DVD Review: Dreamgirls

I don't know why it took me so long to finally watch Dreamgirls. Possibly because I'm not really the biggest fan of musicals. I don't hate them. I wouldn't even say I dislike them, they're just not typically my thing. But what is my thing is girl groups from the 50's and 60's. So I really wanted to see this movie when they first started advertising it, but somewhere along the line when I realized what the plot was, I just got a little disenchanted and set it aside until it made it to the top of my Netflix queue last week. Even then, I let it sit on my desk for a week after it came in. I wanted to hear the music and see the awesome vintage outfits, but I just wasn't sold on the story.

Really, that's pretty much the only problem I can find with Dreamgirls, and it's something that you have to really understand the history to get why you can't let that get in your way. If you look to this as only a film, as only a musical, the story is a bit cliche and the characters are well worn stereotypes. The music is amazing, but the arc everyone goes through is predictable.

But that's the problem, is that you can't look at this as just a movie. It's practically a historical film, but with songs. The reason we know these characters and this story so well is because we already know it really happened. Maybe not exactly like this, maybe Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx) is a much more sleezy character than Brrry Gordy ever was. But at the end of the day, the interpersonal relationships are ones that you see play out in the music business year after year after year.

So how do you settle that as a viewer? The costumes, the acting, the songs, they're all amazing. Granted I wasn't alive during the time period the movie shows, but it seems very accurate and represents the era(s) well. A musical is above all about the music, and not only are the songs themselves top notch but the singing and performances are as well.

But there isn't a single new revelation in the movie. It's very, very good but it isn't fresh or new. Plus many people have pointed out that because it's not at all shy about the fact that it's a fictionalization of the history of Motown Records that the film actually could be considered insulting to it's source material.

So where do you go with that as a viewer? My opinion, you buy the soundtrack and get a hold of as many of the songs as you can, and then read up on the history of Motown on your own. Unless you really love one of the actors, or musicals in general. In which case, there are much worse ways to spend a couple hours.

Living in the future: music storage edition

The other day I was trying to find something in my office, which is also the only place that I still have a stereo, so it's where I keep my CDs.

The course of going through things brought me to the decision to grab all these old burned mix CDs and rip the songs back off of them to my hard drive, so that I could get rid of them because I knew a lot of them were duplicates. Various mixes that had similar songs, that kind of thing. Or ones where I have since bought the whole CD, or never deleted the MP3 in the first place.

As I was doing this, I remembered that I made these CDs in the first place because my old hard drive was running out of space and mp3s were such huge files, I couldn't keep them digitally.

So the irony that I was now putting them back on the hard drive because CDs take up too much physical space wasn't lost on me.

Then I had one that was scratched to the point where it wouldn't play anymore. And it got me thinking about how silly CDs are going to look in another generation. They were so fragile. They couldn't take heat or cold, scratches were a constant issue. You couldn't bend them too much, or put too much weight on them. How silly were we to think it was a good idea?

Of course this started me on a conversation with my cousin about all the various media that humans have used for music, and in the end it seems like we still haven't figured out something that was crazy fragile in some way. Records melt in the heat and have the same scratching problem. Cassettes were vulnerable to magnets and getting eaten alive by your stereo.

Even hard drives are problematic in some ways, largely the fact that one day it could just fail to boot up for whatever wacky reason it feels like, and then you're stuck. So now we not only have music collections, we have backups of our music collections. I'm not sure if that's a step in the right direction.

But at the very least, we do finally have the space thing taken care of. While I do think shelves full of records look pretty cool, it is nice that my entire collection of music fits on something smaller than a hardcover book.

Back in my day we could listen to music at all...

I read this article once that said that you eventually reach an age where you just aren't going to find more music that you like. Maybe some artists that are similar to things you already enjoy, but that you do have a threshold of how much music you'll really enjoy. Which is why whenever a new sound happens, all the old people walk around saying "Back in my day..."

