"High Hopes," A Hole in the Head (1959)."The Way You Look Tonight," Swing Time (1936)."Over the Rainbow," The Wizard of Oz (1939).But it's still a nice, above-average piece of adult contemporary-rock and I dig Etheridge having an Oscar under her belt.
Is it on-par with something like "Come to My Window"? Not quite. Even if the song is a tad too on-the-nose, I quite like Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up," from An Inconvenient Truth. "Patience," a nod to the great Donny Hathaway, is listenable but wholly forgettable.īeyond Dreamgirls, this year boasted yet another Randy Newman nomination, this time for Cars' "Our Town." Performed by the terrific James Taylor, it's not half-bad - another example of a Newman-composed tune lifted by not having Newman perform it himself - but I think the Academy actually got it right this year. The bland "Listen," on the other hand, doesn't sound '60s in the slightest, rather a run-of-the-mill ballad that could've surfaced on any Beyonce album. While it's hardly an A-grade song, it does at least ring of some middle-of-the-road Motown numbers, almost a filler Supremes or Martha and the Vandellas track.
The best of the three tunes, "Love You I Do," is a modestly enjoyable number, performed by the buoyant Hudson. While the Academy didn't go too head-over-heels for the film, ignoring Condon and looking past the production in Best Picture, Dreamgirls did manage a hefty three noms in Best Original Song. I also didn't think - and here's where I loop this into Best Original Song - the new tracks, all by Henry Krieger, resonated even a tenth as strongly as "I Am Changing," "One Night Only" or, of course, "And I Am Telling You." While I enjoyed Jennifer Hudson's Oscar-winning turn as Effie, I was left restless by the wooden leading turns of Beyonce and Jamie Foxx. Lo and behold, I was left largely cold by the picture, which I didn't feel nearly captured the magic of the material's stage productions. Venturing into Bill Condon's 2006 film adaptation of Dreamgirls, I had pretty sky-high expectations, given the strength of the material and my fondness for Condon's prior work. I consider Dreamgirls one of the finest American musicals of the past half-century, a rich, often exhilarating look back at a time when producers and their dazzling performers would crank out one two-a-half-minute mega hit after another, many of which proved timeless and still garner plenty airplay to this day.even if many of the actual performers themselves have sadly been forgotten. WON AND SHOULD'VE WON: "I Need to Wake Up," An Inconvenient Truth
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