“STAX: Soulsville USA” is a four-part, four-hour series about the legendary Memphis soul music label’s rise and fall, and its impact on American culture and history. 

Stax was founded in 1957 by siblings who bonded over their love of music: country fiddle player Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, who took out a second mortgage on her house to finance the construction of a music store and a recording studio. The music store was wide-ranging: it is described in the first episode of the series as sort of an ongoing focus group with a permanent address, enabling Stewart and Axton to learn what kinds of music people were open to buying. But the studio only recorded country because that’s what the founders knew best. 

Then the father-daughter team of Rufus and Carla Thomas entered the picture and recorded soul songs for the company. Their second effort, “”Gee Whiz: Look at His Eyes,” became the company’s first hit (in both rhythm & blues and pop). It also started their association with Atlantic Records, which gave the smaller company a $5000 advance plus promotion and distribution muscle in exchange for a five-year option on all future recordings. Satellite became Stax, a cryptic amalgam of letters from Stewart and Wexler’s last names. 

As any student of music history could tell you even if they didn’t know the details of Stax’s relationship with Atlantic, this arrangement came back to bite the founders. Over the next eight years, Stax built up the careers of multiple all-timers, including Booker T. & the MGs and Otis Redding, and became a force to rival Motown. The latter was putting out a slicker, altogether more palatable product, without the raw, passionate lead vocals and funky Southern-fried soul elements that defined the house band at Stax, as well as the company’s regular composer-arrangers (among them: Issac Hayes, who would make Stax a fortune and win them an Oscar with the original songs and score for “Shaft”). But in 1968, months after Redding’s death in a plane crash, Atlantic sold out to Warner Bros. Atlantic’s point person with Stax, Jerry Wexler, exercised a clause in the contract (which Stewart did not read before signing) that gave Atlantic all of Stax’s existing catalog, save for unreleased work, and forced them to start over just when their power was at its peak. 

Stax persisted nonetheless. Hayes’ great success changed the energy of the operation and propelled them into the next decade, peaking with the Wattstax event in Los Angeles. Unfortunately by 1975, Stax was functionally nonexistent. The company fell victim not only to Atlantic and Warner’s corporate treachery and an unfavorable distribution deal with CBS Records, but also the tendency of artists to start their own entertainment companies and become immediate successes based on talent and originality, then crater because nobody actually knew how to run a business. The closest equivalent to a responsible adult in Stax’s executive ranks was former DJ turned marketing executive Al Bell, who eventually became the company’s vice president and a co-owner. He was so valuable that after repeated disagreements between him and Wexler forced Stewart to pick a side, he stood with Bell and made his sister step down. Wexler took the money from selling her shares in Stax and founded the Memphis Songwriters Association as well as her own label, Fretone, whose biggest hit was the 1976 novelty record “Disco Duck.” Fantasy Records bought the post-Atlantic catalog in 1978 and started signing new acts and releasing new music, but retreated and became a reissues-only label for the next twenty years. 

It’s a great story with lots of twists, and more colorful characters than can be comprehensively listed here—though Bell and Booker T. Jones deserve special praise; their thoughtful statements are cement holding a sprawling narrative together. The series also succeeds as an atmospheric re-creation of places and eras. “STAX” is a trove of well-known and rarely- or never-seen footage. Among the latter: kinescopes of live TV concerts, home movies by Stax intimates, and TV news images of the wreckage of Redding’s plane; film clips and still photos that bring the 1960s Memphis recording studio scene to life (including repeated shots of a hand perched over a fader, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers); and archival imagery of life beyond the studio (including 16mm film of street life in ’60s Memphis, and hauntingly framed shots of rain on streets and buildings in the hours leading to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination). 

What you won’t get from the series is much sense of the creative and financial conflicts between artists or the seamy underbelly of the record industry (in every genre, not just soul/R&B). Given the apparent mandate of the series, that’s understandable. Film and TV documentaries about pre-existing music could not exist without the participation of corporate “intellectual property” rights-holders. The three big dogs here are HBO, a division of Time Warner Discovery, which bought Warner Entertainment, an earlier incarnation of which absorbed Atlantic; Polygram Entertainment, a division of Universal Music Group; and Concord Theatricals. The latter describes itself on its web site as a music publishing and licensing company providing “comprehensive service” to storytellers who are using lots pre-existing music in their work, but the main thing to know about them is that they now own Fantasy Records, the company that  was built atop the graveyard of the post-1967 Stax. Which means that, for all of its sensitivity, intelligence and feeling, what you’re seeing when you watch “STAX” is in some fundamental sense a four-hour promotional video for intellectual property, commissioned and controlled by the rights holders—and that if you want the down-and-dirty, unexpurgated history, you’re probably better off reading music history books, or spending the day on Wikipedia clicking key players’ names.

