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by jim

I have two things to say before I begin:

1. I have never seen the play...so, remove it from your mind for a few minutes.

2. Richard Gere is The King of Chicago.

WARNING!!! WARNING!!! SHAMELESSLY GLOWING REVIEW AHEAD!!!

CHICAGO opens fast and furious. We are, from the opening moments, whisked into the vaudeville world of Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones). She does an act with her sister. Her sister isn't here tonight...and Velma's late. Turns out Velma is a dirty killer. That's cool, because actress wannabe Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) just blew away her louse of a lover. The two ladies wind up in the clink together.

Within the first few shots my mind was racing to MOULIN ROUGE (a comparison every nutjob with a computer and Internet access will jump to...including this one), fast moving camera work, very stylized, very colorful and, you know, singing. We aren't so used to seeing people sing on screen anymore. Lovable dogs and cats singing? Sure. But, not people, unless they're animated, too. Before the MOULIN ROUGE thing can firmly take hold, however, director Rob Marshall has moved on to the marginal existence of Roxie. Some great intercutting between Velma's show and Roxie's adultery helps set the creative pace Marshall will provide through the last frame of the film.

Once in prison Roxie quickly learns that money can get you everywhere. Be it special favors from the prison warden, Mama Morton (Queen Latifah) or the undefeated, star-making attorney, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere). Flynn gets his ladies off using a dazzling combination of lies, double-crosses and headline grabbing. The ambitious Roxie sees this as the perfect opportunity to get her name in those long elusive lights and she does everything in her power to get just that. Will Roxie's planning and scheming pay off? Only if she can keep her foul mouth and short temper at bay.

By the time Richard Gere arrives in the film, we have already been shown what amazing vocal talents Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger have been squirreling away. Zellweger came as no surprise to me, as I had her pegged as a great singer from her guest vocals at the tail end of EMPIRE RECORDS. We have also been treated to the outstanding introduction to Queen Latifah's gold-digging warden. Latifah, we all already know, has a powerhouse voice and the personality to sell it, as well. So, when Gere shows up, the movie is already chugging ahead at full steam. Satisfying and entertaining. But Gere is like throwing nitro on the fire. He steals every moment of screen time he has. His voice is perfectly befitting his smarmy lawyer. This is the role that should restore respect to man who constantly works in projects on lower levels than his ability. When he does choose good roles, they tend to be in smaller films (RED CORNER) or he, himself, gets shown up (PRIMAL FEAR). Whenever the film starts to drag, as it does a few times in the middle, Gere steps back in and rejuvenates everything.

Renee Zellweger is totally on fire. Her electric performance should find the deserving talent up for her second Oscar nod. The revelation here is Catherine Zeta-Jones. DO NOT get me wrong, I HATE Catherine Zeta-Jones. No, I think despise says it better. Those atrocious T-Mobile commercials? At least it took Jamie Lee Curtis twenty years of working to be reduced to taking that Carrot Top-esque gig. But, I gotta hand it to her. She was remarkable. She sings and dances very well (though I prefer Zellweger's carefree flapper persona to her more polished one), and looks great in her short, black bob. Better than she's looked since THE MASK OF ZORRO. While I'm confessing to things...there is the little fact that John C. Reilly, who avid readers may note I have a great distaste for, does some of his best work ever in this film. Though his musical number is partly responsible for bogging down the pace of the film at one point. He is subtle (for once), and in turn, magnificent (I warned you this review was glowing).

Director Rob Marshall really deserves the lion's share of credit for how well this film comes together. It is just so well imagined. The visual style changes to fit the tone and feel of each scene. Even minor nuances are treated by Marshall with a creative and interesting touch. At every point throughout the film, Marshall gives us something to look at. Often many things. Not in MOULIN ROUGE's "catch me if you can" sort of frenzy, but a visual, surrealistic party. It's part dream, part nightmare.

In the end, CHICAGO's message is not deep. The media has an insatiable hunger for "the next big thing", that being a star matters more than being an innocent in our easily manipulated society. This is nothing shocking. We've know this crap was possible since William Randolph Hearst turned the news from the reporting of facts to a sensationalistic money-making monster. What deepens CHICAGO is the WAY it skewers the media and shows them for what they are. Thanks to Marshall's eye and a very well chosen and gifted cast, CHICAGO deserves to be a huge success. If this movie cannot resurrect the lost art of the musical motion picture, it's time to stop trying.

