Word: whitneys
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...much hyped movie, "Waiting to Exhale" is based on the best-selling, and better written, novel by Terry McMillan. The movie's central characters are four black women trying to eke out a living for themselves in Scottsdale, Arizona: Savannah (Whitney Houston), Bernadine (Angela Bassett), Gloria(Loretta Devine) and Robin (Lela Rochon). Also featured are big-screen talents Wesley Snipes, who plays Bernadine's post-marital love interest, and Gregory Hines, who plays Marvin, Gloria's last chance at romance...
While the material the actors have to work with is lacking, so are most performances. "I closed my eyes," says Whitney Houston's character, Savannah, "And I exhaled." But Houston's performance lacks destination, so this epiphanic experience doesn't ring true. Houston has some good songs on the soundtrack, but after her wretched performance in "The Bodyguard," it's surprising to see her in a leading role again. She simply doesn't have the depth to sustain a performance any longer than a music video...
...Where Whitney didn't deliver, Bassett was astounding. Back from "What's Love Got To Do With It" and as pissed as ever, she had the audience shouting along with her as she threw her adulterous husband out of her house and proceeded to burn all his belongings, including his Mercedes. "I'm tired," she screams, baring those buff biceps, "of being a background to your foreground...
...Everything in the '50s or Now and Then last fall--about a quartet of young females looking for love and identity. Here the setting is Phoenix, Arizona, and the women are black, but everything else is familiar. Bernadine (Bassett) finds that her longtime husband is deserting her; Savannah (Whitney Houston) has a lover who won't leave his wife; Gloria (Loretta Devine) can't get her bisexual ex-husband into bed; and Robin (Lela Rochon) shacks up with a virtual Fiesta Bowl Parade of losers. The men are all rotters except for two perfect guys (Gregory Hines and Wesley Snipes...
...Like most soap operas, the film version of Terry McMillan's best seller wins hot tears from its audience by imagining the worst things that could happen to decent people. Starring Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston, this is the familiar story of a quartet of young females looking for love and identity. Director Forest Whitaker ties his film's women to the railroad tracks of caprice and invites us to watch as a betraying beau comes chugging toward them. But Waiting to Exhale doesn't have the idiot vigor to become a camp classic like the movie Valley...