Dreamgirls

Dreamgirls follows the rise and fall of a girl group from the 1960s, Supremes-style. Among its cast are several veterans as well as several newbies. They all share the same quality of having amazing pipes, belting out soulful tunes of love, failure, and general silliness. The look of the film is rather glamorous, capturing the colorful and shiny feel of the 1960s and the flashy, disco style of the 1970s. Where the film sort of falls off for me is in the aspect of making it an actual musical. I am a big fan of musicals (most of which were made into films from the original popular plays), especially some of the older ones such as Hello, Dolly!, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music, and even some of the newer, more unorthodox ones such as Kenneth Branagh's interpretation of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (where Branagh sets the play during World War Two and the characters periodically burst into Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra classics). However, I feel like this film seems awkward in its transitions from speaking to singing. Whatever people have to say about Rob Marshall's Chicago, I still think the placing of songs was very creative and well done; I never questioned "Wait, why are they starting to sing now? This doesn't really work?" This thought ran through my head several times during Dreamgirls. Maybe I had trouble buying the whole musical world as well because I just didn't enjoy the music that much. This surprised me greatly as I love the music of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Temptations, The Supremes, and other similar groups from that era, but I just couldn't get that excited about most of the tunes in this story. All in all, a fairly enjoyable film, but unless you're really into musicals, soul music, or Beyonce, I would save it for DVD, if even that.