I’m in NY till Tuesday, so I was unable to spend last night doing this (which sucks, because I really wanted to see Charles Mudede ride a mechanical bull). Instead, I did what every sane person did while awaiting confirmation of Saddam Hussein’s hanging: Went to see Dreamgirls.

I’m not crazy about the movie, not by a long shot, but my boyfriend and I both wanted to see Jennifer Hudson’s big kaboom on the big screen again, and we couldn’t imagine a better time or place than a packed opening-weekend screening in Harlem (at the Magic Johnson Cinema, just around the corner from the Apollo, where I was unable to see James Brown’s corpse on Thursday.) The movie still kinda sucks, and the boring parts were even boringer, but Hudson and Eddie Murphy remain great, and if ever a movie benefitted from audience sass-back it’s Dreamgirls: 80 percent of the thing is frickin’ montage, and perfect for subsidiary dialogue. (In Norfolk, the backtalk was primarily encouragement (“Do it!”); in New York, it was conversational observations (“Beyonce looks Asian.”))

Once again, the movie was way more fun that not, and while I’ll never need to see the thing in its entirety ever again, I was happy to pay five bucks for a bootleg Dreamgirls DVD—shot from the audience at a local screening and sold on the street near the cinema—so I can revisit the experience of seeing the movie in a theater full of people going bonkers whenever I want.

Still, throughout the screening, I kept wondering about Saddam Hussein’s impending execution, jonesing for a Blackberry for the first time in my life. When the movie ended, Jake and I rushed home and got the facts from the internet. Then he made this tribute to our evening’s twin obsessions. Enjoy.