Synopsis
Who Needs A Heart When A Heart Can Be Broken?
Singer Tina Turner rises to stardom while mustering the courage to break free from her abusive husband Ike.
Directed by Brian Gibson
Singer Tina Turner rises to stardom while mustering the courage to break free from her abusive husband Ike.
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Tina Turner is not happy with this movie and says it made her look like a "victim". Her opinion is the only one that matters here but I will just say that when it comes to situations like this we needed to retire the word "victim" and use "survivor" instead. It's saddening she feels this way because I don't think anyone in this world considers Tina Turner to be anyone but an incredibly strong and resilient person.
The film is a standard biopic but it's elevated by great performances by Laurence Fishburne and especially the goddess Angela Bassett, particularly in the latter half. She lipsyncs of course but she absolutely nails the physicality and the moves, "Proud Mary" performance here…
This movie shifts tones very effectively, and has lots of beautiful other kind of tones.
CW: abuse, misogyny
Every piece of art you love was brought to you via exploitation.
It needs to be made clear at the start that though the process of exploitation is used to distribute the art, though exploitation drags art out of creators in hard circumstances, though exploitation is an unavoidable quality of a capitalist system, none of the art you love was created because of exploitation. Near the end of the film, Ike tells Tina he "made her." The truth is, she made herself in spite of him.
Take the scene where Phil Spector (a known abuser of women himself) comes to ask Tina to make a song with him. It ends with Ike and Phil going off-camera to…
Angela Bassett is terrific as Tina Turner. However the movie itself felt very mundane in its storytelling, focusing mostly just on the abuse rather than her career itself.
It’s almost redundant at this point to say ‘Angela Bassett as Tina Turner is one of the best performances ever’ but it’s true. The difficulty of putting the magic of her into words lies within the fact that it’s an experience rather than a calculated, predictable notion. Her screen time embodies such an emotionally rich and tough persona that it seems as if she is this woman. The amount of work, respect, energy and boldness she injects into each second is an unaltered treat that never fails to showcase the effects of both brutality and luck. Her musical numbers are impressively vibrant while her shocking realizations are beautifully haunting. The film may be a vehicle for her to succeed, but when it’s at THIS level, you can’t deny how absolutely entrancing she is.
Everything you can think of that makes Angela Bassett such a queen, one of the greatest and a powerhouse, is fantastically encapsulated in her Oscar-nominated role as the icon Tina Turner. I’d like to say she captures the essence of the artist, but apparently Tina herself says she doesn’t, so who am I to say otherwise? Either way, accurate or not (more on that later), she was just brilliant and the energy she exuded was infectious. She gets to be fierce on stage but shows her vulnerability and again, she has such a commanding presence. For his part, in his also Oscar-nominated role as Ike, Fishburne is an abuser of the tallest order, a c—t you immediately…