Saturday, January 17, 2015

Whitney

So here are my thoughts…..

I HATE Yaya DaCosta, and I mean WITH. A. PASSION. But I have to admit there were moments that she was really giving me Whitney. I mean, she really did the research, watching footage, studied Whitney, all that, because I SAW Whitney at times. What threw me most was her voice. It was too high-pitched and prevented me from really buying in. But I have to give credit where credit is due and Yaya definitely gave me more than I expected from her, all things considered. I can’t front, that “I will always love you” performance scene at the end kinda got me…. But I might have just been at the funeral all over again.

Bobby, on the other hand….. um….. LOL. There was nothing about this nobody they casted that gave me Bobby Brown. NOTHING. He wasn’t a bad actor. He just wasn’t BOBBY.

Now the music…… I love Deborah Cox. LOVE Deborah Cox. And even though there are some aspects of her voice that are reminiscent of Whitney’s, its not nearly close enough that her renditions of Whitney’s songs make me feel close. What’s disappointing is that there are so many Youtube stars who do. I heard a couple Whitney tributes on Youtube that if I weren’t looking at the screen, I would have thought WERE Whitney. Why not pay some nobody who actually sounds like her to do the tracks?

Wesley Jonathan as Babyface? Really tho? Son, LOL. SMH. But Clive Davis was 100% CLIVE DAVIS.

I found it interesting that Angela Bassett chose to put Whitney’s drug use on front so early. She made a clear assertion that Whitney was doing the shit before Bobby, which is something I always suspected. Not that its facts just because its in this movie, but I think it was always just more comfortable for people to believe that America’s princess got dragged into that lifestyle by this bad boy, ruffneck dude from Boston who nobody thought she should have ever been with.

To be honest, I felt like this movie was more about Bobby than it was about Whitney. I don’t feel the movie did her life justice at all and I wasn’t shocked that this was the case. VH-1 and Lifetime suck at biopics, mainly because they don’t want to spend the money to do them justice. The stories they choose to tell simply can’t adequately be told in 2 hours. They can’t. There was SO much left untold and unexplored that we as the public know about, it just felt empty. The most key moments in the public space of Whitney Houston were necessary to tie it all together and they just weren’t there. There were moments – including Bobby’s proposal, as told from his own mouth in the interview afterwards, and the murder of his friend – that were not even close to how they actually occurred that really annoyed me. I wanted to give Angela Bassett credit, as a friend who probably had really intimate conversations with Whitney, trying to tell the story that was untold or misinterpreted, but when you know the story and you see it not playing out the way it went….. I’m just disappointed. But I expected to be. It was way too soon for this and VH-1 or Lifetime was not the vehicle by which it should have come. Period.

So with that, I am going to digress on any further commentary. As an idol of mine, Whitney, I feel, deserved better representation. And I don’t mean in terms of making her look good, because we all know her life was just a mess after a certain point. I mean in terms of telling her story. Remember her right, you know what I’m saying? I’m sorry. I’m salty.

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