![]() Really, the movie just wants to fill its heroine with dreams, place surmountable adversity in her path, and allow her to shine. When it finally does something to get your attention, it's negative attention earned by overdramatic moments and off-the-wall developments. Much of the time, Sparkle is bland and routine, supplying unremarkable music, story, and characters. Can she find the courage to become a star? ![]() Gladly, hope remains for Sparkle, with some encouragement from the now disbanded group's faintly opportunistic manager (Derek Luke). Out of nowhere, it also costs a life and sends one sister to jail on some kind of murder charges. (The movie is a hard PG-13, warranting the longest MPAA rating explanation I've ever seen.) Just as the girls are close to landing a record deal from an important producer (Curtis Armstrong, adding to his legacy of black musician films in an apparent effort to further shed his reputation as "Booger from Revenge of the Nerds"), Sister's troubled situation costs them their big break. After shrugging off her mother's disapproval, she soon plunges into a life of drugs and spousal abuse. In her eyes, waking up Sunday morning to attend Church is good, while accepting a marriage proposal from an oft-televised local stand-up comedian (Mike Epps) who degrades himself to the amusement of white audiences is bad. ![]() She spells out the three rules of her house as thus: respect, getting an education, and having a relationship with the Lord. Naturally, the girls' stern mother (Whitney Houston) doesn't want them trying to make their dreams come true. Thus, her flashy older sister Sister (Carmen Ejogo) becomes the face of the three-sister R&B group that less focal, aspiring med student sibling Dee (Tika Sumpter) completes. Sparks' Sparkle is a gifted songwriter, but lacks the confidence to put herself out there as a singer. This time around, the titular role is filled by Jordin Sparks, the 2007 "American Idol" winner with a platinum record and over 30 Wikipedia paragraphs to her (household?) name. The film seems like an obvious vehicle for a pop star to break into acting, although that wasn't quite the case for the original's seasoned but not yet famous 16-year-old Irene Cara (an alumna of "The Electric Company", who appropriately enough would find Fame). Neither the period setting nor anything else in this Sparkle provides any flavor. This version arbitrarily takes place in 1968 Detroit, presumably to set the music and story against the backdrop of Motown and make the dream of musical success a more attainable one. The original movie, co-written by '90s Batman franchise-killing director Joel Schumacher, was set in Harlem during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Still, you definitely have seen this movie in the sense that we all have because this is as generic as any fictional tale of a singer's rise. You probably haven't seen the little-known 1976 film on which this is loosely based and odds are that you didn't catch this remake in theaters. But the allure of a posthumous performance that clearly factored into the strong showings of The Dark Knight and Michael Jackson's This Is It didn't draw the masses to this musical drama, which had an ordinary run in fairly wide release. Featuring Houston in a supporting role, Sparkle didn't budge from its scheduled mid-August release date. Shortly before her Grammy Awards weekend death, though, Houston made one final movie, acting for the first time in a decade and a half. And then, aside from Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella for the 1997 revival of The Wonderful World of Disney, Houston's acting career ended, while her music one stalled over a number of high-profile personal problems. ![]() The following Christmas brought The Preacher's Wife. Three years later, she followed that up with the mid-sized hit ensemble comedy Waiting to Exhale. Her debut, The Bodyguard, was one of 1992's biggest blockbusters. Houston's movie stardom was short-lived and limited to the mid-1990s. When Whitney Houston passed away in February, the world didn't just lose one of the best-selling pop singers of all time, it also lost an actress, albeit one that hadn't performed in fifteen years.
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