Carping on the critics

[an occasional series where I take issue with something I've read.]

1) DAVID DENBY's blurb for "Dreamgirls" reads (breathlessly): "A Great Movie Musical Has Been Made At Last!"

AT LAST!?!? Where have you been, pal? Not one, but TWO movie musicals released in the past five years can legitimately lay claim to the title of 'Reinventing the Movie Musical,' and Dreamgirls is not in either's league. The two, Rob Marshall's Chicago (2002) and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (2001) had originality and vision in every frame, sadly lacking in the lumbering "Dreamgirls." Instead, Bill Condon relies on every hackneyed convention of the stale, old movie musical.

Talk about a 'throwback': it is as if he deliberately ignored the last two decades of film history. And don't try to tell me he was "being true to the time in which it was set (1960's-early 70's) or debuted on Broadway (1980s)." Fidelity to time and place went out the window as soon as he staged that ill-conceived disco dance number involving rows of leather-clad, Village People-esque male dancers, when the time period surrounding that sequence (the clothes, hair, etc.) was clearly early Seventies, not Donna Summer disco late-Seventies!

Condon fails virtually every other time he shifts from dialogue to musical number: compare the clunky and stilted way the early number about "Family" begins (they all end up on a stage in a group hug) with ANY of the seamless transitions in Chicago. Every number is a bit too obviously pre-recorded, and poor Jamie Foxx is ill-served by his director: the hapless actor is reduced to standing in place while being sung to for long stretches of film time.

Many of my problems with the film can be blamed on the source material (that second act must be brutal to sit through in a theater), so why bother if you aren't bringing something new to it? Bill Condon is obviously talented -- remember Gods & Monsters? -- but his talents clearly DO NOT extend to movie musicals.