Dreamgirls

I finally saw Dreamgirls, a movie I really enjoyed. The motown music was fantastic, Jennifer Hudson with her deep voice was mesmerizing. The politics of the music business was well documented, the conflict between R&B and pop music, the appropriation and dissolution of black songs and styles by white performers. The musical was set within the civil rights movement and social change of 1960's America.

The movie was also about women’s empowerment. It is a story of women finding there voice, from full-figured, single mom, Effie ( Jennifer Hudson), who challenged the conventional beauty myths of how singers should sing and look, to Deena (Beyonce Knowles) coming into her own and challenging the image her husband wanted her to portray.

David Denby of the New Yorker, reviews it positively here.

Throughout “Dreamgirls,” Condon pursues two tracks: he celebrates the chart-topping success of groups like the Supremes, but he makes it clear that what they have achieved, however exciting, is not the same thing as artistic success. Effie, too idiosyncratic for pop, remains the artist. “Dreamgirls” fulfills the ecstatic promise inherent in all musicals—that life can be dissolved into song and dance—but it does so without relinquishing the toughest estimate of how money and power work in the real world that song and dance leave behind.

“Dreamgirls” is a barely disguised account of Berry Gordy and the rise of the Supremes; it features some brief, crisply written expository passages and several photo-montage sequences that detail the emergence of black artists as a major commercial force in American music of the nineteen-sixties—all seen against a background of the Detroit riots and the civil-rights movement.