MY KIND OF RAZZMATAZZ: I finally caught "Chicago" tonight, and enjoyed it very much. I didn't like it as much as "Gangs of New York" or "The Hours," but I still find it very worthy of its Best Picture nomination. The film also earned all of its nominations in the technical categories, as the staging, costumes, cinematography, and music were dynamite at just about every turn. And beyond the amazing performances by both Catherine Zeta-Jones and the great John C. Reilly, everyone in the cast was perfectly capable of singing the superb Kander & Ebb songs.
The best musical number was the "Cell Block Tango" sequence, although the less said about the Lil' Kim hiphop cover the better. I also loved Queen Latifah's song; if this movie had been made five years ago we know the part probably would've been played by Whoopi Goldberg, and it may have sunk the film.
Renee Zellweger, as Roxie Hart, sings and acts well enough, but two years after gaining both weight and acting credibility for her role in "Bridget Jones' Diary," Renee now looks so emaciated that frankly, it's a distraction. Also, with her hair and costumes, when Roxie is shot in anything but closeup she looks more like Sarah Jessica Parker than Zellweger- and no, that's not a compliment.
And don't count me among those shedding tears over Richard Gere's Oscar snub. The last few weeks HBO has been running Gere's 1996 movie "Primal Fear," another film where he plays a hotshot Chicago lawyer defending a murderer who's guilty- using the same accent, the same mannerisms, and even some of the same lines- the same role, really, minus the singing.
Like "Moulin Rouge" before it, I was rooting for "Chicago" to be successful, because there haven't been nearly enough movie musicals in recent years- and now that "Chicago" is a huge hit, we can now expect Hollywood to quickly greenlight films based on every hit Broadway musical in the past 25 years. We've got the inevitable all-sung film remake of "The Producers" (with Lane and Broderick) to look forward to, plus movie versions of the thus-far unfilmed parts of the Andrew Lloyd Webber canon. A few years ago Tim Burton almost filmed Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd"; that may be just the project to get Burton's career back on track. And of course, it's only a matter of time until we see "Rent: The Movie"; last year a version was all set to go with Spike Lee directing but that, mercifully, fell apart shortly before production was to start.
I'm all for this trend, for a couple of reasons: I can't wait to see the smug Manhattan theater freaks whine when their favorite original cast members are replaced with movie stars for the films, and also because the trend is certain to lead into a revival of perhaps my favorite film subgenre of all: the pseudo-psychedelic musical. Just as the Rogers & Hammerstein filmed musicals of the '60s gave way to the likes of "Pink Floyd: The Wall," "Yellow Submarine," and (of course) "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" in the '70s and '80s, I can't wait for the current, conventional musicals to be followed by a spate of crazy trippy pictures by mid-decade. Wouldn't you love to see Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman take a crack at the genre?