Unbearable, embarrassing shlock

Rating: 1/10 (29 December 2006)

It's hard to find enough bad things to say about this "movie." As everyone knows, there's only one reason to see it: American "Idol's" Jennifer Hudson. She is spectacular, though she sticks out like a sore butt. Like her talented and capable co-stars, especially Eddie Murphy, she is mired in a pretentious, overlong, shallow, predictable, inept, amateurish script and saddled with a director who might as well have submitted this as a 7th grade school project using the latest free editing software. The movie is lifted from the show; no attempts to make it cinematic were made other than to use old news footage and every editing and directing cliché you can imagine. Songs are seen both as staged performances and as impromptu on-the spot dramatic statements within-the-film. The music, though although everyone must have known this, is unforgivably boring, repetitive, hokey, Broadway Deli Cheesecake, screamy garbage, and is an insult to everything that Motown, Diana Ross, the Supremes, Berry Gordy, James Brown and everyone else who lifted music out of the kitschy crap celebrated in this film (with one or two weak exceptions)tried to do. Bill Condon should be banned from Hollywood forever; the writers of Dreamgirls should be boiled in a vat of collard greens.The cinematography is non-existenct, as if the lens were filtered through the girls' outrageous, oily wigs.