SING-SING ALONG

by pat

Okay, so it was the Cook County Jail (wasn't that where the Blues Brothers went?). The point is, jim pretty much covered the movie, so I'll just point out a few differences of opinion. I don't have the issues with Reilly that jim does, but he's not a P.T. Anderson fan, with whom Reilly made his biggest splash, so I was not surprised he was good. I agree that ZJ is typically terrible, and share the shock of her pulling this off. I preferred her more precise inflections and dance to Zellweger's more freestyle work, mainly because put side by side it looks like Renee didn't study hard enough and is fumbling through it. I know it's a style difference, but that's how it looks to me. Also, unlike jim, I am in no way a Renee Zellweger fan. The closest I came to liking her was in Jerry Maguire, and even then I thought she was one of the weak spots in the film. I just don't like her delivery, I don't like the parts she plays (either it's the parts, the way she plays them, or her coming throught al that, hard to tell) and I don't think she's as attractive as everyone else thinks she is. I think she looks like she got her wisdom teeth pulled during a bad case of mono, not just in the puffy face but in those eyes that seem to say "I need a painkiller." Still not a fan, didn't like her character, but the character isn't supposed to be that likeable, so for this movie it worked.

I disagree that the movie started off so strongly. I really had to warm up to it, but once I did it was a resonating warmth that carried me through the slow spots, which for me were Roxie's repetetive and sometimes dragged out numbers, not Reilly's solo, which I thought gave us the only sympathetic warmth for a decent person in a film about bad people. Oh, and Gere was damn good, even if he sounded cartoony when he went to the high notes. He's supposed to be cartoony, but I mean helium voiced. It worked, though. The script by Bill Condon was extremely sharp and witty, as were the lyrics to the music, though the tunes themselves I'm so-so on. Bit of a shame to see Taye Diggs not get to sing more, but that's his character, I suppose. Oh, I also disagree with jim on one other point: children are NOT the future, and teaching them well will ultimately prove to be a fruitless venture.

RAZZLE DAZZLE
by AG

My bi-polar mixed feelings about MOULIN ROUGE notwithstanding, I'm decidedly glad that movie musicals are making a comeback. In the past three years, half a dozen movie musicals, both conventional and unconventional, have made enough of an impact that it looks like we've got a genre on the mend. I'll be glad when the day comes that the release of a new movie musical is commonplace enough so as not to yield the sort of "HOLY FUCK!!! THEY'RE FUCKING SINGING!!! IT'S SOME KINDA MYOOZEEKAL!!!" ballyhoo that Rob Marshall's movie of CHICAGO seems to be getting, but for the time being, I'll take a new genre entry.

CHICAGO represents something of a milestone in the rebirth of the genre - among the first of the latterday crop of musicals not to originate as a movie musical - so, it stands to reason that if it's a hit, we can expect a lot more never-been-adapted-to-the-screen musicals in its wake. Conversely, if it flops, well ... don't hold your breath for a movie of SUNDAY IN THE PARK.

That said, CHICAGO shouldn't have anyone fearing for the future of the genre. Slick and sharp, Marshall's interpretation - which owes as much to Walter Bobbie's 1996 revival of the show, still running in New York and London, as it does to Marshall's own ideas - ticks along at a pace just breathless enough to keep you from noticing how much better than the sum of its parts the movie really is.

Set in the jazz-and-booze-heavy 1920's, CHICAGO centers around Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger), an adulterous housewife sent up for killing her lover (Dominic West), and attempting to ride her own notoriety into the hearts and minds of the world. In a gambit to steal the tabloid spotlight from fellow murderess songbird Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Roxie retains Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), a slick defense attorney with a courtroom record as perfect as his suits.

On top of that, Roxie's got a showbiz fixation, and not only intends to use her status as a press sensation to get her club act off the ground, but frequently lapses into song-and-dance daydreams which turn her prison into a dancehall, her courtroom into a circus, and her sadsack sap of a husband Amos (John C. Reilly) into a tragic clown.

Roxie's got a long row to hoe, considering that Assistant D.A. Martin Harrison (Colm Feore) has his eye on sending her to the gallows. Good thing Billy knows how to work the press and the jury as well as he tapdances. As Roxie's time in stir rolls by, she grows into a shark nearly comparable to Billy himself, but for her inexperience, and, when she fears losing the mic to homicidal heiress Kitty Baxter (Lucy Liu), she fakes a pregnancy, deftly enclosing citywide attention into her fist, leading up to "The Trial of the Century".

