The movie was screened for critics a scant 36 hours before its release, which generally suggests a level of insecurity about the product. ( SEE: Whitney Houston, her life in pictures)Īs it stands, the tragedy touching the characters-softened from the 1976 film, director Salim Akil’s ( Jumping the Broom) remake swaps one death for one much less heartbreaking-has less impact than the real-life tragedy. From how much she gives to the performance, you would not suspect drugs would take her within months. Honestly, it could have been: Houston’s voice is rough and raspy, but she is undeniably there in Sparkle, a funny, convincing presence, seemingly reveling in the chance to act. Before she died in February, at 48, Sparkle was being billed as her comeback. Sparkle is Houston’s last film, and her first feature film since 1996’s The Preacher’s Wife. I could go on at length about how the original is more desperate, darker and more impressionistic than this slick new version, but let’s get down to business: The biggest distinction between the two films is that the 2012 Sparkle is a cinematic pallbearer, arriving with the burden of Whitney Houston’s drug-related death on its not-intended-to-be-mighty shoulders. ( READ: TIME’s appreciation of Whitney Houston) Sparkle herself is not just a singer, but a prolific songwriter, who the third sister says “could be the next Smokey Robinson.” (I should use her name, Dolores, since I liked her and Tika Sumpter, the actress playing her, but as the “plain” sister least enchanted with the spotlight, Dolores exists to get the narrative shaft.) Epp’s Satin is a comedian who caters to white audiences, a self-described “Sambo,” while the original Satin only had the imagination to be a mobster. Everyone in this Sparkle has more money and better jobs. When things didn’t work out with music, cast members departed for the Civil Rights movement or construction jobs “upstate” paying the princely sum of $5 to $10 an hour. They’re very different worlds, Motown dangling tantalizingly in front of Sparkle and her sisters in the remake, while in Harlem 10 years earlier things were more casual. The old Sparkle took place in Harlem in 1958, this one is in Detroit in 1968. Older even than Dreamgirls, which it has much in common with, starting with the setting. ![]() This year’s Sparkle, like the original (which had the distinction of being written by famed Hollywood player Joel Schumacher when he was a wee thing of 37) is about corruption, the price of physical beauty and triumph against the odds, all stories as old as the hills. From the get-go, nobody except Sister likes Satin the girls’ mother Emma (the late Whitney Houston) loathes him on sight. His name is Satin-like Sparkle, a name you might expect to find on a product under your sink-and this silky but dangerous creature feeds poor Sister drugs, beats her and interferes with the trio’s grand ambitions. ![]() They have ample talent and Sister (Carmen Ejogo) could shimmy her way to fame in a heartbeat, but a treacherous man (Mike Epps) leads her astray. They go by the name “Sister and the Sisters,” not quite as jazzy as The Supremes, but with a ring to it. Follow a glitzy remake of the 1976 music-heavy film, is about three sisters, one a sex kitten called Sister, the second a tough cookie, the last a shy-boots with the uncommon name of Sparkle ( American Idol winner Jordin Sparks), trying to make it as a girl group.
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