Whitney

Dee Dee Warwick (left) and a young Whitney Houston

 

Whitney in the studio singing with her mother, Cissy Houston

 

Whitney with her parents and two brothers

 

Whitney with her mother and father

 

Whitney with Robyn Crawford and her two brothers

 

Whitney with her mother and Dionne Warwick (right)

 

Daddy's girl

 

Bobby Brown

 

Mary Jones, Whitney's aunt and personal assistant

 

Clive Owens, president of Arista Records

 

singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl

 

meeting Nelson Mandela in South Africa

 

Whitney's home in New Jersey

 

WHITNEY                 B+                  

USA  Great Britain  (120 mi)  2018  d:  Kevin Macdonald           Official site

A curious documentary that probes under the surface, premiering at Cannes, very much in the same vein as Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), the film was commissioned and basically authorized by Whitney Houston’s estate, whose executor is the late singer’s sister-in-law, Pat Houston, one of the producers on the film, where Scottish director Kevin Macdonald obtained family access to photos and archival material, also interviews with family members and close associates, and while a few were forthcoming, some to a surprising degree, but most others refused to offer anything but the standard family line, something they’ve been doing their entire lives, never deviating from the script, making this a more difficult challenge than it might seem.  The daughter to gospel and soul singer Cissy Houston, who formed the Drinkard Singers, the Gospelaires, and later the Sweet Inspirations, whose career as a back-up singer to Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley is legendary, where Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick are Cissy’s nieces and opera diva Leontyne Price is her cousin, but she also worked as the musical director of their Newark, New Jersey church, where Whitney sang as a child, working closely with her to prepare her for a singing career.  Among the first notes we hear come from a music video, but with all the instrumentation stripped away, allowing viewers to hear the pure and unadulterated sounds of Whitney’s singing voice.  Today you can hear the booming sounds of Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody - YouTube (5:14) echoing throughout giant sports arenas, like baseball, football, basketball, or even hockey games, as the upbeat vibe so perfectly fits the need to entertain fans between plays, amping up the volume, fueling energy into the room, where it’s a mad rush of pure adrenaline.  While music is truly international, mixing music with sports is a particularly American touch, as the joyous music typifies what’s best about America, yet it’s also the music to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s first dance at their recent wedding, a song Markle refers to as her “happy song,” so the joy is spread around the world.  What’s perhaps notable early on is that Whitney did not respond well to her mother leaving and going on the road all the time, leaving her children in the hands of other family members for long periods of time, where Whitney, the only girl in a family of brothers, was picked on for having lighter skin, a problem unique to black communities plagued by the race issue, something that would follow Whitney throughout her career.  After the Newark riots in 1967 and in something of a protective measure, the family moved to a larger house in East Orange and Whitney was sent to an all-girls Catholic high school, where she met her best friend Robyn Crawford, described as the “sister she never had,” who would remain a lifelong confidante for the rest of her life.       

 

Whitney thrived singing in the church, and loved singing with freedom and abandon, but her mother, basically the architect of her musical style and career, was a tough taskmaster, making her repeat things over and over again until she got it right, with Whitney making a surprise appearance at the Sweetwater Club, a Manhattan New York night club replacing her mother, who feigned an illness, and was an instant success, immediately offered record deals, but Cissy refused as she was still in high school, but she did sing back-up jobs with her mother for Chaka Khan at age 15 and by seventeen was also doing modeling work, becoming the first black woman on the cover of Seventeen magazine.  But she was solely interested in a singing career, resulting in a bidding war for her services, eventually choosing Clive Owens from Arista Records to represent her, and within a year she made her television debut, singing a song from The Wiz, Whitney Houston's "Home" Live On The Merv Griffin Show 1985 ... (5:03) to a rousing  success, which led to her portrayal of a fresh new face with a bubbly image, almost like the innocence of a Disney character where the beautiful Siren-like princess finds fame and fortune by singing for others, thoroughly enchanting them, mysteriously making them melt in her hands.  Unlike anyone else in the industry, she had a voice that was set apart from the others, with a three octave range, effortlessly wrapping herself around the words and content of each song, soulfully identifying so completely with what she was singing, breathing new life into every expression, where seeing her live was “an experience.”  Few have had the range and distinctive sound that she could produce, embracing and identifying with audiences, raising the artistic quality by so easily hitting and holding every note.  In a word she was brilliant, though her commercial appeal was heavily packaged, featuring that natural smile, her beauty, and an ability to have a good time on stage.  Her seven consecutive number one hits is still an unmatched feat in the music industry, and her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” WHITNEY HOUSTON - I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU ( GRAMMY´S ... YouTube (5:30) from THE BODYGUARD (1992) soundtrack is still the all-time best-selling single by a female artist.  Hilariously, Saddam Hussein used an Arabic version as his campaign song when running for his final presidential term, at the time heard playing on the radio so relentlessly that one man living in tenement housing in the British Isles somewhere complained that his neighbor played it over and over again endlessly, driving him batty, complaining to the police, where the person in question eventually served 7 days in jail.  This serves as an example of the Whitney fever that existed around the world, where she was simply uber successful, bringing boatloads of money into the family, many going on tour with her, including Gary Garland (former DePaul basketball player) as a back-up singer, where two other brothers acted as bodyguards and road managers, but were also very open about fulfilling their roles of procuring drugs in every city they visited, something they had been doing since their teenage years.