It's probably relatively accurate. I definitely find that I still really enjoy silly pop songs from the 90's and early 2000's but that I don't really care about much of the new stuff coming out. I find a reasonable amount of new music that I enjoy, but I can't just listen to top 40 and expect to hear things I like anymore.

Which brings me to my problem: it's nearly impossible for me to listen to music anymore and that's kind of ridiculous. When I was a kid, I just left my tv on CMT or VH1 (sometimes MTV but they were already starting to get away from playing music). Or I could listen to a couple radio stations in my small town.

Of course, none of those stations play music videos regularly anymore. In the morning you can catch some, but it's hard to figure out when they're on and they're frequently interrupted. Last time I watched a top ten show on VH1 (which was admittedly five years ago) they didn't play the whole video for anything except number one.

I was driving for an hour one day a little while ago and through a set of randomness I had no choice but to listen to the radio. Where I live, you can cycle through the fifty stations around here during commuting hours and find nothing but people talking. DJs rambling and telling stupid jokes, talk radio shows, commercials, whatever you want of people talking but no music.

This is a huge problem in the car, where I basically can't listen to the radio anymore so I have to rely on a device. If I want to hear new music, I only have two choices - Pandora or Spotify. I'm trying to troubleshoot why Spotify isn't working on my phone, but I never got far because until recently I just listened to Pandora.

Pandora used to be the perfect solution to this, but it's really fallen from grace lately. The app on my phone just barely works at all, it's always locking up or dropping out. And when it does work, I've noticed it just plays the same dozen or so songs on each station. So I'm already sick of half of my stations. I'd love to get more variety and functionality out of it, because the idea behind Pandora is perfect. It's exactly what I want, but it doesn't give me new music anymore and it doesn't work half the time, so that's a bust.

Then there's satellite radio, which I used to have and love. But towards the end of my subscription they started adding DJs to the stations, and if I have a digital display telling me what song is playing, then I have no need for a DJ and I really don't want to hear them. I ended my subscription shortly after that, because I bought an MP3 player instead.

So this is my question: what has replaced the radio? How are we supposed to find new music that we might like these days? Since radio stations (even satellite) is more concerned with people yammering, and even Pandora is falling into the "let's just play thirty songs on rotation, nobody will notice" then what do I do when I don't want to just listen to my own music again but maybe hear something new? Is Spotify really the only choice for that these days?

Jem: Finally Woken

Note: I know that the archives aren't working and you can only access the latest three posts. I'm not sure why this is happening and will try to tackle the problem soon, along with making the google ads read the content of the blog and not the footer.inc. Also: the spellcheck feature on blogger doesn't seem to be working, and so I apologize for spelling errors. I'm really a very terrible speller.

Jem: Finally Woken

It's been an incredibly long time since I bought a CD after listening to only one song. Normally I wait for two or three, or even until someone else has bought it and I can listen to the entire thing. But in the case of Jem, I loved the song "24" so much that I wanted to hear it more, and only one local radio station seemed to be playing it.

So on a whim I checked out the price at our local FYE, which is always overpriced. They had it for only $12, so I decided to check Target instead. When I found the CD for only $10, I snatched it up without thinking much about it.

I am so glad that I did. Every song on the CD is good, and I can listen to it over and over without getting tired of it. The music is very different from the typical pop songs that are getting so much airplay now, and it's a sound I love. I played it on repeat for about four hours when I first bought it, and I never listen to anything on repeat because I get sick of things too quickly. Since then it's left my CD player only to go to Cyn's house and make her listen to it.

The song that gets stuck in my head most is not 24, which I still love, but Finally Woken. Jem's voice is beautiful, and I wish I could explain the allure of this album better. But all I can say is that there's something in it, the way the songs flow, the way they work together, the way the music compliments the singing. There's something, and it's perfect. Now I'd be willing to buy any music of hers without even hearing it, which could get me into trouble but ah well.

It really is that great. I would reccomend it to anyone, and wholeheartedly so. It might not be everyone's taste, but it is absolutly worth a try.