Lifetime & Wendy Williams: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Never Try It Again

By now you’ve probably seen the Aaliyah biopic that aired on Lifetime last night. If you haven’t, you’re lucky. This movie is everything that could go wrong in a film, all rolled in to two hours of wasted time.

I’ll be frank, I had my reservations before the film ever aired. Aaliyah was a huge inspiration in my life. As a young tom boy teenager who was following her passion as a singer at the time, I mimicked most of my style from her. I was a super-fan to say the least. I still have boxes of memorabilia, every photo, calendar, released & unreleased song, CD, DVD, music video, interview, magazine, you name it and I have it stored in my closet. So of course, as someone who had this “bond” of sorts with the memory of the rising star, I wanted the first movie done on her life to be done right. Let’s face it, there’s a lot about Aaliyah we didn’t know and the little that was speculated (rumored relationships with Jay Z, etc) was interesting to me. Unfortunately Lifetime missed the mark completely.

Let’s start with the obvious. The casting was terrible. Alexandra Shipp, though at some points did strike a resemblance to Aaliyah, did nothing to capture her essence. Her dance moves (or her dance double’s moves, rather), her voice (both speaking and singing) were not that of Aaliyah. Aaliyah was a cool, soft spoken, smooth individual. Alex was giving me high strung and junior varsity cheerleader, I wasn’t impressed.

I also wasn’t impressed with the casting of a skinny light skinned woman with a wig and a baggy Adidas track suit as Missy, or a tall skinny light skinned man as Damon Dash. Then there was the catastrophe of R. Kelly’s lace front baldie and Degrassi Drake playing Aaliyah’s brother.

I was also highly disappointed in the amount of time spent on the R. Kelly and Aaliyah love scandal. It was creepy and almost as if Lifetime condoned it. A whole hour was spent talking about Aaliyah and Kellz and the latter part of the movie was spent trying to pack in another 5 years worth of career between commercial breaks. A part in the Aaliyah/R Kelly rendezvous that I found odd is how Lifetime tried to portray it as if Aaliyah was the aggressor. There is a scene where Aaliyah is in the house that the label bought her, she’s snuck away with R. Kelly, and she’s talking about how she missed him. Then at some point after he professes his love to her she tries to lead him up stairs into the bedroom and he stops her and they sit down to talk. Now this is where I’m sitting here confused. Though none of us REALLY know what happened, it’s really hard for me to believe that a man who was later caught peeing on a 13 year old in a sex tape would be led to the bed by a 15 year old girl who spent the majority of her life sheltered in Catholic school. I also felt as if it was that easy to get into Aaliyah’s pants, why would he have been in such a rush to marry her? My theory has always been that he wanted to get in her pants, she wanted to wait until marriage, he made marriage happen and once he got what he wanted, he let it go. But again, I wasn’t there.

Moving on to the issue of Aaliyah’s music. Let’s be clear that her family had no involvement with this film so the only songs that Lifetime was able to use were covers that Aaliyah did. Ok, understandable. I’m not too pressed about it given that Andre 3000 was faced with a similar predicament with the Jimi Hendrix movie and he made it happen anyway. The problem for me, Alexandra Shipp couldn’t make it happen. She failed to capture the soul that even Aaliyah’s soft voice was able to key in on. Alex sounded like a bad karaoke rendition and I would have loved for Lifetime to have just hired some one to voiceover the singing. That could have saved a lot of the viewers disappointment.

A lot of milestones were missed in this movie and they missed the mark with the accuracy as well. It seems like the movie was all about R. Kelly, Aaliyah being love sick and how much she wanted to be a film star. They didn’t even discuss all of her films, preparing for them, left out key music videos and most of all we never got to see Aaliyah on a personal level. She was a goofy, fun person. You can watch her MTV Diary or E! True Hollywood Story or VH1 Behind The Music to see that. The film didn’t touch on any of that. All we saw was a brat who never really got over R. Kelly. And oddly enough, so many of the conversations were had between people who weren’t even involved in the film that I find it hard to believe that any of this happened the way Lifetime says. All this reminded me of was nothing short of a poorly executed high school play.

The worst part was the Powerpoint presentation they tried to pass off as an ending. I would have loved to see Aaliyah in her last moments. I mean, it’s all documented on an episode of BET’s Access Granted, it wouldn’t have been hard to recreate. We never saw Aaliyah work on her last album. We never saw her around her true friends. She just appeared as a bratty little loner. I was very displeased.

Lifetime, we need a resolution and I suggest it’s that instead of rushing to get something out, don’t do it if it can’t be done correctly