Certainly one of the most eye-opening sequences described the friendly relationship between Whitney and Robyn Crawford, who was an acknowledged lesbian and considered trouble by the family, who quickly denounced her as a hanger-on and a nobody, but that is obviously a family cover up, as she was her most trusted friend after high school, perhaps the only one who always put Whitney’s needs above all else, working as her assistant, then her executive assistant, and finally her creative director, traveling around the world with her in charge of shows.  While it was alleged they were lovers, what’s more important is their friendship, as they were obviously a collaborating team that worked well together personally and professionally, also providing space for Whitney when she needed it, like a place to disappear to and just be herself, not having to be that professional image of herself, which is nearly impossible to live up to.  Ask Michael Jackson or Prince, or before them Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin, or countless others in the music biz that lost their lives tragically early.  When you have all the money in the world and literally no obstacles, no one telling you no, temptations are lurking everywhere.  Crawford provided stability when Whitney’s parents were breaking up, as Cissy was allegedly having an affair with the pastor, which is more than her father John Houston could stand, having his own family’s phone tapped to track his wife’s movements, though he was just as guilty of his own infidelity.  He was an important Newark city official in an era post 1967 riots with whites leaving the city in droves, ushering in black officials for the first time to run the city, but it was a corrupt administration, people were on the take, including John who became a power broker authorizing the construction of new buildings.  According to his children’s recollections, like The Godfather, you were expected to kiss his gold ring.  Now deceased, his life is a bit clouded in ambiguity, though he maintained contact with his daughter’s career, becoming her manager at one point, then sued her for $100 million dollars when she signed with someone else, still wanting a piece of her profits.  This move on his part effectively ended their relationship, never speaking to him afterwards.  One other revelation was how Whitney was initially perceived by the black community, perceived as too gay, or too white, with the Reverend Al Sharpton leading a boycott against her for appealing to a white audience, calling her “White-ney.”  She was actually booed at the Soul Train Awards, which hurt her deeply, as it’s impossible to conceive Whitney Houston as anything but black in the way she sings, among the first black artists to be featured on what was otherwise an all-white MTV, Whitney Houston-How Will I Know (Live on MTV 1986) - YouTube (3:55) or Whitney Houston - All The Man That I Need (Live) - YouTube (6:34) in 1991 from her Welcome Home Heroes concert to honor the troops, obviously taking us back to church with that proud black tradition.  Having to defend herself on TV chat shows didn’t seem to have any impact.  What caught her eye, however, was the instant appeal of another Soul Train performer, Bobby Brown, which seemed to solve all her problems, as he was black enough, and straight.  After a three-year courtship they were married.          