Still, this is a thrilling and often moving production, one that pushes the outer edge of the envelope of its innate limitations as product, and illuminates the material in a sorrowful, sensitive manner. Directed and coproduced by Jamila Wignot (“The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross”), its scope, ambition, and pace evoke “OJ Simpson: Made in America” (the architect of which, Ezra Edelman, is listed as an executive producer). “STAX” would work brilliantly as a companion piece to it, because of its ability to show how massive, anonymous-seeming historical forces bear down on individual lives. Every ten minutes there’s an anecdote that hits you right in the heart, like Jim Stewart and Carla Thomas’ account of trying to meet with Atlantic’s Wexler back in 1960 in Memphis and having to bring Thomas into a restricted hotel through a service elevator; or Booker T. Jones talking about how, in the aftermath of King’s murder, his white colleagues never asked him how he was feeling or even mentioned the tragedy. “I started to feel, deep down, that something was amiss,” he says. “They didn’t understand my daily life as a Black person.” Jones says he came to understand that “the close personal relationship I had with them didn’t exist outside of the studio.” 

The seeming benevolence and “color-blindness” hinted at in early sections of the story is peeled away after that. What’s revealed is something fundamentally selfish and passive-aggressively oblivious in America itself, not just its music industry. the Black artists who revolutionized pop music rarely got to share in the financial part of its success because, with a handful of exceptions, they didn’t actually own anything. That meant that any help that the white establishment might give them was more self-serving or conciliatory than genuinely empowering, no matter how kind and honorable any one person might have been. The realization that runs beneath all of “STAX” is more powerful for not being stated bluntly by any living witness, though James Baldwin boils it down at the start of the third hour: “I don’t want to be given anything by you. I just want to be left alone so that I can do it myself.”

I cannot think of a single reason for another Garfield movie, and apparently, the people who made this couldn’t, either. It reminds me of the legendary comment about “Nancy,” which, like “Garfield,” was originally a comic strip known for the spareness of its design and the helium-weight lightness of its humor. When asked to explain “Nancy,” someone once said, “It takes less energy to read it than to skip it.” Those who have children pestering them to see “Garfield” will feel the same way about this film. It’s not awful. It may be too much to say that kids will enjoy it, but it is probably fair to say they will feel that they have been entertained. But those accompanying the children may feel dispirited by the emptiness that emanates from a film that is just an IP cash grab. And parents may have some concerns, discussed below.

Jim Davis’ wildly popular “Garfield” comic strip started almost half a century ago, and for most of that time, it has centered on very few themes and characters. Garfield is a cat who rules the home  No one could think of calling Jon, the human he lives with, as his owner. Also in the house is a dog named Odie, who exists in the world of the strip to be the subject of pranks and derision. Even though Garfield does not work, he hates Mondays. He loves food, especially lasagna.  

What works in a four-panel comic strip will not work in a feature film. So, this animated version of Garfield, voiced by Chris Pratt, loves lasagna but is not as selfish and obnoxious as the Garfield who stars in the strip, the books, mugs, calendars, and t-shirts. In a brief prologue, we see how Garfield was left by his father in an alley when he was a kitten. Garfield spotted Jon at a table in an Italian restaurant, devoured Jon’s entire pizza, and Jon was so taken with the kitten that they became roommates. (In this scene, Garfield passes by a sign that says “Lorenzo,” a shout-out to Lorenzo Music, the first to provide a voice for Garfield, in television specials, an animated series, video games, and commercials.)

In the present day, Garfield has a great life, ordering drone food delivery by an app on Jon’s phone and watching videos on Catflix. Instead of being annoyed by and competitive with Odie, in this version, they are friends, and Garfield calls Odie his intern. Everything is fine until Garfield’s long-lost father, Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson), shows up, causing Garfield to acknowledge the pain of his feelings of abandonment. He has no interest in developing a relationship with Vic, but Garfield, Odie, and Vic are all kidnapped together by revenge-seeking Jinx (“Ted Lasso’s” Hannah Waddingham). Then it turns into a heist film, as the only way they can escape is to help a huge bull named Otto (Ving Rhames) rescue his love, a cow named Ethel. 

The storyline is complicated but not particularly engaging. There are elements that are too arcane or unsettling for children and not of any special comedic value for adults. Garfield’s resentment over being abandoned by his father is a touchy theme, and children may not find its resolution entirely satisfying. The painful separation of Otto and his beloved is the consequence of the farm’s being purchased by an agribusiness, a plot line neither original nor resonant for a young audience. A bird gets electrocuted and killed, and major characters get shocked with cattle prods and an electrified fence. Jokes about actor Daniel Day-Lewis and an extended “joke” about roadkill are poorly chosen. The villains are the only two significant female characters and they are angry, shrill, and domineering. At one point, a character addresses the audience with what is supposed to be a joke: “If you have young children, this would be a good time to leave the room.” My advice is just to find a better movie.