I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Musical biopics are tough. Do you let an actor do their own version of the star's music, or do you have them imitate as best as possible? Do you play the original artist's music and ask the new actor to lip-sync? These are critical decisions to make early in the production process, no doubt mired in legal issues of who has the rights and how much they cost, and as such each musical biopic is wildly different in scope, intention, and effect. Rami Malek, for example, was a great Freddie Mercury, but one wonders how the film would have been different if someone else played him while singing his music. Conversely, when Sissy Spacek played Loretta Lynn and sang all her music, I personally appreciated the performance more. So what the heck are you going to do in a film about someone with such an iconic voice and impossible talent as Whitney Houston?

You hire Naomi Ackie to play her. While it would have been nice to see someone like Cynthia Erivo sing all the hit Whitney songs, it probably wouldn't have felt like an honest biopic; it's just too different a voice and body type. So in almost every musical number, Ackie lip-syncs; she does this extraordinarily well, to the point that I wasn't always sure it's Whitney's voice we hear. But the sound editors pull a lot of surprises out for us, namely in the way her vocals are not the familiar ones from her records. I don't know how they did it, but they either found alternate recordings or mixed them to sound unique, and the effect was a constant element of doubt as to exactly whose voice we really hear. It's dazzling.

Ackie -- relatively unknown to me, apart from her brief role in Star Wars 9 -- here does the work of a newborn star, much like Whitney herself did in those early years. She knows she's a star, and it's time the world sees it. Early in the film, Whitney sings in church and as a backup singer for her professional mother Cissy until one day when a major record producer (Stanley Tucci) arrives in the nightclub. Cissy fakes an illness so Whitney can shine, and as she sings "The Greatest Love of All" we are treated to the sight of a producer immediately recognizing the talent of a goddess. It's a lovely scene, buttressed by the film's depiction of Whitney engaging in an early lesbian relationship with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams). That's the kind of representation and emotional honesty a filmmaker like Kasi Lemmons brings to her films, and it's so refreshing to see.

Unfortunately, as it seems all biopics of music superstars do, things go awry, and it's not too long before the fame and pressures build too high. For multiple reasons, her relationship with Crawford suffers as her hits climb the charts, and soon enough she becomes addicted to drugs. Choosing her image and career over living authentically -- the evils of fame are suggested more than explored in this particular story -- she chooses to romantically engage with Bobby Brown. A lot of the second half of this film feels more motivated by the need to hop and skip through critical moments of Whitney's life rather than let the story organically follow any emotional or spiritual beats. More than once, I wished the film might have dramatized more of her early years, or up through her early fame, rather than try to encompass her whole life. By about the time of her singing the national anthem, I was wondering where exactly the film would climax; the Superbowl would have been a nice ending point (had the earlier scenes been more fleshed out), and many other points would have been satisfying.

Instead the film continues its skipping and jumping to the inevitable end of Whitney's life. It's hard to watch her story through a vibrant and life-affirming lens while knowing her story through the lens of public scrutiny, as we know that her voice and style and personhood were so diminished by what was happening to her. The business part of show business is, of course, where the problems originate. Lemmons and Ackie do their best with an otherwise unfocused and desperate screenplay (by Anthony McCarten who also wrote Bohemian Rhapsody); Barry Ackroyd's (The Hurt Locker, United 93, Bombshell, Detroit, Coriolanus) cinematography was a bit garish in light and color saturation, and often felt bizarrely split between shaky personal images and concert-style wide shots. I would have liked more of a personal take on Whitney's story, more of the woman-behind-the-tabloids perspective with didactic meditations on queer Black female fame in the '80s. Because that's what's so life-affirming and fascinating about the real woman, and we're still left to speculate on most of it.

Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Four aging Vietnam War veterans reunite in Ho Chi Minh City. Catching up doesn't take long -- the bonds forged in war clearly have not weakened -- and we quickly learn their purpose. The four black Americans recently learned of a landslide that revealed what they hope is the plane near which their squad leader was killed. The "Bloods", as the group called themselves, hope to reclaim what's left of the body or at least memorialize the site; they also hope, as we discover, to reclaim a buried locker of gold bars they had buried there during the war.