While Whitney seems genuinely happy at first, over time the influence of her husband becomes brooding and more imposing, especially when her earnings simply go through the roof, all but leaving him in the dust as a performing artist, which seems to deflate his image of a man, so he misbehaves as a way of getting attention.  The film disproves any thought that he may have introduced Whitney to drugs, as that came from her own brothers at age 16, who call Bobby Brown a lightweight in terms of drug use.  So quite a few things are going on behind the scenes, as her husband and father genuinely detest the influence of Robyn Crawford, yet it turns out their own influence is much more damaging, eventually pushing Crawford out altogether, who felt Brown’s philandering and self-destructive influence on Whitney’s career would have a devastating influence, as they simply retreated for days and weeks on end behind hotel room doors, each fighting their own demons, struggling with addiction issues, which the family continued to deny, never acknowledging any real or profound impact, despite Whitney’s public attempts to seek treatment, almost always leaving prematurely, with her husband apparently threatened by her sobriety, eventually falling back into the same habits.  Drugs destroyed both her voice and her career, so it’s telling that two of the closest to Whitney, her mother and her husband, wouldn’t even discuss drug use before the camera, with Brown astonishingly claiming it had nothing to do with her death.  As people don’t normally drown in hotel bathtubs, viewers will find him both delusional and detestable.  Much more forthcoming is Mary Jones, Whitney’s aunt and personal assistant, the one who discovered Whitney dead in a Beverly Hilton bathtub at age 48, who heartbreakingly witnessed a 14-year marriage fall apart and end in divorce, with both fatally inadequate to raise a child, as their daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, died at age 22 in a death identical to her mother.  It was Mary Jones, along with one of Whitney’s brothers, Gary Garland, who insinuated sexual abuse, as Garland was himself abused as a child around age 8 or 9, naming his cousin Dee Dee Warwick (now deceased, but who would have been in her late 20’s), suggesting she abused Whitney as well, particularly when her mother was away for long periods of time and the children were left in her care.  What is intimated here is that Whitney wasn’t able to come to terms with her sexuality, and be open about it, because of the horror of that abuse.  This discovery comes late in the film and was discovered near the end of the director’s shoot, where the family finds it a detestable admission in the film, like what good does that do now?  Certainly one of the more uncomfortable aspects of the film is the unspoken realization of how much the family contributed to Whitney’s demise, as they repeatedly covered up for her, always singing her praises, but leaving out the darker side with the long-lasting scars.  Perhaps most telling is Macdonald’s interview with a tearful Lynn Volkman, Whitney’s publicist, who had been with her since the start of her career.  “I’ve spent 25 years lying about Whitney, so it’s very difficult for me to get into the other gear of actually trying to say what is truthful…I now feel so guilty.  I thought I was helping her.  I was doing what was required of me.  But actually, I was enabling the addiction, and enabling all this bad behavior by doing that.  Why did I do that?”  Of course, that’s a question none of us can answer, offering instead a devastatingly poignant and emotionally involving film that explores the highs and lows in equal measure, filled with touching moments throughout, offering a special glimpse of this mega-star performer who lost a personal struggle with her own demons. 

Broadway Danny Rose

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE           A                    

USA  (84 mi)  1984  d:  Woody Allen

You know what my philosophy of life is? That it’s important to have some laughs, but you gotta suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life.

It’s very important to be guilty. I’m guilty all the time and I never did anything

My hand to God, she’s gonna be at Carnegie Hall. But I’ll let you have her now at the old price, okay? Which is - which is anything you wanna give me. Anything at all.         —Danny Rose (Woody Allen)

