Call us naive, but we are a teensy shocked that the three statuettes Dreamgirls won at last night’s Golden Globes were not hooted off the stage. While we were eternally grateful to the foreign journalists who last year bestowed a Golden Globe on Sandra Oh, the object of all our love for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever, we are convinced that this year they were smoking serious crack.
While Dreamgirls has its moments--Eddie Murphy everytime he’s on stage and Jennifer Hudson’s show-stopper “And I am telling you I’m not going,” most of the songs were D.O.A. Take the song “Family,” which the composers wrote while on Methodone. The lyrics are juvenile, simplistic, preachy, like that song a few years back--by Whitney Houston or someone--”Teach the children” or something — it was that bad.
Yeah, the costumes are great, and the first half ever-so-slightly interesting. But when it gets into the corporate Motown stuff, and Beyonce Knowle’s watered-down-to-boring Diana Ross turn, and the absurdly “up” ending, our jaws hit our knees. Plus, we hate that guessing game shit. We totally get that this is about The Supremes. Ergo, the tiny kid doing the moonwalk is Michael Jackson. Can’t you just fucking call him Michael Jackson?
Bottom line, if the music sucks, then the musical sucks. Ok, some may argue that “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” had sucky music, but was still fun. Key word is “fun.” Rocky Horror never took itself seriously. Except for Eddie Murphy, this movie always takes itself seriously (even to the point of putting in a part about Martin Luther King. If it wanted to comment on the 60s, it should have explored The Temptations “Psychodelic Soul” a great album that, paradoxicallly, dismayed many white fans). It lacks the delirous quality of “Singin’ in the Rain,” (and the dancing), the great music of all those Lerner & Loew and Rogers and Hammerstein vehicles, and we could go on. And Jamie Foxx’s Barry Gordy (we think) is kind of vapid and banal. It’s all so two-dimensional, like a head-achy dream that won’t end. We imagine the fat cat producers hashing out the pre-production details, asking each other: “Yes, it’s boring as hell, but is it boring enough?”
Guys, the answer is yes.