Whitney Revisited

With the return of Whitney Houston to the music scene with her latest album, some music commentators took the occasion to revisit her finest hour - the 1992 soundtrack to the movie The Bodyguard, which even today remained the best selling soundtrack of all time.

The movie itself was so-so, but the theme song I'll Always Love You struck a chord with a lot of listeners, and lent the movie an extra level of poignancy which was lacking in both the script and the acting (Kevin Costner tried very hard to go for the stoic look but ended up looking wooden instead).

I remember the song well, for I had fallen hard for someone around the time it was released. The song had been playing for a few weeks on the local FM station at Belfast before the film's opening, so most people were already familiar with the song when they went to see the film.

As Whitney walked away after saying her goodbyes to Kevin at the end of the movie and the acapella first verse started, suddenly, the girls in the cinema started singing along! The guys in the cinema squirmed, but the girls grew bolder and louder. Of course, not everyone made it to the iconic chorus, but the whole incident was oddly moving. The song was about loving someone but not being able to be with him/her for some reason, and the girls were pouring out their own set of circumstances into their impromptu karaoke.

Even today, the opening verse still gives me the goosebumps, as I remember the voices of those girls in that dark cinema many years ago.