The four men, older if not necessarily wiser, embark on their journey into the heart of darkness much as we might expect in any movie dramatizing the war in Vietnam. Tempers run as high as the jungle temperatures, dangers lurk around every palm frond, and madness slowly manifests before the group fractures. It doesn't help that each successive scene reveals -- mostly through quickly paced, jargon-infused expository dialogue -- increasingly disturbing details about the relationships between the men. After all, the character who is perhaps most like a protagonist declares very early on that he is a vocal Trump supporter. Later, as the group explores the city, one reunites with his old Vietnamese girlfriend and learns he fathered a now-grown child. One man reveals his financial bankruptcy and consequential desperation for this journey. All seem to have varying degrees of PTSD.

The story, far from inventive, nevertheless manages to feel consistently fresh, clearly due to the uncompromising vision of its writer and director Spike Lee. Though this movie doesn't reach the horrific immediacy and jolting timbre of his previous feature, Da 5 Bloods must be ranked among the best of the director's films. Its surprising humor and sudden, gory violence combine into a fever dream of an experience, one that I would have preferred to see on the big screen instead of streaming on Netflix. Don't be daunted by its lengthy runtime; this movie is electric with energy, both thematically and dramatically. I found myself only briefly getting lost in the implications of certain developments before getting absorbed into the next crucial sequence. And its mix of genres (the heist aspect of the plot feels very Western, as if Lee were turning The Treasure of the Sierra Madre into an homage of Apocalypse Now) keep it fabulously engrossing in terms of aesthetics.

And, as only Lee can do, this movie wears its relevance on its sleeve without beating us over the head with its significance. A stock story of warring men journeying into the wild for gold could be storytime fodder for any time and place. Add elements of racial injustice, colonial and imperial fallout, gender politics, mental illness, etc., and you can start to actually say something audiences might consider relevant. Lee, with his typical flair, combines all these elements and more until such easy "lessons" become impossible to untangle, much less critically defend. Instead, he simply allows the complexity of the story he presents to be just that -- complex -- while framing it with timely and equally complicated stock footage. Here, he frames the story of the Bloods with the voices of Muhammed Ali and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom are synonymous with Civil Rights activism in the U.S. and both of whom were vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam.

Through this frame, Lee also seems to be repurposing the trope of American films that deal with Vietnam. They are, far and wide, populated by macho white men who behave very badly and are glorified in cinematic history as a result. Name any major movie about the Vietnam War and it will not indicate that nearly one-third of the soldiers sent by the U.S. were black. But here, bolstered by what I would call the most surprising and award-worthy performance of the year so far by Delroy Lindo, the focus is firmly on black men. Sure, they don't behave much better than their white counterparts in other flicks, but the dramatic depth is far more profound. During flashbacks, the Bloods squad leader Stormin' Norman (played by Chadwick Boseman) educates his comrades (and audience) on the history of a racist country relying on black and brown bodies to die in its wars, on the few significant soldiers of color actually recognized by history, and on viewing the gold they seek as the first step toward reparations for slavery.

Perhaps most welcome, for me, was that this movie isn't nearly as on-the-nose as BlacKkKlansman was. Granted, Lee's wit and messages worked magnificently well there, and it spoke keenly to the America he was trying to entertain and teach. But here, despite Lee's insistence that Trump be named multiple times in this movie, Lee is not simply "bashing" anybody, much as they may deserve it. In playing a longer, more delicate game, he reveals the devastating legacy of "President Fake Bone Spurs", as one character says, pointing out that while his red MAGA hat floats around the Vietnamese jungle, the man himself never did. Delroy Lindo's character, the Trump supporter, makes his case for the Oscar this year in one particular scene as he cuts his way, alone, through the jungle and rants and raves directly into the camera. As Lindo speaks about the U.S. government and grows more incensed, Lee twists our expectations by not having the character go mad; rather, he reaches a cathartic revelation (an apocalypse, now, if you will) before calling on a cruel God and -- well, there's still more irony to be had in the scene.

As always, Lee can be enjoyed as pure entertainment. But what I love best about him is that he layers so many complications atop each other -- dramatically, thematically, artistically -- that you could never fully and absolutely understand one of his movies. I haven't even mentioned the score by Terence Blanchard (and soundtrack by Marvin Gaye!) which also deserves an Oscar nomination, or the Vietnamese woman who acts as a sort of Greek chorus, accentuating themes of racial injustice in history and wartime governments while raising questions about the narrative filters on this film. Further, Da 5 Bloods would seem to be Lee's means of revisiting his earlier movie The Miracle at St. Anna and putting it in a crucible to make new art that is dramatically and intellectually more dense and satisfying. And, by framing it the way he does, Lee performs the haunting revelation that this war, for black Americans, is far from over.