Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Dreamgirls review

Hello, faceblind person! If you were wondering, "should I watch the movie Dreamgirls?" the answer is, "yes and no."

"Yes" if you like music, particularly R&B, soul, and Motown. The movie was full of it! And although the plot seemed like it could have been too predictable, there were some surprises.

"No" if it's going to bother you that you can't tell anyone apart! This is the worst movie I've ever watched from the perspective of prosopagnosia. At any given point, all the men are wearing suits in the same style, and all the women are wearing the exact same dress and wig (because they're in a girl group), or at least very similar styles of clothing and hair when not onstage. The only people I could tell apart in the movie were Effie, because she was a bigger girl than the others in the group, and Effie's brother if his head was turned the right way, because he had odd, squared-off pointy ears. Oh, and Effie's little girl, because she was the only child, and later in the movie, the original promoter because his hair went white.

I could still follow it and figure out who was who from context, mostly. Well, I could tell that Deena was Deena because she was being focused on, and the other skinny girls were not focused on mostly. But it was a LOT of mental effort. A LOT. And I don't usually have much trouble following movies or TV shows at all. I guess because most movies have the characters look and dress more distinctively. With all the uniformity, this movie was like a prosopagnosia test with faces and no hairlines and so on!

My partner, of course, had no trouble whatsoever telling them apart. That kind of astounded me. I would have thought that they all looked similar enough for even a non-faceblind person to have trouble. Apparently not.

RATINGS:
Good movie? 4/5
Good for FB Folks? 1/5
More reviews: Rotten Tomatoes

2 comments:

Myself said...

For this movie, I found that it didn't really matter that I couldn't tell the difference between the two other singers (that weren't Effie). I was never able to tell them apart through the whole movie, but I followed it just fine, as long as I remembered their names.
Truthfully, I'm not sure it mattered that you couldn't recognize anyone that wasn't Effie. Her brother and the manager were always obvious from context.

I'm sorry that you stopped updating this journal. I thought it was pretty entertaining!

Andrea said...

Oh, thanks, "Myself". (Which by the way is not me, anyone else who comes by. Hee!)

I stopped updating because I haven't seen a movie in a long long time.