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Whitney

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Whitney (2018)

July. 05,2018
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7.3
|
R
| Documentary Music
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Examines the life and career of singer Whitney Houston. Features never-before-seen archival footage, exclusive recordings, rare performances and interviews with the people who knew her best.

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Reviews

Spidersecu
2018/07/05

Don't Believe the Hype

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FuzzyTagz
2018/07/06

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

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TrueHello
2018/07/07

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

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Cristal
2018/07/08

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

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timjohnson-10201
2018/07/09

As has been our practice over the past years, Diane and I went to the movie on Essex and left sometime later with the same opinion about this film; it was about a remarkable talent. I was not sure upon entering the cinema if my impression, Bobby Brown was responsible for the drug addiction that killed her was correct. We both thought that the film was fair; however, we both felt that the movie play ed too much on the negatives of her addiction. About mid-way through the film, the viewer was submerged by the negatives. I did, however, go from thinking that Brown should die for his actions in denying the world's greatest singer a continued life. Preferably, after the film, We saw that Whitney virtually suicided and Brown greased the slide because she did most of it herself from an age before she even knew him.Diane and I thought the movie was absorbing with a little too much emphasis on the downward towards the peak of her career. See it if you were a fan and who couldn't be a fan.

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ckorr2013
2018/07/10

I think the movie is primarily, though not exclusively, for fans. The documentary does exactly what you would expect - it rehashes the information that most people who own a television set or read a newspaper already know. In short we are told that she was very talented, had a lot of success followed by (and in conjunction with) considerable difficulties, and died unexpectedly. The film is interspersed throughout with her marriage, drugs, and the minutia of her life that is common knowledge by now. I did not have any revelations that I did not have prior. At best, on a rare occasion, an assumption or two I had was confirmed. Some may argue that the documentary was not intended to present us with additional intriguing information that we did not already know, and that it was more about being a tribute - and this is fine. Irregardless, I would suggest that if you have not had your head in the sand for the last few decades you can miss this one without too much worry. I would not say the film is bad per se, but I did not think it brought anything substantial from outside we already knew. It is, however, a perfectly fine nostalgic film that hard core Whitney fans will likely not want to miss.

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MisterWhiplash
2018/07/11

Just kidding!This is quite good, better than your average Behind the Music episode due to the access to the interviewees and how much they opened up - McDonald is also solid as an interviewer and makes sure to ask follow up questions much as possible - and there are many candid home video clips of Houston that add to the subject matter (the best being a bit where she decries Paula Abdul but not before her mother Cissy shittalks Janet Jackson).McDonald and his editors take pop culture and politics and make damn sure through montage to compare and contrast in literally smashing pieces together that Houston's music couldn't be disentangled from the times they were in. How she became so monumentally successful? What was the world she was in? Somehow only she could pull off the Star Spangled Banner as a black woman to such a way everyone else since aspires to that.Downsides: it has the predictable arc due to knowing a pop stars history, but the tragedy here is that there were so many who were there for Whitney and she succumbed to her addictions.

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Bertaut
2018/07/12

I wasn't a huge fan of Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal's Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017). The film was built on the foundation of never-before-seen backstage footage from Houston's World Tour 1999, but I felt the narrative was poorly constructed, jumping from her divorce from Bobby Brown in 2007 to her death in 2012 with very little detail on what happened in those five years. This had the effect of making the last part of the documentary feel rushed and incomplete. I went into it not knowing a huge amount about Whitney Houston (apart from the obvious bits and pieces that everyone knows), and I came out still not knowing a huge amount about her.Kevin Macdonald's Whitney covers almost identical terrain as Broomfield and Dolezal, with many of the same interviewees appearing in both films, and much of the same factual information presenting itself (Houston tried drugs long before becoming a celebrity; she was criticised as "acting white" and selling out her culture by many black people, and was booed at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards (where her single "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" was nominated for Best R&B/Urban Contemporary Single - Female"); she was hounded with questions regarding her sexuality for much of her life, etc). One hugely important absence from both films, of course, is Robyn Crawford, Whitney's one time best friend, road manager, and probable lover, who was pretty much the only person in Houston's life who seemed to tell her what was really what, as opposed to what she wanted to hear, and have Houston's best interests at heart. Apart from a beautiful obituary for Esquire (on whose editorial staff Crawford's wife works), Crawford has maintained a dignified silence since Houston died, and neither Broomfield and Dolezal nor Macdonald were able to persuade her to speak on camera. This leaves a sizeable lacuna in the narratives of both films, as it is fairly unlikely anyone will really get to the core of who Houston was until (or indeed if) Crawford decides to tell her own story. As a side note, one interesting figure who didn't appear in Can I Be Me, but who does unexpectedly pop up in Whitney is Clive Davis, president of Arista Records, and the man who signed Houston to her first record deal.For all their similarities, however, I found Macdonald's film superior to Can I Be Me. Whitney has two major, and interconnected, advantages over the earlier film. Can I Be Me is more concerned with facts, and probably covers more "Did you know" moments; for example, the idea to open "I Will Always Love You" capella style was actually Kevin Costner's (however, having said that, Macdonald does manage to squeeze in a couple of not especially well known moments of his own; for example, Houston's haunting rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at the 1991 Super Bowl (where she had her bandleader and arranger Rickey Minor take the radical step of altering the time signature from a 3/4 to a 4/4) was completely unrehearsed, and the revelations regarding Dee Dee Warwick are shocking to say the least). However, what Macdonald does much better than Broomfield and Dolezal is that, on several occasions, he takes time out from the narrative to simply let the audience hear her sing. Probably because of this, his film is considerably more emotive. I was very moved by it on a couple of occasions; I don't remember being moved by Can I Be Me at all. One scene in particular I found very upsetting recalls that horrific scene in Asif Kapadia's Amy (2015) (2015) where Amy Winehouse is performing in Serbia a month before she died. In Whitney, it's footage from her Nothing But Love World Tour 2010, as she tries and completely fails to sing "I Will Always Love You" in Newcastle. The crowd is respectful enough, but given that so much of the documentary is simply about her voice, seeing her like this is very sad, as with her hoarse voice, she can barely stay in tune, let alone hit the high notes, sounding more like someone doing a bad karaoke rendition than one of the greatest singers of all time.Another very well handled part of the documentary's narrative is its coverage of what could be termed "mainstream media complicity" in her suffering. Look, Whitney Houston was a drug addict and a terrible mother, who was indirectly responsible for Bobbi Kristina Brown's death, insofar as she gave her child no stability, and introduced her to a world of substance abuse. Nobody is arguing anything different. But she was also a person, suffering deeply, in public, and very few people did, or even tried to do, anything to help her. The film presents a 2002 sketch from Saturday Night Live (1975) with Maya Rudolph as Whitney, in which she addresses the infamous Diane Sawyer "crack is whack" interview, and a scene from a 2005 episode of American Dad! (2005), in which an emaciated Whitney "sings for crack" in the Smith living-room. These clips were probably funny at the time, but aren't especially funny now, and they serve to highlight one of the most bizarre paradoxes of our celebrity obsessed society; we love to build people up and up and up, but, at some arbitrary point in time, we decide they've become too popular, too successful, too talented, so we do anything to pull them down, and when something goes wrong in their lives, really catastrophically wrong, our response as a society is not empathy, kindness, or understanding, but scorn, derision, and sarcasm. What a strange world we've made.7/10

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