Chicago (DVD)

Escapism at the flicks is what entertainment is all about to me. I don't wish to watch every movie that comes out and I'm not particularly keen on those "real-life" dramas...I can see real life all around me, let's have a bit of out-of-this-worldness at the cinema!

Enter Chicago stage left. To borrow a phrase from one of its musical cousins this film is "Spectacular, Spectacular"! It's colourful, it's bombastic, it's a dance a minute, it's a song for every sentence, it's.....boring.

To summarise the plot - a bored little budding stage-starlet Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) is cheating on her husband with a man who has promised to get her into her own show. Once she finds out she has been taken for a ride (excuse the crassness) she reaches for her husband's gun and kills the lying lover. Her gentle naive doormat husband (John C. Reilly) first tries to cover up for her but to no avail. She is put in jail awaiting trial. While there she meets one of her greatest stage heroes Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones). She is in jail awaiting trial for the murder of her husband and sister. Richard Gere comes high-stepping into the film as their never-lost-a-case-lawyer and the story progresses...but I won't give anything more away.

I haven't read the other reviews of this movie on Ciao as I did not want them to influence my opinion, but from the reviews I have read in the paper and on the web I am being led to wonder if I perhaps saw a different movie from everyone else.

Out of the 5 main characters, the only ones who deserved to be cast on merit where Catherine Zeta-Jones, John C. Reilly and Queen Latifah (who played the matron of the jail and had one great musical number). Renee pouts her way through the movie like an anorexic Marilyn Monroe. Richard Gere in his opening number looks so embarassed, I found myself cringing in my seat watching him. He didn't look much more comfortable in the later numbers either. And what was so great about the tap dancing scene that people in the cinema audience started to clap?

Am I a horrible old cynic? I'm beginning to feel so when I speak to people about this movie as 90% of people are gushing about it! There are some very good scenes - I loved the Mr. Cellophane song, Queen Latifah's number, and Catherine Zeta-Jones surprised me with her strong protrayal of her character. But a knock-out movie? No....I was looking at my watch from around an hour in which is really unusual for me. To compare it to Moulin Rouge is a travesty in my opinion - M.R. combined music and cinema to perfection - Chicago is song after song after song after song with very minimal dialogue in between - I think it was all a bit too much for me! I go to the cinema to see cinema...I felt like I was in a theatre without the atmosphere of seeing the life show.

I would recommend this movie as most people seem to love it, but I'll be hoping on Oscar night that it doesn't sweep the boards.