Music Video
The music video for "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" was directed by Forest Whitaker, who also directed Waiting to Exhale. The video focuses mainly on close-ups of Houston, sporting a short and mature coif, as she sings. Scenes of the movie are inter-cut between her scenes. In a Making of the Video segment of "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)", which aired on Japanese satellite television channel NHK-BS2, Houston explained:
"I wanted him to do it. And he said 'yeah'. I said 'are you sure you can? Because you've got so much to do.' He said 'I think I can do this.' I kinda got afraid because I knew he was working so hard."
According to Houston, the song was direct, so she wanted the video to be direct and concentrate on her face and on the lyrics. Whittaker also expressed a same opinion of the song. He said, "I've seen the video It's like a thing she has, you know, that I guess people would say is like a charisma kinda thing that it zooms, you know, comes up. It's beautiful It's magic, it's spirit." The video aired on MTV on October 10, 1995. According to Marla Shelton, a writer for Camera Obscura, a journal of feminism and film theory, "the video concept's originality stops with Houston's hair style as its stark simplicity underscores the 'straight and narrow' politics of the film." When the film was released, the video was shown as a trailer prior to the beginning of films on 450 General Cinema screens in some major US media markets.
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