The unreserved, unadulterated Woody Allen at his relaxed best, one of his funniest films, a film loaded with Yiddish and one-liners, not to mention plenty of Jewish guilt, a tribute to the Borscht Belt-Catskills comedy circuit, which is told as a feature length long running joke starring Allen as Danny Rose, renowned throughout the land as the personal manager of the worst acts in show business, opening and closing with a group of New York City comics sitting around the Carnegie Deli telling jokes and talking about the old times.  When they get around to mentioning Danny Rose, each has their own anecdote, but one (Sandy Baron) says hold on, he’s got the best Danny Rose story there is, which then takes up the rest of the film.  Beautifully shot by Gordon Willis in black and white, it would be impossible to understand Danny Rose without comprehending his innate Jewishness, defiantly non-religious, which happened to be the norm in his generation, yet something of a beacon of hope in a moral wasteland.  The film also stars Mia Farrow in one of her better roles as Tina Vitale, playing against type, a manipulative, self-centered, tough-talking bombshell whose wiseguy husband was recently killed by the mob when he was shot in the eyes.  “He had it comin’,” Farrow deadpans, while Danny nearly faints, remarking “The bullets go right through, don’t they?”  Danny has to stop helping his regular acts, the Jascha Heifetz of wine glass entertainers (“Not one lesson, never taken one lesson!”), piano playing birds, the balloon twisters, the blind xylophone player, the one-legged tap dancer, the dressed parrot, or a hypnotist act that goes wrong when his subjects don’t wake up (“I promise you, if your wife never wakes up again, I’ll take you to any restaurant of your choice — do you like Chinese food?”)  in order to devote his time exclusively to one act, Nick Apollo Forte (basically playing himself) as Lou Canova, an overweight, egotistical has-been lounge singer, a 50’s crooner, and worse, a serial womanizer with a drinking problem, who is making a comeback when the country takes an interest in the nostalgia craze. 

Canova is two-timing his wife with an unseen glamour girl he claims he’s in love with, giving her a white rose every day, and when he’s booked at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, with the possibility of being the opening act for Milton Berle at Caesar’s Palace, he pleads with Danny to “be the beard” and bring his girl as Danny’s date so his wife won’t get suspicious.  When Danny drives to Jersey to pick her up before the show, she’s hopping mad, screaming profanities over the phone at Canova that she never wants to see him again, as he was seen in the company of a cheap blond the night before.  Danny, of course, is all apologies and anything else he can think of to calm her down, but she’s out the door making a trip to the neighborhood psychic for advice, which leads to crashing a mob wedding party, where one of the wise guys has a crush on Farrow, and when he sees her with Danny, he feels his honor has been disrespected and vows revenge.  The rest of the afternoon is spent running away from crazed Italians carrying baseball bats, each one threatening to kill him.  Allen and Farrow are marvelous together, as it’s a hilarious romp through the most unsightly places, the swamps of New Jersey (“All these weeds everywhere, I feel like Moses,”), a warehouse filled with Macy’s parade floats and exploding helium balloons that lead to cartoonish Munchkin-sounding threats in the middle of a gunfight, also a dumping ground where Farrow utters “I recognize this place, my ex-husband’s friends used to dump bodies here.” Danny, of course, has lost it, especially when they have to take a boat back across the Hudson, as he fears for his life when his feet aren’t touching the ground.  It was during this boat ride in the fog that Farrow recalls urging Canova to get a better manager a few days ago, that Danny Rose, who she’d never met, wasn’t providing what he needed. 

Despite surviving the afternoon alive and in one piece, when they arrive at the club, Canova is smashed, as he was a wreck drinking all day waiting to hear from them.  Danny, of course, has his home made remedy waiting which he’s provided plenty of times before, because, after all, a personal manager must provide personalized services.  Danny also picks out all the clothes, the order of the songs (‘‘What you should do is ‘My Funny Valentine’ after you do Great Crooners from the past who are now deceased...”), even suggesting a few onstage moves as well as offering the advice from a neverending list of deceased relatives, not to mention his longstanding professional motto: “You gotta look in the mirror and say your three S’s.  Star.  Smile.  Strong.”  Berle and Howard Cosell show up and Canova is a hit revitalizing songs that should have stayed dead long ago.  So in celebration, Canova decides to go with new management, leaving Danny in a white-palmed state of flux, like what more could he do for the guy, and this is the thanks he gets?  After a quick uncomfortable moment, followed by a somewhat hilarious uncomfortable moment, there’s a shot of the big floats of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade before Danny gathers all his acts together to come over for a Thanksgiving dinner party to eat frozen turkey TV dinners.  To see all the lovable losers in the same shot is a bit ludicrous, especially the bird wearing a dress and a bonnet, as they’re like lost souls, loved and nurtured by the craziest yet most devoted agent in show business.  Allen’s affection for this character is the heart of the film, often feeling like a Yom Kippur atonement, where Danny’s fierce loyalty to his acts is supposedly based upon Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, who have produced every single movie Allen has ever directed.  When the blind xylophonist blurts out in a straight face that the cranberry dressing is too dry, and what he’s actually eating is the mashed potatoes, well it’s hard not to crack up, as this movie personifies theater of the absurd.  By the end, however, Farrow remembers one of Danny’s uncle Sidney’s best lines, “Acceptance.  Forgiveness.  Love,” and underneath all the crazy antics is one of the sweetest love stories in the Allen repertoire.

