Rating: 
Summary: The Real Razzle Dazzle.
Review: In the movie CHICAGO, there is a scene where Richard Gere's character illustrates to his client how much a court room is like a circus; all you have to do is razzle dazzle them and you'll win your case. That's what CHICAGO has done with many of the critics and the Hollywood establishment; put on a great show to hide a movie that's really only so-so. ...Seeing that this is a musical, the acting is top-notch because it also involves a ton of singing and dancing as well. Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones are getting a lot of press, but the real stars of the show are the two major male performers: Richard Gere and John C. Reilly. Gere has a solo tap dance number that is most impressive. Reilly plays the only character who is likeable and normal and his solo song "Cellophane Man" is a performance of classic showmanship. The film's story cuts back and forth from reality to fantasy, making the movie difficult to follow at first. Overall the only parts of the film that I was impressed by were the first ten minutes and the last thirty minutes The hour and twenty minutes in between is rather forgettable. The film has a PG-13 rating, but actually borders on R territory; there are a lot of scenes of violence and almost all the women are so scantily clothed it looks like they are wearing thin strips of toilet paper over their most private areas. I admit that the film had me wanting Roxie Hart to be proven innocent. However, in doing so, I lost respect for the movie. I've routed for the criminal before (e.g. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN), but the criminals were always likeable people who made a change of character. In CHICAGO, all of the characters (John C. Reilly's Mr. Hart withstanding) are despicable crooks. They are sleazy liars who wallow in a hedonistic lifestyle at the expense of the joy and peace of others. I left the movie somewhat depressed, feeling I had just witnessed and partaken in a movement of propaganda. I was taken in by the old razzle dazzle. My advice to others, wait until the video and DVD comes out and the buzz has died down;...CHICAGO is only so-so.
Rating: 
Summary: Chicago the new movie
Review: This broadway production made into a movie was fantastic. Seeing Richard Gere tap dance was extraordinary. I loved hearing everyone sing, and i sugest everyone to go and see it.
Rating:
Summary: Tied with "Gangs of New York" as the "Best Movie of the Year
Review: This movie was phenomenal...It gave me a rare feeling that I only get from seeing a really great movie. Having seen the show on Broadway this past November, I was anticipating a really great movie. I was hoping the movie would fill in holes that a stage show could not-- and it did. Not only did "Chicago" more than meet my expectations, it trounced the Broadway show; it just seemed to fit better on a movie-screen. Having said that, it still felt a little like watching a stage show; such as, after each solo, I felt like clapping-- Of course, I didn't; those are the people I make fun of.
The performances were incredible. Catherine Zeta Jones was excellent; she not only played the part too the fullest, but she also looked as though she was having a good time. Renne Zellweger was amazing; having not known her to have had a dancing or singing backround, she must have worked really hard. Oddly enough, Queen Latifah was really good...but now that I think about it, her being good isn't that odd; the role really fits her. John C. Reily was also very good, as he was in all of his other roles in every really good movie this year. Richard Gere's performance was good but not great. His solos were definitely the weakest and everyone else outshined him.
The director did a great job, too; his eclectic shots were interesting too watch but not overused as some directors do.(Though Scorcesse, still deserves the Oscar.) The mood of the movie really helped in the enjoyment of it.
