BEFORE: Giancarlo Esposito carries over from "Waiting to Exhale" and I just got back from the NYC Craft Brew Festival, held in the fashionable West Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, to call it a beerfest would really be underselling it, there were also spirits like root beer flavored whisky, hard tea and some alcoholic beverage from Finland that I don't recall the name of. Actually I don't remember a lot of what went down during this three 1/2 hour festival, because I did two laps around the serving tables and sampled 57 different beers and spirits - so yeah, after the event was over and they kicked me out it took me a few hours to get home, but part of that was just remembering how to do that. I stopped at Barcade and played a few games of Q*Bert to sober up, also it was raining so I got very soaking wet and kind of failed to notice that. Anyway, I'm back home and ready for a nap, but I think I can knock out a blog post first.
Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 30:
Best Picture Nominees:
7:30 am "The Champ" (1931)
9:00 am "Top Hat" (1935)
11:00 am "The Maltese Falcon" (1941)
1:00 pm "The Last Emperor" (1987)
4:00 pm "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)
Best Picture Winners:
8:00 pm "Ben-Hur" (1959)
12:00 am "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946)
3:30 am "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935)
5:15 am "Cimarron" (1931)
HA HA! Another 7 seen out of 9 today - all of the films except for "The Champ" and "Cimarron". This brings me to 141 seen out of 341, which is 41.3%. Just as I predicted, I'm going to finish strong at the end. I'm going out of town tomorrow but I'll print my final results on Tuesday, I expect to finish over 42% with a little luck.
THE PLOT: A gifted young black woman struggles to maintain her voice and identity after she's offered a lucrative recording contract.
AFTER: This movie played at the theater where I work, I don't recall if it was a special guild screening or part of some larger festival like the Tribeca Festival, but either way it would probably have been during calendar year 2022, and that means it took me about two years to fit it somewhere in my chain - I guess I'm lucky that it's stayed on Netflix all this time.
But it took me WAY too long to figure out that this was an allegory for the Whitney Houston story, which obviously somebody did NOT have the rights to, so they just went ahead with what they knew (or imagined) took place in Whitney's life and just changed the name of the main character to "Beauty", which is weird because nobody anywhere has that as a first name. So clearly we're supposed to kind of FEEL Whitney in "Beauty" without it really being stated as such.
But the IMDB listed this under "romance" so that's where I programmed it, sure, there's a lesbian romance between Beauty and Jasmine, and sure, it fits into that category fine, but really, come on, it's a biopic about Whitney Houston. It's another random coincidence that I ended up programming it one day after a film with the REAL Whitney Houston in it, but honestly, there are no coincidences, or at least I've come to expect them as part of this whole process, there are just happenstances that lead me to greater truths. And what we know NOW about Whitney is that she was most likely bisexual and had an ongoing relationship with Robyn Crawford, however this supposedly stopped when she signed her recording contract.
Something finally clicked for me when Beauty finally made her television debut, on a talk show where the host sounded amazingly like Dick Cavett, only under a different name, and then suddenly I realized this whole thing was an allegory, a thinly-veiled biopic of Whitney made by people who had no rights to Ms. Houston's life story, so they just borrowed every element that they could and changed the names to make this (barely) legal.
OK, given that, there are still two major problems here with the way that the story is told - first of all (and this also took me way too long to realize), we don't EVER hear Beauty sing. Nope, not at all, go back and watch the film again with this in mind if you don't believe me. The film either shows her in a recording studio with the headphones on, and she's either about to sing or she JUST finished singing, or in the few shots where she is depicted singing, there is NO SOUND of her on those shots. It's just all weird and awkward, like how do you make a whole movie about an amazing famous singer, or a woman who is about to sign a recording contract and therefore become an amazing famous singer, and we never hear her sing in the movie, not even once? That's bizarre, and also it feels like cheating.
I don't know WHY anybody would choose to make a film this way - maybe they cast an actress to play Beauty and then realized she couldn't sing worth a damn? You'd think that somebody would check that first. Maybe they meant to have her lip-synch to someone else's vocals, and then realized that looked very fake-y and not realistic? Again, you'd think that doing some screen tests during the casting process would have highlighted this problem early on and then they would have made some kind of adjustment. It's possible, sure, that somebody felt that NOT showing the lead character singing would create some kind of air of mystery about it, but then I think I might be giving the director of this film a bit too much credit, like I'm covering up for them or something. No, I've got to just shrug my shoulders here and say that as a narrative choice, to NOT show the lead character singing is decidedly a very questionable decision, and one that I just can't agree on.
Beauty's mother is famous for being a singer herself, although largely as a dependable back-up singer for other artists, and not a star herself, and yeah, sure, that's Cissy Houston, no doubt. That's what really sealed the deal for me, that Beauty's mother was also known as a recording artist, but mainly as a back-up singer. There's one other narrative choice made here that's very questionable, which is when Beauty's father sends her two brothers out to "take care" of her girlfriend, namely to either beat her up or maybe even kill her, but instead they end up fighting with each other and beating each other unconscious, and really, that makes zero sense at all. It's bizarre on top of bizarre.
Perhaps there was a larger point to be made about Whitney Houston, or her family's expectations for her or what she had to do to conform to society's definition of a famous pop singer, but unfortunately it's buried under so much nonsense and conflicting information that ultimalely there's no point to this movie at all. Either make a movie about Whitney Houston or don't, but PLEASE don't half-ass it.
Also starring Gracie Marie Bradley, Niecy Nash (last seen in 'Trust Me"), Aleyse Shannon, Kyle Bary, Micheal Ward (last seen in "Empire of Light"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "Here Today"), Sarah Stavrou, James Urbaniak (last seen in "Tesla"), Andre Ozim (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Joey Bada$$, Alan R. Walker, with archive footage of Ella Fitzgerald (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Judy Garland (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Mahalia Jackson, Patti Labelle, Nancy Reagan (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Donna Summer (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Mr. T (last seen in "Air")
RATING: 3 out of 10 gold records on the wall
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