There’s a new streaming documentary, Lilith Fair, about the all-female music festival that was conceived by Sarah McLachlan and was a summer perennial in the late 1990s. I went to one of these shows, in Hartford in 1999, featuring McLachlan, Aimee Mann, Lisa Loeb, the Pretenders, Sheryl Crow, and Mya. It was a lot of Top 40 music for the amount of money you paid to get in.

The documentary is heavy on nostalgia and engages in unnecessary racial acrimony (black artists were sought but simply didn’t agree to appear). But the tone is, like everything, about the commercial triumph.

It puts me in mind of a genre I call “airport lit.” From Moneyball (2011), about the Oakland Athletics using sabermetrics, to Air (2023), about Sonny Vaccaro marketing shoes with Michael Jordan, to Tetris (2023), about the origins of the video game, airport lit turned into film is pretty tiresome. The Founder, Joy, and even The Pursuit of Happyness are other notable entries in this genre. Moneyball did it best, but all the beats in these stories seem familiar. The only one since Moneyball that jumps out at me as being truly memorable is BlackBerry, which has bravura performances from Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruchel.