With Chicago winning several Oscars, the people behind Dreamgirls began flogging the movie as the Next Big Oscar Thing immediately after the 2006 Oscar ceremony. The project attracted some very big names for its cast--Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover. Extended clips were shown at Cannes and other movie festivals. When Dreamgirls was finally ready for its theatrical bow, Paramount and DreamWorks booked it in a handful of venues with $25-plus tickets in an effort to make the movie a prestige event.

To be honest, the hubris behind promoting Dreamgirls made me gag. Even though I allowed myself to be dragged into a movie theatre by my sister to see Chicago, I adamantly refused to give Dreamgirls any money. The movie did great business until...Oscar nomination day. Dreamgirls was once touted as the inevitable big winner, but it did not score nominations for Picture or Director. It had the most nominations of any movie with eight, but three of those were in the Song category. Paramount’s big guns, Dreamgirls and Flags of Our Fathers, came up short while the studio’s small pistols, Babel and Letters From Iwo Jima, landed in the Top Five.

Well, I didn’t have to pay for the screener copy of Dreamgirls that I got from Paramount, so I still haven’t given the movie any of my money. To be honest, Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Hudson are wonderful as sassy singers trying to claw their way out of poverty to the big time. However, Jamie Foxx and Eddie Murphy were highly irritating. Foxx and Murphy don’t just play smug characters--they give off the vibe that they’re smugly self-satisfied playing smug characters. As a whole, Dreamgirls has a glossy, entertaining sheen that never develops much substance--a trait that makes its 130-minute running time feel much longer than it actually is.

By the way, while Dreamgirls is based on Diana Ross’s time with The Supremes, watching the movie felt like watching Beyonce Knowles’s career being played out in an alternate universe, too. (Miss Knowles was once a part of the group Destiny’s Child; Destiny’s Child has probably disbanded for good.)

Yunda Eddie Feng