amazing musician and I know she had to go through significant hardships due to her appearance, and that's what I wanted to see in this documentary. However, this is more a series of interviews with friends (?) of hers retelling their memories with a few pictures and some videos through time to support them. It's not really my style as it keeps jumping back and forth between the past and present, as opposed to a documentary that has a steady flow of past events all the way to the present. As such, the documentary is not for me, even though it was an interesting peek into her life.

1/26/2026

There is something really quite manicured about this film on Dolly Parton, and at no point did I feel that we were learning anything about her that wasn’t already in the public domain or that she didn’t want us to know. What it does show us is an expertly curated compendium of her appearances, though, and right from her early appearances with Porter Wagoner she comes across as a woman determined to make it on her own terms. Her lyrics clearly demonstrate her views about the role of women in the family and in society, but she is not an overt feminist. Indeed, though she readily acknowldges her friendships with folks of colour or who are gay, she is shrewd enough to appreciate that those “who love her” (as Jane Fonda put it) might well be deeply and politically conservative, and so she keeps