The Iceman

Barbara and Richard Kuklinski as teenagers

 









Richard Kuklinski

THE ICEMAN            B   
USA  (105 mi)  2012  d:  Ariel Vromen            Official site 

Beginning in the spring of 1954, Kuklinski began prowling Hell’s Kitchen in a search of victims. He came to Manhattan numerous times over the ensuing weeks and months and killed people, always men, never a female, he says, always someone who rubbed him the wrong way, for some imagined or extremely slight reason. He shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned men to death. He left some where they dropped. He dumped some into the nearby Hudson River. Murder, for Richard, became sport. The New York police came to believe that the bums were attacking and killing one another, never suspecting that a full fledged serial killer from New Jersey was coming over to Manhattan's West Side for the purpose of killing people, to practice and perfect murder. Richard made the West Side of Manhattan a kind of lab for murder, a school, he says. 

—Philip Carlo, author of The Iceman, Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, 2006

While HBO already aired The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer in 1992, a documentary of two interviews a decade apart of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious mob enforcer for the Gambino crime family, alleging he killed somewhere between 100 and 250 people, there are also several books written on the subject, Philip Carlo’s The Iceman, Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, a rambling, non-investigative account that reveals as much truth as fiction, and the 1993 book upon which this film is based, Anthony Bruno's The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer.  Bruno combines the stories of the notorious killer, a former altar boy who is also the seriously abused son of a brutal, alcoholic, and child-murdering (killing Richard’s older brother Florian) father in Hackensack, New Jersey, and the ATF agent Dominick Polifrone, a cop who grew up with the same mobsters in Hackensack, but posed as a mobster in a risky undercover assignment wearing a wire of Kuklinski attempting to buy cyanide.  The book captures the tension of the ATF agent fearing he would be the next target, as Kuklinski’s reputation for cold-blooded efficiency intimidated even the crime families, while the film is less interested in any police involvement, preferring an exposé on the double life of Kuklinski, played by Michael Shannon, a shadowy figure who heartlessly kills with ease using a variety of methods including derringers, shotguns, knives, poison, ice picks, tire irons, baseball bats, bombs, along with his bare hands while also maintaining a normal family life as a husband and doting father of two daughters in suburban New Jersey.  To them, he was actively involved in the legitimate business of currency exchanges and finance, seen as a respectable man in the community, never giving them reason to suspect otherwise, though in real life Kuklinski was an enormous hulk of a man who regularly beat his wife.  Still, up until the moment of his arrest, they inexplicably remained completely in the dark about what he did for a living.  

Kuklinski lies when he meets his wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) in the mid 60’s, amusingly telling her he dubs Disney films for a living when he’s really duplicating porn films, and while he’s not yet connected to the mob, he casually slices the throat of a poolroom hothead who casts dispersions on the reputation of his wife to be.  While this is the first murder shown in the film, it’s more likely that he’s killed a dozen men by then, many of them simply for sport, where he was a weird way of practicing various techniques on live subjects, just to see how they work.  But it’s the porn business controlled by organized crime that initially gets him involved, when mob boss Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) pays him a visit on a sizeable debt owed and decides to have some fun at his expense, sticking a gun in his face and the guy doesn’t even flinch.  Showing cojones to a mob boss is not an insignificant thing.  When DeMeo points out a random bum on the street and orders him to kill him, Kuklinski, better known by now as The Pollack, displays such a natural ease that he instantly becomes Roy’s favorite enforcer, staging robberies, collecting debts, helping traffic illegal porn for DeMeo and the Gambino family until he eventually becomes their preferred killer for hire, known for his efficiency, as his executions are ruthlessly cold and quick.  DeMeo’s right hand man is interestingly played by David Schwimmer, supposedly a Jewish kid he picked up off the streets with furry eyebrows and a shaggy ponytail, where despite the hardened look he will always be overly anxious Ross Geller from the TV sitcom Friends (1994 – 2004), while DeMeo’s connection to the Gambino family is Robert Davi as Leonard Marks, whose pock-marked face has tough guy character written all over it.  The side characters are all excellent, where outside of Shannon’s smoldering performance, it’s Winona Ryder, making the most of a small part, who may be the biggest surprise, reminiscent of Faye Dunaway as the pampered and overly entitled mob wife in James Gray’s The Yards (1999).  

