‘Nina’ Review: Zoe Saldana, What Happened To Your Miss Simone Biopic?
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Miscast and misbegotten, this catastrophic biopic plays like a sketch-comedy version of a bad movie about a legendary performer
“Nina,” an infuriatingly amateurish picture about the great singer and pianist Nina Simone, is a new low for the musical biopic genre. First time writer-director Cynthia Mort, whose main experience is as a writer on the sitcoms “Roseanne” and “Will & Grace,” unforgivably exploits Simone’s memory and name with a movie that plays like a sketch comedy parody of the worst possible Nina Simone biopic. No one involved seems to have a clue who Simone was or what she stood for.
Mort has said that she could not get financing for “Nina” when she submitted the names of her preferred African-American actresses for the role of Simone. But then she was offered money if she would cast Zoe Saldana, who was thought to be a bankable enough name, and there was an outcry when it was reported that Saldana would be darkening her skin with make-up to play Simone, a development that pushed an already strained situation into the realm of the offensive and the grotesque.
Most of “Nina” is set in the 1990s, when Simone was in her sixties and her career was in eclipse due to her temperamental behavior, and so on top of everything else Saldana, who is in her thirties, looks much too young to be convincing as a diva in winter. Saldana does all of her own singing, and she uses no Simone-like vibrato but sometimes pushes her voice lower to try to sound like her.
She fails miserably on every single song, slaughtering most of the best numbers in Simone’s catalogue and even hitting off-key notes here and there. Saldana stares off into the distance when she sings and frowns and glowers in a clownish manner, trying to appear Serious and Significant in a way that just makes her look absurd.
Saldana gives a truly terrible performance in “Nina,” especially in the scenes where she is pitching fits and throwing champagne bottles at people, which play as if she were doing some “Mad TV” sketch about a crazy star in a turban. David Oyelowo, who plays Simone’s ? handler Clifton Henderson, also gives a bad performance where he does nearly nothing and just looks very depressed to be in this inane movie.
“Nina” begins with a brief scene where we see the young Simone insisting on having her parents up front as she plays a piano recital, and it does include a few brief and arbitrary glimpses of her 1960s prime, but most of the scatterbrained narrative revolves around her 1990s decline and interactions with Henderson. We see Simone take a random phone call from Richard Pryor (Mike Epps), and then a brief flashback to them playing a gig together, but this tells us nothing we need to know about either Simone or Pryor.
Scattered throughout are brief scenes from an interview Simone does with a French journalist, and these are notable only because Saldana suddenly decides to do some kind of accent in these interview segments. The really distressing thing about “Nina,” which features a light comedy-type musical score, is its cheerful, bouncy tone, as if a laugh track is indicated every time Simone loses her temper again. “Nina” tries to make Simone into a joke, but the only joke here is the movie itself.
Surely a decent budget could have been found to do a proper film about Simone for cable with an appropriate lead actress like Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, or any number of other lavishly gifted African-American actresses who could have lip-synched to Simone’s own rippling voice and made us understand what made her so angry.
Until that movie comes along, “Nina” is an affront that should be shunned. If you are unfortunate enough to see “Nina,” you will need to spend a lot of time afterward listening to the real Simone on records and YouTube and anywhere else you can find a place where her intensely moving voice still lives. That voice will never be forgotten by anyone who cares about first-class musicianship.
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Well ? ...
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Damn.
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Came for her like Caine damn...
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Nooooooooo lmaooo
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I need a source. T/s is known for endorsing fuckery
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This forum needs to learn how to cite sources aka post links or ? .
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Who really thought this would be a good movie? Zoe Saldana playing Nina Simone - say that ? to yourself. Viola Davis though...
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Damn... that was an official lambasting. I didn't know they still did those.
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Gaaaaaaaawd damn
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As expected
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Who made the review though...
Let's see their review on another movie we all saw to establish credibility -
Here's another review
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/movies/nina-review-zoe-saldana-nina-simone.html?_r=0&referer=http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/nina_2016/?search=Nina
One night, Nina Simone, the great jazz singer, composer and pianist, now semiretired on the French Riviera, calls up her old friend Richard Pryor. It’s the 1990s, and both of them have seen better days. His first words to her are “Can you imagine?,” and while he’s referring to his own struggles with addiction and illness, his question haunts “Nina,” a sincere and spectacularly misbegotten new biopic.
While the movie may invite us to imagine its subject’s extraordinary life, it frustrates our ability to do so at every turn. The conversation with Pryor, who is played by Mike Epps, is a perfect example. A flashback establishes that they performed together back in the ’60s, but it’s gone before any historical or emotional significance has registered. In its wake there is a lingering flicker of curiosity. Nina Simone and Richard Pryor were friends. Wouldn’t that make an interesting movie?
