Am I all alone?

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2007)

Did everyone else see the same film? I'm completely bewildered by the reviews, because what I saw was awful, with no redeeming features other than being unintentionally funny in the dramatic moments. The audience I saw it with were not only laughing in the 'serious' bits, but groaning and complaining loudly whenever yet another cheesy, insipid song started up. When it finished, those who had stayed the whole length warned everyone in the ticket line for the next showing to at all costs go see something else.
I'm not exaggerating, every element was terrible. The script was appalling, with plastic 2D caricatures instead of actual characters. How are we are meant to feel sorry for Jennifer Hudson's character when she has the emotional maturity of a toddler? The direction was appalling, with constant continuity problems, pointless montages, and unbelievably poor miming from the 'instrumentalists' (did anyone else notice 'tiny Joe' holding his fingers on the back of his guitar neck while soling away?!?). The set and costume design I understand were not meant to be authentic to the time period, so why did so much of it need to be so ugly? I also get it that the music wasn't meant to be Motown, but did it need to be so boring and bland? It makes it hard to sympathize when the characters are upset about their 'good' music being ripped off when their music was so terrible, and could never in any alternate universe have become classic and influential the way Motown did.
To make matters worse, the acting was so melodramatic and self-important it made The Bold and The Beautiful seem subtle and refined. Who decided Jamie Foxx should to do three consecutive double-takes when he sees his daughter? Did Beyonce think that the only way to show internal conflict at the Cleopatra press conference was to "make a sad face, now children"? And don't get me started on Jennifer Hudson, I know that the strained-vomiting- as-emotional-singing style seems to be popular right now, but that everyone in the audience was laughing and booing during her big song should tell you something... And they could have done something about her pigeon-toed waddle as a 'dance' move in the other numbers. Nobody else was any better at singing, which was lucky, because any actually good singers would have made this embarrassingly clear - try putting any of them in the Blues Brothers!!! To be fair, it's not reasonable to expect any of the actors to be great singers, and the songs didn't give them anything good to sing (just as the script didn't give them anything good to act), so I'm sure they would have sounded better if the songs actually had any emotional depth or decent lyrics or anything inspiring about them at all.
So, if you haven't seen it, and you're not convinced by the other reviews, my advice is DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE!