Last Thursday, after some poor decision-making around a dicey takeout dinner, I succumbed to a vicious bout of food poisoning. After a lengthy battle in the bathroom, I emerged weak and dehydrated on Saturday night. I thought I was hallucinating at first when I saw that a Canadian channel was about to air the Lifetime Aaliyah biopic, 'The Princess Of R&B', and honestly, I still wasn't sure by the end if my brain had invented the entire thing. Maybe it was just all a bad dream, I thought. However, the internet's rage-filled explosion directly afterward told me that it wasn't a mirage, it was just a really terrible movie.
For starters, let's just get something clear: they made an Aaliyah biopic without a single Aaliyah song. It's important to note that the movie did include a couple recognizable songs, most prominently, Bobby Brown's 'My Perogitive' (because let's face the facts, the man's gotta eat), and some cover songs that Aaliyah did sing, but the majority were songs that kinda sounded like Tamia's 'So Into You' without actually
being Tamia's 'So Into You', or trashy demo-reel R&B that nobody has ever heard before (or ever wants to hear again). I don't really think that Lifetime intended to leave out Aaliyah's music, which means that Lifetime approached the estate of Aaliyah, most likely her parents, showed them a script of a biopic about their daughter, and they were so horrified that they were not willing to release the rights to a single song. Just let that sink in for a moment.
From the very beginning, it was clear they'd really phoned it in on the casting. The younger versions of Aaliyah through the 'rise to stardom' sequence each looked like an entirely different child in each scene. R Kelly looked like the dude that drives the bus I take in the mornings. Actually, this one may not be that far off base. Missy Elliott was thin. Like, now thin, but this was 1997, and Missy was wearing suits made of blown-up garbage bags in most of her videos, because I'm not sure she could even fit into most pants at the time. I'm pretty sure the dude that played Timbaland was one of the prop guy's nephews that accidentally wandered onto the set, because there is no way any human actually selected this young man for an even
remotely reasonable facsimile.
Let's get to the real bread and butter here: R. Kelly. Instead of approaching the relationship with any sorts of rape-y undertones, they chose a 'kids-will-be-kids, and 38-year-old-men-will-be-38-year-old-men' spin. Puppy love, if you will. That is to say, if puppy love included some sort of child-bride situation, and a whole lot of statutory contact. I'm sure they were fearful of any repercussions from Kelz himself, because as pedophilic as he is, let's face the facts: he can buy and sell just about anyone's ass (and probably has, on occasion).
Lastly, the final quarter of the movie was a glaring tribute to one person, and one person only: Damon Dash. Though in real life, they dated for around a year, the movie approached the relationship like the be-all-end-all for this girl. She was young, attractive, rich, and in her early 20's. If that plane didn't crash, you know that bitch would have dumped his ass, and would probably be dating Drake right now.
There's more than just the reasons I've already listed. Glaring omissions of her relationship with Jet Li (and let's be honest, those sex scenes could have been
hot like fire), era-inaccuracies (did you know Aaliyah invented 'talk to the hand' in 1988?), and not-so-fabulous singing in a movie all about singing. Really, I could go on all day, but the real point of this post is: wouldn't it have been so much cooler if I was just hallucinating the whole thing?
~sarah p.