There's some real irony in Billy's advice to Roxie that the whole world is showbiz - that, as he sings, "Long as you keep keep 'em way off balance/How can they spot you got no talents?"; sure, Marshall does an outstanding job of keeping the proceedings energetic, vital, and funny - so much so to the point that it becomes easy to ignore that there's not much bones under the meat. CHICAGO, as a piece of work, is one of many musicals that suffers from having its opening number being its best, and despite Marshall and Co.'s pyrotechnics, it's hard to miss that you're waiting for a great musical number that never really arrives. Sure, there are a lot of good ones - even a couple of really good ones - but the show never gets great.

Somehow, though, the movie does. Adrenalized and sexy, the musical numbers are staged with imagination and style, and the real-life drama unfolds with sharp buoyancy, thanks largely to an excellent cast.

Renee Zellweger continues to keep her career on an upward swing, giving Roxie an iron fist in a velvet glove, or more fittingly, brass balls under silk panties. Also, much like Ewan McGregor in MOULIN, Zellweger surprises by singing and dancing like a lifelong pro. Anytime she wants to drop out of the movie scene and do this sort of thing fulltime, I bet she could make a proper go of it.

Avid fans of this website won't find it shocking that I didn't care much for Catherine Zeta-Jones's Velma. Sure, she's got looks and moves, but her thin mastery of her American dialect distracts, and she seems intent on playing to the back row, even with a camera eighteen inches from her mug. In a scene where Velma tries to worm into Roxie's limelight by inviting Roxie to replace Velma's murdered sister in her double-act, Zeta-Jones seems to give off as much flop sweat as her character. Would that Bebe Neuwirth, the '96 revival's original Velma, were enough of a box office draw to have been cast in the movie; Neuwirth carries the kind of easy, sexy zing to make Velma pop, and for a character with what feels like considerably less screen time than Roxie, Velma should pop everytime she walks onscreen.

Similarly, I've never much cared for Richard Gere, and this ain't the movie that's gonna break my stride on the issue. His actor's smugness ("Look at me! I'm'a tapdancin'!!") transcends even Billy's snake oil charm, and while that steely smarm plays well in his dramatic scenes, it makes his musical numbers exercises in watching a performer vastly more impressed with himself than an audience ever could be. I'm all the more disappointed to learn that Kevin Spacey and Hugh Jackman - both able song-and-dance men themselves - were considered for the part; either of them would have been preferrable, to my way of thinking.

The supporting cast, many of them endowed with their own musical numbers, is excellent, with Queen Latifah's frumpy-but-savvy prison matron Mama Morton giving a welcome zip to her scenes, playing for the highest bidder in her pen, and turning her ever-so-lesbian entry number into a Harlem burlesque show-stopper. Reilly, always a welcome supporting player, nails the pathetic Amos perfectly, and, as surprisingly as with the rest of the cast, sings and dances excellently. The rest of the cast - mostly culled from the various around-the-world productions of the revival - are outstanding; a charming little nod to the show's roots features Chita Rivera - the show's original Velma - as an inmate called Nickie (an equally charming nod to her taxi dancer of the same name from 1969's SWEET CHARITY).

For my money, the real star of the movie - earning the applause his title card got in the end credits - is Marshall, making his feature debut after an already-impressive career as a Broadway director and choreographer. These roots make him the perfect man for the job, and his visual sense shows a stage-to-screen versatility probably not seen since Bob Fosse (fittingly enough, since Fosse is one of CHICAGO's co-creators). Apparently, Marshall has turned his eye on adapting some of Stephen Sondheim's works to the screen; that don't sound too bad to me.

Under Marshall's guidance - and that of Bill Condon's sharp screenplay - CHICAGO neatly transposes from its roots as an amorphous stage show into an alternately realistic and fantastic entertainment. Unfortunately, the device of using Roxie's musical visions to meld John Kander and Fred Ebb's memorable if not career-best score into an otherwise literal framework, feels, on at least one occasion, like a grift of Selma's escapist fantasias in DANCER IN THE DARK.

But the survival of a genre lies in its adaptability to the times, which also explains Martin Walsh's MOULIN-esque whip-flash editing. I'll condone that, as a storytelling strategy, it keeps the pace agile, but like with Baz Luhrmann's sensory attack of a musical, it creates the problem that you never really get to see the beautiful, stage-worthy images being presented for long enough. In Mama Morton's number, we're given hints of a silhoutted jazz combo framed perfectly over her shoulder, but you really have to be watching to drink in the visuals with any satisfying depth.

All told, though, it looks as though the future of musicals is sound, and if the success of CHICAGO has anything to say about it, is in the right hands as well. Even if it's not embraced wholesale by a mass audience, hopefully CHICAGO will at least serve as a gateway - an excellent turn-turn-out-in-jump-step in the right direction of future film adaptations of all that other jazz.