Product: Cadillac Records [Blu-ray] (2008)
Rating: 1.0
watered down music, lazy filmmaking
I can't say that I'm surprised to see such a lame hollywoodized version of what could have been a powerful film. The individual stories of some of the people in the film, Muddy Waters, Leonard Chess(and his brother), and Howling Wolf in particular, deserve their own movie. They deserve something on the scale of "Ray", not a slapped together, cable TV film. I hoped for a decent film anyway, but the people who made this film just didn't respect the artists or their music enough.This film might have gotten away with poor writing, mediocre acting, and lazy directing, if it had gotten one thing right: the music. All of the remakes of blues classics in this film would hardly hold up at an open mike night at any average blues club in America. There was no way any of these actors were going to come close.They should have just used the originals. Beyonce's arrogance, in particular, is galling. You just need to listen to the first two words of Etta James's "At Last", compared to Beyonce's, to know that Beyonce is way out of her league on this one. All the technical singing prowess in the world is not going to make up for pure tone and true feeling, especially with The Blues. Beyonce presents a convincing argument for why American Idol should never have a Blues week.The shame of this movie is that it is filled with good actors, wasting their talent. By all accounts, the people in the film were either highly charismatic or very intense, or both. That doesn't come across at all through these performances. Eamonn Walker does manage a passable Howling Wolf, in spite of the screenplay. Jeffrey Wright reduces Muddy Waters to a supporting character who gets too many lines, and Adrien Brody is clearly thinking about a paycheck and his next project after this stinker.