What's Love Got to Do with It (1993 film)

It is a TV movie of the week that is elevated by the performance of the leading actors.

My favorite scene is when they show up to a function after having a wild and crazy fight in the limousine.

Angela was pissed that Tina stepped in to play herself for the climactic title song performance.

The soundtrack is excellent.

Angela Bassett was robbed of the Oscar for this role

R2 How do you know?

I never understood why Bassett got so muscular for the film. Tina was never that muscular.

The screenplay was horrible and completely bastardized the book by making Tina and Ike into cartoon characters. R1 is right. It's a Lifetime movie elevated by two performers at the top of their game. I will say the musical numbers were great, and Tina re-recorded all the songs for the concert numbers, which was great. However, narratively speaking, it was a wretched film, only memorable due to Bassett and Fishburne.

(I find it interesting that Fishburne turned down the role of Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction because he didn't like how the character was written but agreed to play Ike Turner in a film that depicted him as nothing more than a Mississippi pimp with some musical talent.)

Dumbshit R7, he did What's Love before Pulp Fiction, when he has fewer options to say no to

R8, you need to calm down. Calling someone “dumbshit” (what are you, thirteen?) is completely unnecessary. You have all the emotional maturity of an orangutan.

Even with all the demands he made to improve the script, the end result still made Ike into mustache twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain. In Tina’s book she presented him as a complicated, disturbed individual. He wasn’t some one-dimensional pimp who only had a knack for talent scouting and beating women. Bassett and Fishburne deserved a better script.

Cher should have won for Silkwood in 83, Holly Hunter should have won for Broadcast News in 87, and Angela winning for this in 93.

In my revised Oscar history Angela would have been the second black actress to win BA after Whoopi in 85.

Angela made the stupid comment that her performance was better than Holly because Holly had no lines to learn.

Was the during or after the cpaign?

I love Angela Basset and Lawrence Fishburne in this. Just excellent

Angela on losing the Oscar.

If she didn't make the lines comment in 1993 it unlikely cost her. I think Holly was seen as more due plus her movie won Best Picture.

Holly winning.

OMG Holly thanked Harvey Weinstein but I doubt she was his type.

Sigourney fired her agent because he didn't let her know they wanted her for "The Piano". She must have been very annoyed, especially when it became a huge success. Plus she wouldn't have had to learn any lines ;)

Holly Hunter worked to develop the character's own system of sign language, since in the world of the movie such a thing didn't exist. She didn't "do nothing".

I also don't recall Tina Turner being a body builder, tee hee.

I think Holly was unstoppable that year. She won Best Actress at Cannes, Golden Globe Drama, National Society of Film Critics, and New York Film Critics Circle.

R21 I was also struck she won a lot of precursor awards (NBR, NY, LA, Boston, Berlin) for Broadcast News but lost the Oscar.

Is Angela the OG Viola? She’s bitter as fuck, hopefully she loses her BSA category this year.

R15 her performance was good, but butch it wasn’t that good. The movie played like a Saturday night movie of the week. She’s fucking delusional.

The way she says “Holly Hunta… playin’ uh mute…”

Can we add her to the thread of celebs who probably have said fag?

I saw this when I was 11 and I LOVVVED it. I didn’t know anything about Tina Turner before it and Angela Basset is a goddess. Ike Turner scared the shit out of me

I used to love her. This thread made me not like her. It’s giving Viola.

I haven't watched the WWHL clip but she was probably encouraged to be funny. If WLGTDWI were released in 94 she may have won.

R28 there was no humor, she’s a cunt

Bassett and Turner were fantastic, elevating a movie-of-the-week script to something seriously watchable. And that's because they were playing Stars, and they brought the STAR QUALITY!

And that's the difference between a music biopic that works and one that doesn't, whether or not you believe you're watching a major star.

Angela getting her Golden Globe.

I'm not saying Anna Mae wasn't slapped around, punched and treated like dirt at times, but she has never been called to account for her role in what went on with Ike. As in complicity in his even-worse doings.

That's why I never liked the "poor me" abused-woman triumph shit.

Things went down otherwise in real life than it does in a cynical screenplay and book. But, boy, the took it all the way to the sinker.

Do you think the fact that they used Tina's recordings rather than have Angela sing worked against her?

^ That clip shows the director didn't know what he was doing. You have a great song that we just want to see performed and he uses cutaways and bad camera angles.

I think she said it with humor. At Datalounge, Black woman are presumed to be angry and humorless. If a Brit like Emma Thompson or Olivia Colman made that remark on Graham Norton everyone would think it was hilariously shady.

Sadly, nothing. I’m so lonely.

"Tina’s laugh and the way she spoke took over.”

I still have my Tina Turner wall clock they were giving out the premiere. The legs swung back and forth like the tail on the cat with the bulging eyes clock.

R16 No, Schindler's List won Best Picture that year.

Holly Hunter should have won for Broadcast News and then Stockard Channing could have won in ‘93, the best of the nominees.

Bassett was great though - overall a really strong year (followed by ‘94 which was abysmal)

my memory was Touchstone/ Disney dumped the film. no buzz / not oscar material. I remember being surprised how much I liked it.

I thought Hunter gave the strongest performance that year. Of the nominees I would rank them:

Holly Hunter Emma Thompson Angela Bassett Stockard Channing

I never saw Shadowlands, so I don't know where I would rank her.

By her, I mean Debra Winger.

It's a story about triumph and perseverance but its ugly too.

R43 she didn’t even deserve a nom, tbh

R43 I liked Shadow lands but I was surprised Debra was nominated, as R45 wrote. She was perfectly fine but didn't do anything that impressive apart from maybe one scene with her son and her holiday with CS Lewis.

Hopkins though was magnificent, he would have got an Oscar nod if he wasn't already up for "The Remains Of The Day" in the same year.

Saw it in the theater when it was released, and I agree it felt like and elevated Lifetime Network movie, or an ABC Movie of the Week (like The Burning Bed, or that Valerie Bertinelli miniseries with Chris Meloni).

People in their orbit at the time almost all said Tina gave as good as she got, with she and Ike brawling for several hours at a time. She'd beat up on Ike, an inveterate philanderer; while Ike beat up on Tina, because Tuesday.

Ike Turner was a brilliant, pioneering and innovative musician, live performer and songwriter, and he really got the shaft both in the book and in the film version. He earned every bit of his 1991 nomination/induction into the Rock and Roll HOF.

"Tina gave as good as she got, with she and Ike brawling for several hours at a time. "

And Ike was a strong man and Tina was a small woman, who do you think got hurt worse during those fights?