There are so many interesting movies hovering in the air, none of them the one onscreen. “Nina,” written and directed by Cynthia Mort, has taken a long time to arrive in theaters. In the months leading up to its release, the film has been criticized for casting Zoe Saldana, who is also credited as an executive producer, in the title role. The real Nina Simone had much darker skin than Ms. Saldana, whose participation has sparked renewed discussion about persistent color bias in popular culture. The fact that her complexion, like her accent, seems to shift from one scene to the next is unlikely to help.
But the problems with “Nina” are more than skin deep. Ms. Saldana does her own singing, and while she has a fine voice, she lacks Ms. Simone’s lower register range and the uniquely Simonean tonal quality that was somehow both raw and silken, furious and sad. Still, the film, shot in cool, soft, vintagey colors by Mihai Malaimare Jr., works better as a lounge act than as a biography. The songs (including “Four Women,” “Wild Is the Wind,” “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “See-Line Woman”) are still great. Even so, those interested in Simone’s art should listen to her records. Those curious about her life can check out “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” Liz Garbus’s recent, and excellent, documentary.
Many of the important facts in that movie appear as footnotes or flashbacks in this one. An early scene shows Simone as a teenage piano prodigy in North Carolina, insisting that her parents be seated in the segregated hall where she is performing. Later, in an interview on French radio, she recalls her Juilliard education and her rejection from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, which had no place for a young black woman interested in classical music. We catch a glimpse of her composing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” in the company of its inspiration, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. We learn that she had a daughter and was active in the civil rights movement.
By ROBIN LINDSAY 1:02
Movie Review: ‘Nina’
Video The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews “Nina.”
But the threads that would connect these data points into something coherent — let alone revelatory, moving or provocative — are never supplied. Instead, we are treated to a bizarre, shambling drama about Simone’s relationship, in her last decade, with Clifton Henderson (David Oyelowo), who was her assistant and then her manager.
They meet in Los Angeles, where Simone has been placed in a psychiatric ward after pulling a gun on a record-company executive. Clifton, a nurse, treats her kindly and is aware of her fame, so she drops some cash on him (literally) and spirits him away to the South of France, where she leads a dissipated expat life. Existing on Champagne and cigarettes, she pouts and sleeps and swears at poor Clifton, refusing to eat the food he prepares her and occasionally throwing things at him.
In her early 60s, she still intermittently performs and records, but her erratic behavior, some of it the result of bipolar disorder, keeps her from the comeback she desires and deserves. To the extent that “Nina” has a plot, it involves Clifton’s efforts to help her and preserve his own patience and dignity.
But their interactions, too, feel like a weird cabaret act, or like outtakes from a sitcom about a crazy diva and her loyal servant. Ms. Mort’s writing lacks psychological texture, and her direction generates little intensity, or even continuity.
To say nothing of relevance. Ms. Garbus’s documentary implicitly linked Simone’s public career and private travails to the racial and sexual politics of the present. There are few musicians whose work feels so permanently urgent, whose contribution still demands to be grappled with and understood. It gives me no pleasure to say that “Nina” contributes nothing to that understanding.
“Nina” is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. -
Critics hated batman v superman,
I loved it -
Critics hated batman v superman,
I loved it
This is different though. With a superhero movie, the story and characterizations can be a bit of a mess, but the movie can still be enjoyable. It's harder to pull that trick for a biopic. -
LOL
@DWO got a crush on Saldana so nothing can change his mind
LOL @ the director of this film being a writer on comedy like Will & Grace -
it leaked yesterday
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Don't wanna see it
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Well if it's anything like the Miles Davis movie, it might be iight...
In Miles ahead the focus wasn't on the music or his career, it was basically him wilding out on his label, a beef over a recorded session, and him in his feelings about his first wife....
It wasn't a chronicle of his life, just a peak into a rough patch....
I don't think the goal of this movie is to chronicle her entire career either. I think Zoe is just playing an old bitter Nina who is angry about things in the past...
Just like I saw miles movie, I'll check this one out -
Not watching
Written and directed by a cracka. Strike 1 and 2
Zoe Saldana as Nina. Strike 3
I feel the same way about this as I do Gods of Egypt
Won't even bootleg -
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It's 5% on RT. RT at times be on some bs but if it's that low then it's probably trash
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On some real ? , I should have not watch Nina Simone videos and lastly her cover of strange fruit on YouTube. ? got me in tears and having me wanna leave the South for good.
Nina Simone was a staple of a the black spirit and I wish some day I can be half as brave as her. Beautiful and strong and a haunting voice. -
Well if it's anything like the Miles Davis movie, it might be iight...
In Miles ahead the focus wasn't on the music or his career, it was basically him wilding out on his label, a beef over a recorded session, and him in his feelings about his first wife....
It wasn't a chronicle of his life, just a peak into a rough patch....
I don't think the goal of this movie is to chronicle her entire career either. I think Zoe is just playing an old bitter Nina who is angry about things in the past...
Just like I saw miles movie, I'll check this one out
I'm sure the goal was to make a good movie, and based on both of these reviews, it isn't that, so they failed.
