Rant: Beyonce Knowles and acting. Why?

I saw THIS TRAILER recently for Beyonce's latest movie, Obsessed. The movie, which is released April 16, is a weak update of Fatal Attraction, with Beyonce playing the devoted housewife, Idris Elba (The Wire) as the suspect husband and Ali Larter (Heroes) as the crazed stalker vixen. We have no plans to watch this movie. If it had any shot of being remotely entertaining in that cheap thrill, guilty pleasure kind of way that Halle Berry's Perfect Stranger satisfied, the director's erased that possibility when they cast Beyonce as the housewife.

This is Beyonce's eighth movie. And while she was able to show some fortitude as an actor in Cadillac Records, she's overall quite bland on the big screen. The ferocious entertainer that you see in her music videos or her stage performances is generally dwarfed by the talent that shares the screen with her in film. In short, she can't act. when you place her with actors who have even minor chops -- let's say Ali Larter, for example -- the outcome is quite painful to watch.

So why does she do it? I doubt she has some innate desire within her to express herself artistically through acting. Nothing about her Dreamgirls performance suggested this to be the case, and that was her biggest role to date. And even though she pulled off that one dramatic scene in Cadillac Records, she was essentially asleep emotionally through the rest of the film.

So why the hell does she insist on embarrassing herself in this way? The answer is quite simple. If you can pull $4 million for simply memorizing lines and walking through a production, why not.