Trust me, see this movie!! You will not be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: As Big As Any Gangland Hit
Review: Reknowned for his complex choreography and innovative staging, director-choreographer Bob Fosse was well known for his ability to impose tremendous style on even the slightest of material--and that is precisely what he did when John Kander and Fred Ebb presented him with their follow up to Broadway smash CABARET. After considerable script work, the story of two 1920s jailhouse divas emerged on the stage as CHICAGO, a remarkably dark and visually witty commentary on lust, corruption, and fame at any price. And although Fosse, who has been dead a decade or more, had nothing to do with the screen version with CHICAGO, this big screen show is so completely in his style that it is difficult to believe director Rob Marshall wasn't doing a bit of spiritual channeling when he put it together. This one of those rare screen versions that doesn't pull the teeth of the original material: on screen, CHICAGO is every bit as dark and bitter as it was on stage, and if you're expecting a boy-meets-girl, bursts-into-song musical you're in for a rude awakening. Singer-dancer Velma Kelly (Catherine Zita-Jones) has become the queen of Chicago's tabolids by offing her faithless husband and perfidious sister; sitting on death row, she's busy enjoying the press and planning to parlay the attention into a big time vaudeville act--but she's suddenly rolled for the throne by show-biz wannabe Roxie Hart (Rene Zellweger), who captures press attention when she bumps off her lover and is then caught trying to coax her husband into taking the wrap. And with fame, fortune, and beating the wrap high priorities, the two slither, snarl, and play games of one-upmanship right into the courtroom under the sponsorship of their equally corrupt lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere.) It's an arena in which truth counts for nothing and the innocent hang; only hardness, a total lack of integrity, and an implausible lie will get you by. The cast is simply amazing. Both Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere come from stage backgrounds, but neither have shown their song-and-dance skills on the big screen until now--and they give every indication of having the time of their lives, tossing off everything from meticulous time steps to classic Fosse-esque squirming choreography, and singing the complicated songs extremely well indeed. And they are very nearly upstaged by Queen Latifa as the wanton prison matron and John C. Reilly as Roxie's dim husband. And then there is Rene Zellweger as Roxie Hart. Frankly, the late great Gwen Verdon, who originated the role on Broadway, is a tough act to follow--but Zellweger sidesteps the trap of merely repeating Verdon's memorable interpretation and creates her own take on the half-niave, half-rapacious jazz baby from hell. And when all is said and done, she makes Roxie Hart her own. Although some songs from the stage version have been dropped, the best survive, and the company tears strips off them, all the way from the opening "All That Jazz" to the finishing "Nowadays." And everywhere the Fosse touch is very much in evidence: surrealistic concepts of space and time, slinky and half-naked dancers, wicked wit, and a sexy sneer are the order of the day. The cinematography is also quite fine, using elements of rapid-fire editing seen in MOULIN ROUGE but without the same "beat you to death" quality that film had. The result is dark, glittering, and remarkably sly in its mix of too-accurate social commentary and classic music elements. And this is one of the few recent musicals that I think will stand the test of time. Strongly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: I DIDN'T "GET IT!"
Review: In the darkened movie theater, soon after the opening scene of CHICAGO played itself out, I nudged my wife, a real movie maven. "I don't get it," I pestered. She responded, "shush!" I whispered louder, "I don't get it!" Now really annoyed, she quipped, "It's not rocket science!" But as the credits rolled at the end of the movie, her reaction to CHICAGO had become as sour as mine. I was not alone. But I am certainly in the minority. More than 85 percent of the film critics loved CHICAGO. The movie opens with maximum sight and sound energy. Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones) kills the other half of her sister act -- and her husband -- when she catches them cheating on her. Then Velma runs to the theater and rushes onstage to do her vampish song and dance. Roxie Hart, made less interesting by Renée Zellweger, guns down a furniture salesman after their tryst when she realizes he falsely promised to set up a cabaret debut for her to get in her pants. Roxie almost gets her loser husband Amos (John C. Reilly) to take the rap for her murder. But a police detective wrings the truth out of them and Roxie winds up in jail. Velma and Roxie wind up in the same jail, where Mama Morton (Queen Latifah), a compassionate guard, is their only hope of redemption. Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) is their jailhouse lawyer. Gere's camera close-ups are perhaps the most painful part of the movie. It wasn't the plot or action that I didn't get. Rather, I expected to get blown away after all the hoopla and fuss about CHICAGO when it first opened. I was eagerly waiting for the great entertainment to begin. But all I got for my eight bucks was frustration. What was I missing? What was I missing? Then it dawned on me. There was nothing there to miss!! The most spectacular part of CHICAGO was the work done by film editor Martin Walsh. His job was to make Zeta-Jones, Zellweger and Gere seem like song and dance performers akin to Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers and Judy Garland (and daughter Liza Minelli). In the undulating darkness of the theater, it became clear that inadvertently Chicago became a cut-and-paste commercial for the stage play. An early sign of things not right with CHICAGO is the painfully phony Hungarian monologue by a minor character, death row prisoner Hunyack played by Russian dancer/actor Ekaterina Schelkanova (both my wife and I are fluent in Hungarian). Hunyack's long monologue is spoken so poorly that it could be any language or no language. Why didn't Director Rob Marshall cast a real Hungarian dancer/actor of which there are many in the world? Details, details. Worse yet, in one scene, even though Hunyack is supposed to be a Hungarian murderess she clearly yells "Help! Help!" but in Russian! Marshall had sufficient low directorial standards to leave that glaring blunder in the movie! The relentless motion of CHICAGO, adapted from Bob Fosse's 1975 musical, had been revived on Broadway with enormous success in 1996. But the original, 1975 CHICAGO production had foundered because, as one theory goes, the story line was too dark: Velma and Roxie compete in manipulating the press to manipulate public sympathy to beat the rap. Billy is their ringmaster, mentor and savior for hire. However, since 1975, cynicism about the media and celebrities had toughened, and now the public was ready for CHICAGO's darkness. But the antics of Roxie and Velma in the movie are no more demonic than those of ordinary people in an episode of TV's Survivor. CHICAGO begs for comparison with the now classic musicals of this genre. It is clearly Cabaret-esque, but Liza Minelli dances and sings up a storm. Indeed, we never get to see Zeta-Jones and Zellweger do a complete dance number. With Walsh's relentless editing we get to see clips of these two dancing, but never more than a couple of dozen frames of it here and there. What the audience is allowed to see is impressive, the best of Zeta-Jones and Zellweger who are indeed excellent performers. But neither of them get to deliver a dance number from beginning to end. At a live Broadway performance the theater audience commits itself more than an audience watching a movie. There are good reasons to expect that the movie version of a Broadway musical will deliver something more on the big screen than what we can seen on stage. Movie performers have the advantage of multiple takes, multiple cameras, body doubles, vocal dubbing, and editing. When the results are as disappointing as they were in CHICAGO, the film merely becomes an elaborate but poor substitute for the real live thing. The 85-plus percent of the professional critics can gush, ooooh and aaaaaah over CHICAGO all they like (and they DO it too). But this movie is flawed and all of that expensive glitter, fantastic sets, incredible editing and big name actors don't overcome the real, unedited flaws.
