January 24, 2007

Dreamgirls: Pros and Cons

CONS
The silly editing of musical sequences with ordinary scenes. I don't wanna see that.

Unorganised and unstructured. Suddenly people are married and have hit records.

Weird way of doing certain musical sequences. Like, we see about 20 seconds of Jamie Foxx performing "Steppin' to the Bad Side" and then it goes into a montage of him gambling? WTF? Characters randomly deciding to sing songs off stage when there was no previous acknowledgment of this.

Too long. They needed to cut out a couple of songs.

That awful song about being a family, and being a tree that grows or something. That was really bad. And they kept reprising it!

Jamie Foxx.

PROS
Jennifer freakin' Hudson!

A bunch of about 8 musical scenes were really fantastic.

Beyonce was actually quite fine in the final act.

Jennifer Hudson!

The costumes and the glamour and the makeup. Some of those costumes were hilarious.

Jennifer Hudson!

Jesus, Beyonce looked so much like Diana Ross at times it was scary

Energetic and full of sass.

Eddie Murphy.

Jennifer Hudson!

Loretta Devine.

That shot of Beyonce during the photoshoot sequence where she was done up to have darker skin? WTF was that? Unintentional hilarity, I'm sure.

CONCLUSION
It may seem like there are more cons that pros, but the pros are pretty convincing. I think it's a B. I enjoyed it. But, yeah, that song about growing trees and families was terrible.

4 comments:

Simon A said...

OMG Loretta Devine. I miss her.

Glenn Dunks said...

She's in it for about 4 minutes, and she gets her own song.

adam k. said...

I'm sorry, I just cannot get behind Dreamgirls for anything. A B- is as high as I'd ever go. It is an uneven mess.

And as fun as JHud was and as great as she sang, I didn't think her non-singing scenes were that great. She needs some acting classes, and then she might really be something.

OMG and that scene where she's all "hey mistah all I can do is sing, so now that I can't do that I can't do nothin', so NO I did not look for a job this week" made me hate her and the script so much. NO one can be that much of an ass. Get your ass off welfare and get a job, Effie. Wannabe singers get other jobs. Jesus. Go work at McDonald's or something.

Anyway, that was mean, but some of that script was so atrocious I couldn't stand it. It killed all the good moments.

And yeah, that "Family" song needed to go. No reason to keep it in there. The only randomly sung offtage song shoulda been "And I Am Tellin' You." But don't even get me started on how bad they botched up THAT scene.

BusterBrown said...

I think the staging of Family (along with the orchestrations) makes the song seem worse than it is. It sounds much better on the original cast recording in my opinion.

One of my biggest problems with the movie is that it felt like Condon didn't trust himself. Making non-performance songs take place on stage is awkward. Either make a musical where its okay for people to break out into song or don't.