Dreamgirls

There are many showstopping moments in Dreamgirls. When they're singing, the actors fully embody the full magnitude of their characters' emotional dramatic potentials. When they're not singing (which is rarely), the performances can come off a little stale. I can see why Jennifer Hudson won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2007 for her performance as Effie White: it's for her tumultuous, gut-wrenching, powerful rendition of the song "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going". Wow. Breath-taking. Her handling of dialogue between songs: so-so and equal to the less acclaimed performance of superstar Beyonce Knowles as starlet and Diana Ross avatar (new favorite word) Deena Jones. The knock may be that while the production values, performances, and general entertainment are uniformly solid, Dreamgirls is not transcendent. None of these elements surpass the peaks of the musical genre. And perhaps my biggest knock is that none of the songs remain memorable to me save for Hudson's "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" and Knowles' "Listen". The one surprise for me was that the hype and praise for Eddie Murphy's performance as James "Thunder" Early is earned. It's an exciting, volatile, and entertaining performance that appears just as spontaneous as it does calculated.

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