7.6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
An in-depth look at the life and music of Whitney Houston.
Starring: Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, Bobbi Kristina Brown, Cissy Houston, Gary HoustonMusic | 100% |
Documentary | 15% |
Biography | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
There are at least a couple of kind of appalling moments in Whitney where the iconic singer’s personal issues are used as fodder for comedy in shows like a scabrous (animated) sitcom or a sketch comedy enterprise, and so it’s perhaps understandable why those issues seem to raise the hackles of what may be still grieving fans. I personally discovered just how intense Whitney’s fan base is when I jokingly subtitled our The Bodyguard Blu-ray review “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” which one fan of Houston’s incorrectly assumed was some kind of snipe at her substance abuse situation, which was then very much in the news due to her then quite recent death. That fan came after me with figurative guns a-blazin’, but other, perhaps more objective, readers, rightly assessed that my comment was a joke about the film, not Houston per se. For those who weren’t around and paying attention to pop music when Whitney Houston erupted like a supernova in the mid-eighties, it’s hard to really explain what a phenomenon she was — and how long that phenomenon persisted in the often ephemeral world of “hit based” music. I personally can still remember watching music centric cable channels back in those days where Houston’s promotional videos were simply inescapable, and even then, as she shattered sales records and charted Number One Billboard hits like Steph Curry or Ray Allen aced three pointers, some MTV and VH1 video jocks were joking about aspects of her appearance (I remember one particularly snarky guy, maybe Don Imus (?), repeatedly mentioning the little “scrunch” line between her eyebrows that would appear when she’d belt especially forcefully). There was a grace and ebullience to several of those early Houston music videos (and of course their underlying singles) that were like little jolts of adrenaline in an otherwise kind of stale and rote “big hair” environment of pop and rock music in those days. But like so many other gifted artists who have battled with various personal demons, Houston couldn’t quite outrun her fate, and unfortunately became just another “statistic” in the sometimes (often?) cruel annals of show business, and industry that seems hell bent on sucking incredibly talented individuals into its gaping maws, only to chew them up and spit them out as veritable shells of their former selves.
Whitney is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a variety of aspect ratios, mostly due to a glue of archival video, but with all of the new interview segments and many of the still photographs in 1.85:1. As typically happens in a documentary cobbled together from such a wide variety of source elements, quality is widely variant. All of the contemporary shot material looks sharp and well detailed, though the palette is pretty drab, tending toward grays and browns (no pun intended, considering Bobby's participation). The archival video is all over the place. There is some home movie material that looks like it may have been sourced from 8mm, but even some of the old television material can look pretty rough at times. Nothing is unwatchable by any stretch, but there's a certain heterogeneity to this presentation that has to be accepted, and which actually should be welcomed, given the relative rarity of some of the footage presented here.
While Whitney features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, some may feel it's unnecessary, since so much of the documentary is simply talking heads and/or voiceovers, with most of the music left to interstitial snippets (or even consigned to "background" material, as a voice talks over it). The surround track does open up these brief snippets, but otherwise this is really almost a "mono" presentation, at least during the talking heads segments. Fidelity is fine throughout, and even the archival video segments tend to have excellent audio (some of the oldest snippets, including Whitney as a schoolgirl singing in church, do occasionally show their age). It's notable that there are quite a few candid audio recordings of Whitney sprinkled through the piece.
There's no escaping the melancholy that pervades Whitney, and in fact a couple of the people interview just start sobbing uncontrollably at various moments. Whitney Houston seemed to have it all, but in a way she was plagued by both having too much and never having enough. Whitney does an admirable job of presenting the real woman behind the superstar, and anyone who loved Whitney's singing or even her somewhat limited film career should find this documentary fascinating and moving. Highly recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
2015
2019
2018
2014
2016
2016
2018
2012
2015
2015
2012
2013
2007
2013
2011
2019
2004
2015
2012
2024