Yar, you be here: Chicago (Full Screen Edition) > Customer Reviews

Chicago (Full Screen Edition) Customer Reviews (28 - 30 of 120 Reviews)

This winning BEST PICTURE was the biggest crime of all.

The story is a juicy one.

The plot centres around two scorned woman. The first is Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a famed vaudville performer who kills her cheating husband and sister, the other is Roxy Hart (Renee Zellweger), a wannabe vaudeville star who kills her abusive lover. Both women battle it out in prison for the attentions of their lawyer, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) and the media. Being skillfully manipulated by Billy, Roxy becomes a media sensation and major celebrity to the dismay of her rival, Velma.

The musicals message is an unpleasant one. Especially when considering that both woman were killers and despite this, they were still portrayed as helpless victims. Now I am by no means stating that I take offense to the content. It takes alot more than the glorification of 2 beautiful murderers to offend me. As a matter of fact, since I was never a fan of the musical, the racy storyline was what convinced me to watch this. Juicy tales of murderous mayhem and scandalous, amoral women will be a huge draw for many.

With that said, I will never understand why this movie won so many Oscars. Was it Hollywood trying to revive the movie musical by making them popular again? Or is there truth in the claim that CHICAGO or should I say MIRAMAX bought the Oscars?

Who knows but this film was far from being the BEST PICTURE of 2002. Especially when compared to the other nominess such as THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, THE PIANIST and Scorcese's GANGS OF NEW YORK.

As I have already mentioned, I was never a fan of the musical CHICAGO. I always found the music too bland, too uninspired. Other than the show's most famous number, "All That Jazz", there isn't another song in the score that catches the imagination. In my opinion, the melodies are forgettable. I have never seen the stage production so I cannot judge it as a stage show but the film, despite it's glossy exterior was shallow in it's core.

The film starts off well, with Catherine Zeta-Jones doing a pretty good rendition of "All That Jazz". I will admit that Zeta-Jones has great stage presence and a good voice but was it Oscar worthy? I'm not so sure. However when compared to others in the cast, Catherine is indeed, sensational. Renee Zelwegger on the other hand, is a good actress but her voice is too thin and unimpressive. However, it's still far superior and much more pleasing to the ears than Richard Gere's voice which I found to be "beyond" annoying. Gere's instrument (if I can call it that) was grating and my ear drums suffered greatly. The only other actor in the piece that has some musical abilities is Queen Latifah. Admittedly, she is a charming performer with some real talent. Her solo effort is also pretty entertaining but I ask again, was her performance Oscar worthy? I have yet to meet someone who, after seeing this film has firmly answered my question with a convincing "yes". As much as I like Queen Latifah, she does nothing here that she hasn't already done in her music videos. Her performance was hardly ground-breaking. Her nomination caused the elimination of another actress who was far more worthy of it. That's a shame.

Catherine Zeta-Jones's opening act is definately one of the film's few highlights. The only other number that I can frankly state is also quite good is the "Cell Block Tango". It features several incredibly sexy woman showing off their fine figures, some fine dancing and choreography. The rest of the musical performances are not really worth mentioning. They're glitzy but mindless. All style with no substance. Lacking intricate choreography, emotion and skill. They substitute it with colour and flash.

One of the biggest problems I had with this film was that it cheated a little. The makers of CHICAGO obviously didn't have much faith in today's audience and instead of making this a straight-forward musical, they had to justify the musical numbers by featuring them as being a figment of Roxy's warped imagination. So CHICAGO plays more like a straight comedy that cuts to a music video, then it cuts back to the actual film, then back to another music video and so on and so on. Many hailed this idea as ingenius, others like myself thought it was a cop-out.

Those who love this film, love it alot but there are a countless others who feel that the much-hyped CHICAGO didn't deserve all of it's praise. Especially when considering that other film musicals were far greater in scope and unjustifiably hardly got half of the attention CHICAGO did.

But at the end of the day, it's not CHICAGO's fault it's over-rated.



This is a amazing musical!
I've never seen the stage version of "Chicago", so I can't say if the movie was faithful to the source material, but judged on it's own by a pair of fresh eyes, "Chicago" was a lot of fun, especially considering I'm generally not crazy about movie musicals. No wait a minute........ Except for "West Side Story." After seeing this movie I clearly understand why it had won 6 Oscars including Best Picture.

Catherine Zeta Jones has a very nice voice and plays the confident Velma with bravado. Renee is perfect as the fame hungry, Roxie, determined to see herself in the lime light but instead ending up in prison along side murderess, Velma. The remaining roles are filled quite nicely by Richard Gere as Billy Flynn and Queen Latifah as Mama Morton. I also got a kick out of seeing Christine Baranski, Chita Rivera, and Mya in smaller roles. Everyone chosen for this film has a good voice and are very talented. The songs are really catchy and choreography was wonderful. It's great to see some actors who don't normally sing and dance be pushed to the edge of their talents. Overall it's a great production. The director did an excellent job of splicing the musical numbers with flashes of the actual events that keeps the film moving along. I now own this DVD and this is one of my favorite films. I do recommend "Chicago", even for the ones who don't generally flock to musicals.


Brilliant
Most films have, to my eye, flat spaces--filler, scenes which could be dropped out. Not this one. Every moment a gem.

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Next Page