Rating:
Summary: And now for something completely different.
Review: CHICAGO is a well-crafted and well-performed film, and individual numbers are nicely sung, danced, and choreographed. But I'm going to say something which will probably get me in hot water with just about everyone here, and that is that this isn't really a musical. Director Rob Marshall creates a good film, but he also contradicts the traditional musical form by presenting the numbers- save the opening and closing ones- as self-contained soliloquies which are figments of a lead character's imagination. Why did he do it this way? Because he didn't trust a modern-day audience to pay attention to a movie where characters sing or dance in a book's real-time context as a seamless advancement of the plot? (Even the stage version of CHICAGO allows the singing and dancing to go on uninterrupted.) It seems that modern-day filmmakers regard the musical genre as an out-of-date dinosaur which can only be presented to a modern public as a variation on MTV or VH-1. (The above summary makes the same observation, citing the excessive cuts which innterrupt the dance sequences.) Not all filmgoers are 14 years old; some of us want to see a song or dance performed from beginning to end without cutting back and forth to something else. Is this done because the filmmaker assumes we'd be bored to death watching three uninterrupted minutes of one song or dance? If so, don't knock it until you try it. (Obviously it worked in the films WEST SIDE STORY, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, and SINGIN' IN THE RAIN.) In the end, I congratulate the film for all its accolades and nominations, but it's a highly stylized music video more than a musical.
Rating:
Summary: LOVED IT! Could not get over how great it is.
Review: WOW! Most film adaptations of Broadway musicals lack something in transition but not Chicago -- everyone from the stars (Zeta-Jones and Zellweger, the two Zs in the word pizzaz) to the dancers are thorough professionals, top-notch singing and dancing, hard-bodies performing acorbatic feats in perfect time to pulsing music. Queen Latifah is nothing less than a queen as Mama, the prison matron, whether she is in dowdy prison-issue garb or vamping it up in a gold lame dress. The story is riveting -- Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones) is a well-known singer-dancer who is arrested for bumping off her sister and her husband; Roxie (Zellweger) is a star-struck wannabe who shoots her lover and almost gets her hapless husband to take the blame (John C. Reilly, fresh from a similar role in "The Good Girl"). The audience knows they did it, the two women don't even hide the fact that they did it -- but how are they going to get out of jail and back on the stage? The answer is smooth Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), a lawyer who has never lost a case. Soon, Velma is cast aside for Roxie in the publicity wars that Billy orchestrates. They are stars in their own right, to the point Velma is begging Roxie to be in her act when they get out --- despite never having seen the girl sing or dance. There are many key cameos of favorite stars here -- Mya as a prison dancer, Lucy Liu as a hot-tempered murderess who may well steal Roxie's publicity. The music is great, the voices stunning, the dancing hot. Take a trip to Chicago today!
