Waiting To Exhale

Alex Holt

02/28/2012

Waiting To Exhale

               Waiting to Exhale has the perfect name to me because this movie hits all major key points of what black woman want in a man and have not found, so the woman are holding their breath and waiting exhale with new great men but they never find them in the movie. It is kind of like a sad twisted love story along with a real life twist all in one movie. The actress in this movie are along the A list in Hollywood, Whitney Houston played a woman named (Savannah) in the movie she was a woman in search of love so she left her job in Denver to travel to Arizona where she had a job awaiting her, along with her 3 friends who all stared in the movie. Angela Bassett played a woman named (Bernadine) who is left by her husband in the beginning of the movie for a white woman played by Loretta Devine (Gloria).

               The plot of this movie is straight forward so if you’re looking for a movie with a lot of twist and hiding secrets keep on going past this movie, because you will not find what you are looking for. If you like a standard chick flick with a twist that woman can get even too then this is your movie. In this movie 123 minute movie Forest Whitaker keeps the drama high in all the relationships throughout the whole movie. One thing I would like to give the director a thumbs up for is giving all the woman in the movie some type of closer in the movie, even if it was just some type of mental closer on a bad relationship, or a woman making up her mind and deciding to have a baby with a man she knew would never amount to being a good father or even leave his wife.

               Robert Ebert says "Waiting to Exhale is not really an assault on black men (and men in general), but an escapist fantasy that women in the audience can enjoy by musing, "I wish I had her problems" - and her car, house, wardrobe, figure and men, even wrong men.” The sentence by him was taking straight out of my mouth because as a kid when I went to see this movie back in 1995 or 1996 the older woman I went with talked about this movie for weeks and talked about how there men weren’t worth anything and wished they had better jobs and more money, but they all went home later with these same men they just degraded. I think a movie as drama packed as this reminds me of a good soap opera, because it goes back and forth multiple times with the same characters and just about the same story. Overall I think this was a good movie for its time frame it was made in and is still relevant to this day and I must say RIP to the Great Whitney Houston who did a great job acting, in this film.