Perhaps the most chilling sequence in the film is a visit to Trenton Federal Prison where Kuklinski visits his younger brother Joey (older in reality) who raped and killed a 12-year old girl, the nearly unrecognizable Stephen Dorff from Somewhere (2010), where we gain insight into their collective child abuse, with older brother Richard always bearing the brunt of his father’s beatings.  Joey crudely reminds him that they’re no different, going ballistic when he hears him try to pass himself off as a family man, “You remember when you bashed that kid’s head in with a rock?” literally screaming at him when he tries to leave, “You’re no better than me, we’re screwed up in the head!”  While it is true, Kuklinski's daughters are devoted to their dad, Shannon is near brilliant as a complex individual who remains distant and aloof but capable of conveying softness at home, a subtle and nuanced work defined by physically remaining calm and still, almost inert, expressing himself with only a facial gesture, where his scenes together with Liotta are a sheer pleasure.  While the initial intrigue into Kuklinski’s duplicitous life is intriguing, carefully balancing his calculating professional brutality with an almost tender home life, it’s when the mob is forced to cut him loose that things start to go astray, as without them, he’s an uncontrolled loose cannon, where his emotional stability starts to unravel as well, veering towards interior psychological horror, where the guy is surrounded by an all-enveloping paranoia, believing everyone around him to be his enemy except his family, where he goes on a one-man crusade to extinguish them all.  While it’s never clear how this is supposed to protect the lives of his family, who seem ever more vulnerable and exposed, his actions only draw public attention to the mob, something they deplore.  

The film starts to deteriorate with his friendship and tutorial from another hired killer, Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans), a sleazy assassin whose cover is driving around in an ice-cream truck selling popsicles to children, both of them loners, teaching him some of the most unsavory aspects of the business, such as freezing their victims and chopping them up before disposing of various body parts, often placing them in the trunks of cars and having them compacted into scrap metal before shipping them off to Japan to make new cars.  Hard corps and gritty throughout, depicted with almost unwatchable graphic gore through the equally remorseless character of Freezy, the director is literally rubbing the audience’s noses in the overriding stench of killing and death.  The seamy story covers some 30-years, detectable only through vintage cars, changing hair styles, and some odd choices of music, where we hear ELO’s lushly orchestrated “Livin’ Thing” ELO- Livin' Thing - YouTube  (4:01) during a roller-skating outing of Kuklinski and his family and later we hear Blondie's "Heart of Glass" Blondie - Heart of Glass 1979 Video TopPop stereo widescreen (4:09) during an infamous disco scene where Kuklinski blows cyanide into a guy’s face on the dance floor, killing him instantly.  It was Freezy that introduced Kuklinski to cyanide, becoming his preferred method of choice, as he could use it in public and simply walk by his victim while pretending to sneeze, spraying his face with poison, where he didn’t even have to dispose of the body afterwards.  But it was also Kuklinski’s undoing, attempting to buy the hard-to-find, exotic poison from an undercover federal agent, ultimately betrayed at age 51 in 1986 by “the only man I didn't kill.”  While the body count feels exaggerated and grows out of control by the end, this barely hints at the real damage caused by this man, who reportedly started by killing neighborhood cats as a youth and said he committed his first murder at 14, after which he said he felt ‘empowered.’  

Note – While Shannon was the original pick, there were multiple last minute casting changes, including Chris Evans and Ray Liotta replacing James Franco (who later took a secondary role) and Benicio del Toro, while Maggie Gyllenhaal quit after announcing her second pregnancy, and was replaced by Wynona Ryder, who’s suddenly all grown up.