Rating:
Summary: *** RAZZLE DAZZLE: 3.5 STARS ***
Review: Adapted from the successfully revived hit musical that has been doing the rounds on Broadway and London's West End, Chicago is the cinematic directorial debut of stage director and choreographer Rob Marshall. Chicago is on the whole a dark affair, akin somewhat to both Cabaret and Bugsy Malone. It stars Renee Zellwegger as the 'heroine' Roxie Hart, who shoots her no good lover dead when he decides to dump her. Arrested and sent to jail she meets up with fellow killer Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones), a former nightclub chanteusse that gunned down both her husband and sister after catching them in a romantic clinch. Velma, initially has no interest in poor old naive Roxie because due to her celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) and the prison warder (Queen Latifah) she's a bigger celebrity in prison than she ever was out of prison. That is until Roxie starts to steal her thunder. Hollywood has a long established tradition of making musical movies, indeed the first Oscars best picture winner of the sound era, in 1929, was The Broadway Melody. Until the 1970's when musicals became strangely unfashionable musicals continued to pick up those famous golden statuettes regularly, with the likes of Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music picking up Best Picture Oscars between 1959 and 1965. It wasn't until 2001's Moulin Rouge that the musical was resurrected and readopted as a viable and popular movie genre. Chicago has been nominated for a whopping 13 Oscars with at least one nomination in every major category, with the exception of Best Actor. It also won three major Golden Globe Awards, Best Picture and Best Actor and Actress in a musical or comedy for its stars, Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger. With all the Golden Globes and Oscar hype you might expect that the movie adaptation of Chicago would be something special. However, enjoyable as Chicago undoubtedly is, it is certainly not in the league of any of the previously mentioned screen musicals. Don't get me wrong, Chicago is a good movie, an enjoyable movie and an entertaining movie. It boasts some decent performances too, particularly from the likes of Catherine Zeta Jones and the formidable presence that is Queen Latifah. Richard Gere has some nice moments too and is appropriately slick as lawyer Billy Flynn, manipulating the media and tap dancing his way out of many a tight spot. He has one of the best numbers in the whole show (Razzle Dazzle) and with his background of stage musicals, earlier in his career, was perfectly cast. John C. Reilly nominated in this years Oscars for best supporting actor is both appropriately sad and gullible in equal measures, as Roxie's poor sap of a husband, Amos. ReneeZellweger's performance is also good but not a patch on her turns in Nurse Betty, Bridget Jones's Diary, or Jerry Maguire. Undoubtedly she gives a good performance and is a likeable heroine but next to the likes of Catherine Zeta Jones her lack of a musical background is evident. Chicago is a very difficult show to open out cinematically, with much of the action being set in a prison. Nearly all of the scenes in Chicago betray its stage origins with little expansion of the action out-with a traditional theatrical format. Even with the device of cutting between the reality and the musical fantasies in Roxie's head, Chicago looks like it was all filmed on a sound stage, which of course it was. It therefore seems strangely unbelievable that Rob Marshall has been nominated as Best Director in this years Academy awards when Baz Luhrmann was excluded from last years nominations. Love it or loathe it Moulin Rouge was surely a far more original, innovative and technically more impressive film than the rather formulaic staginess of Chicago. However, what the movie lacks in innovation it makes up for with its classic musical numbers, such as 'All That Jazz', 'Mr Cellophane' and the previously mentioned 'Razzle Dazzle'. In summary, if you are a fan of stage musicals and cant afford to get to Broadway or London's West End then this is certainly worth the price of a movie ticket and far cheaper too. It boasts a great cast that you'll certainly never see on stage together but you'll miss out on that unique live experience. The choice is yours and in the words of Amos Hart 'thanks for listening'.
Rating:
Summary: This Movie is "All That Jazz!" and then some!
Review: If you haven't seen "Chicago" yet you are missing out. Be sure to see it before the Academy Awards - and make sure you see it before it leaves the theater. Renee Zellweger gives the performance of a lifetime and you will fall in love with her character Roxie Hart. Catherine Zeta-Jones is amazing; her voice and dancing ability will "razzle dazzle" you. Queen Latifah, John C. Reilly and Richard Gere all give an extroadinary performance! You will leave the theater stunned and amazed. You cannot see this movie only once - so go see it soon!
Rating: 
Summary: It's no Moulin Rouge, but it'll do!
Review: After I saw the movie, "Chicago" yesterday, I have to admit that it had me singing, "All that Jazz" as I left the theatre. Unfortunatly, that is one of the only couple good songs in that movie. I'm not saying the others were bad. The "He had it coming" scene was actually quite good. But nothing REALLY stood out. Take "Moulin Rouge" for example: Great, up-beat songs that are sung beautifully. But in Chicago, everything started to sound the same. Also, the song where Roxie is Mr. Flynn's dummy, was VERY annoying. On a scale from 1 to 10, I'd give the music a 4. The dancing and acting however, was very good. I also found the plot pretty exciting. I've probably confused you by now. Did I like the movie? Yes, I did. Do I recommend it? Yes, I do. Should you buy the soundtrack? I wouldn't. But, do whatever you want! You should go see it. It's sexy and fun. You'll have a good time.
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