Celia

I just complete the entire season of Celia, the life and times of Celia Cruz on Netflix and I have to admit, I was very impressed with all the actors in the series. Wow! is all I can think of. Each character portrayal was done with gusto and exhausting dramatization of her story. Most impressive was the actress who played Lola Calvo. It's almost as though she studied to play that role for years. I never knew Celia's story, but it was a bittersweet and romantic one. If anything, it's climbing the charts as one of the most romantic true stories of our time. I rarely ever write reviews because life is so time consuming, but I had to make mention of this one. If they could make it in English for Americans to watch without the subtitles I'm sure that everyone would share the same thought. Excellent series. Excellent actors. Excellence! Excellence! Excellence!

I am a big fan of Celia Cruz. I loved her. She was a unique world-class talent. I don't know where to start in listing the worst aspects of the telemundo series. But It may be helpful to start out by saying that, despite the fact, that they cast an excellent singer in the role, she rarely sang. I scanned through the ridiculous story line to find moments where she was actually singing. Not surprising they got the racial aspects all wrong for Cuba at the time. Celia was a black singer, singing an African based musical form they could've done so much to educate the audience about its origins and history. Despite the fact that Cuba has many people of mixed race at that time black people knew who they were and Sonora Mantancera was predominantly a black group. Almost all of the plot lines were ridiculous.But most egregious was the depiction of Pedro Knight as a horny buffoon. Shame on Telemundo!

I have been watching Celia since day 1 and it was great upto they just dismissed Gammy and left us hanging that he was never found or the boat his story was carried on for so many days and then finally he was just cut off and so was Rene, they continued with Mario, Raquel, Lola and her two lovers, of course Celia and Pedro, but they just got rid of the gay couple, (Not cool)! They even kept Nori up to this day and then last night all of a sudden she has a daughter and husband, (No story line on that) Celia's little wanna be son is all of a sudden grown, (what's up with that?) the start of this series was awesome and all of a sudden they just started speeding through everything, including Alberto was cut off, come on dude, you screwed up after you just started speeding through after Gammy, Now Lola's step-father comes back as this reborn manipulating preacher and stupid Lola still falls for it, can she be any more stupid, would really like to know how could you just cut off the gay couple, there is a Gay Latino population here to. don't get me wrong I'm only watching it because I want to see what surprise you have for us at the end and at this point I have a big feeling, I'm going to be disappointed

I was really into this for the first 50+ episodes, as I thought the "young"/"original" versions of the key characters were great actors...and then they replace half of the characters and age them to their mid 40s, all in one episode. To make it more confusing, they keep some random people the same, and the storyline itself only passes about 2 years max...smh. And then you're stuck trying to decide whether to sit through the next 30 episodes because you just watched 50 of them...and be annoyed the whole time by the character change. Whyyy does this always happen in telenovelas? Am I missing something? Are makeup artists not in the budget??

****Some spoilers***

I watched a few episodes back when it first came out and decided to watch it on Netflix as my next binge show. First and foremost this a biopic telenovela. As such characters and story lines have been embellished or created for drama and entertainment. If you expected a accurate biopic move along. People were upset about the additional characters and story lines taking center stage must understand what medium this show is produced for telenovelas are shown long runs and the main story is sprinkled in to milk the episode#.

That said the production value is superb almost movie-like. Costumes, set designs and such were very nice, the acting was pretty good and they choose people who resembled the real life Celia and Pedro albeit much more attractive as TV shows do.

The music had the Cuban-flavor despite it not being completely accurate as others noted only 3 songs of hers actually being sung in the show, blame Sony for that they own her music catalogue and charged the studio an arm and a leg for the rights.

Overall its really entertaining, beautiful to look at from costumes, sets and actors overall an easy 10/10 as a telenovela, as a TV drama i would say its a 7-8 out of 10.