Tag: Clarke Peters

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody

BLU-RAY REVIEW:

Street Date 2/28/23;
Sony Pictures;
Drama;
Box Office $23.68 million;
$30.99 DVD, $38.99 Blu-ray;
Rated ‘PG-13’ for strong drug content, some strong language, suggestive references and smoking.
Stars Naomi Ackie, Stanley Tucci, Ashton Sanders, Tamara Tunie, Nafessa Williams, Clarke Peters, Dave Heard.

The Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody does a decent job dramatizing the legendary vocalist’s complicated relationship with superstardom, but the backbone of the film is its soundtrack of her greatest hits.

The film tracks Houston’s rise in the 1980s from singing in a church choir to putting out one hit record after another, and how she turned to drugs in the 1990s to balance the stresses of fame and family, which ultimately led to her unexpected death in 2012 at age 48.

Naomi Ackie delivers a sparkling performance as Whitney, whose career is depicted as having two primary influences. Her mother, Cissy (Tamara Tunie), a famous gospel singer in her own right, feigns a sore throat when she spots a bigwig producer in the crowd at her nightclub gig, forcing Whitney to sing in her stead. That producer, Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci), ends up signing Whitney to a recording contract.

Her newfound fame causes friction in her personal life, as her father (Clarke Peters) is wary of her relationship with her girlfriend, Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), and insists they be seen in public dating men. This sends Whitney into the arms of rapper Bobby Brown (Ashton Sander), kicking off their infamous marriage, much to the chagrin of Robyn.

Through it all, Whitney projects an image of America’s sweetheart, masking the descent into substance abuse began to destroy her talents.

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If something seems familiar about the proceedings, it may be because the screenwriter is biopic specialist Anthony McCarten, who is also responsible for the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. This film’s structure bears a striking resemblance to that one in the sense that they both make sure to depict the iconic moments everyone knows, and then fill in the gaps with behind-the-scenes tales, culminating in a faithful re-creation of a live performance considered by many as a career pinnacle.

In another odd bit of coincidence, the film’s director, Kasi Lemmons, is married to Vondie Curtis-Hall, who directed 2001’s Glitter, a widely panned A Star Is Born knockoff with some eerie parallels to Whitney Houston’s life, starring another “voice of a generation,” Mariah Carey.

For most movies about artists and musicians, the formula would include showing the elements of their lives that influenced their work, but since Whitney didn’t write her own songs, in I Wanna Dance we get numerous scenes of Davis playing song samples for her to decide which ones to make her own.

The songs played in the film are Whitney’s recordings, though Ackie does a nice job with the lip-synching. To further the emphasis on the music, the Blu-ray offers a “Whitney’s Jukebox” mode that just plays the scenes in which the songs are played. The Jukebox lets viewers jump to any song, shuffle them or play them in the order presented in the film, which equates to about 33 minutes of music.

The Blu-ray also includes six deleted scenes that run about eight minutes total.

Rounding out the home video extras are three making-of featurettes: The seven-and-a-half-minute “Becoming Whitney” focuses on Ackie’s performance; the eight-minute “Moments of an Icon” looks at the efforts taken to re-create some of Whitney’s most-famous performances; and the five-and-a-half-minute “The Personal Touch” looks at how Whitney’s friends and family were involved in the project.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BLU-RAY REVIEW:

Fox;
Drama;
Box Office $53.35 million;
$29.99 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray, $39.99 UHD BD;
Rated ‘R’ for violence, language throughout, and some sexual references.
Stars Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Zeljko Ivanek, Caleb Landry Jones, Kerry Condon, Abbie Cornish, Peter Dinklage, John Hawkes, Amanda Warren, Clarke Peters.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards offers an intense, character-driven examination of the relationship between small-town police and the residents they serve.

Frances McDormand gives a powerhouse performance as Mildred, whose bitterness over the stalled investigation into her daughter’s murder motivates her to rent space on the billboards of the title excoriating the cops for their lack of progress.

This naturally raises tensions in the town, as supporters of the police demand she take the signs down while putting pressure on her friends and family to force her hand.

The police chief (Woody Harrelson), has his own issues to deal with, not the least of which is an alcoholic deputy named Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who is accused of torturing a black suspect in custody during an incident that allegedly happened before the start of the film’s story.

Three Billboards takes a multi-faceted view of cops’ racial attitudes in small-town America, and presents them as people and not as the caricatures some knee-jerk critics of the film would insist upon. Certainly the department must confront its troubled history of race relations, but the situation with Mildred might suggest they’re not great cops in general, or at the very least in over their head on some things.

Dixon, for example, has bigger dreams but little self-awareness, and his racism goes hand in hand with a general attitude of superiority about everyone, no doubt fueled by the toxic influences of his mother. His violent streak even extends to the white kid who sold the signs to Mildred and becomes the subject of a brutal beating in one of the film’s signature sequences — a single take of Dixon walking from the police station across the street to the advertising shop, up the stairs and back to admire the chaos of his handiwork.

Mildred and Dixon represent the opposing forces in the firestorm at the heart of the film, so it comes as little surprise that McDormand and Rockwell were among the most recognized performers of awards season.

The Blu-ray includes five deleted scenes running about seven minutes total that aren’t vital to the storylines but do offer some interesting additional character insights.

Also included is a comprehensive half-hour behind-the-scenes documentary in which McDonagh relates how seeing similar billboards on a tour of the American South inspired him to make the film. The featurette also includes a lengthy look at the making-of the single-take fight scene at the center of the film.

Finally, the disc offers McDonagh’s unrelated half-hour 2004 short film Six Shooter, which won the Oscar for Best Live-Action Short. The short stars Brendan Gleeson as a man on a train confronted with mortality and the foibles of the human condition.