Bump (rather than start another thread on DREAMGIRLS).
When I saw the movie they cracked up even more when Jimmy takes back his soul and drops his pants which was admittedly a fantastic moment.
There is NO reason for Eddie Murphy not to get an Academy Award nomination for this. He was great as a dramatic actor, believable as an ahead-of-his-time funk showman, you really felt for the character during his rich-but-miserable-sellout older scenes, and of course his comic moments were, well, to quote Jimmy Early to Effie’s backup singing, “Shit! I knew you’d have it!” (While I wasn’t a huge fan of the Nutty Professor movies I thought that he should have been nominated for at least the first one; I don’t think many Academy voters appreciate how hard it is to be funny under that miserable make-up {ever worn a latex mask? smells like sulfur and itches, and for Murphy it took hours of sitting still to apply} or to do that many characters, all of them hysterical.)
Agree with all that’s been said on Jennifer Hudson. She’s possibly the greatest talent ever to emerge from AMERICAN IDOL and I think it’s probably to her benefit that she didn’t win. Since unfortunately there just aren’t that many roles for overweight black actresses, no matter how talented, I hope she’ll go into music more than bad comedies or, God forbid, bad sitcoms.
I liked the movie a lot overall. I had never seen the stage show so I don’t know how much it deviated, but my main complaints were:
*The ending was a little too happy for Effie and the other Dreams (plus it’s based, however loosely, on The Supremes and Diana Ross certainly never got her soul back); I just don’t think that a cutthroat businessman in a cutthroat industry would have taken it lying down like Curtis did
*The transition from movie with musical numbers to movie musical was very awkward. For almost half the movie the only time you have splashy production numbers is when the characters are performing or rehearsing, then all of a sudden an hour into the movie Effie and her brother start singing, Curtis joins in and it takes a moment to remember “oh yeah, this isn’t really a song within the movie but a musical number…”
*Little details bugged me. I can easily fathom, for example, that Deena may not have any contact with Effie for years after the break-up, but it would be almost impossible to believe she wouldn’t even know Effie had a child, regardless of whether or not she knew its paternity
as you’d think this would have appeared in magazines and newspapers and “where are they now?” items than they had even in the 1970s.
Overall though it’s worth full admission price and Jennifer Hudson did to this role what Cummings did for the emcee in CABARET or Catherine Zeta Jones did for Velma Kelly- she makes you forget that another actress was legendary in the role and totally owns it. I don’t know that she deserves an Oscar but a nomination would be justified, and for Eddie the competition would have to be awesome not to justify a win. I hope he’ll move more into dramatic roles as I think he’s an incredible talent who’s been wasting himself almost like Jimmy Early for the last few years.
The only problem I had was that I kept thinking I was watching a Diana Ross and The Supremes documentary…