:: 1.31.2003 ::

Chicago
My first-ever Sunset Blvd blog post will be a quick-dry congelation of my thoughts and ideas about the film Chicago, heterogeneously blended. I won’t be able to construct a critical exegesis of the picture until many years from now, after several additional viewings and at least two post-secondary degrees. Don’t expect Gene Siskel resurrected (although I wouldn’t mind being thought of as Roger Ebert’s snarky foil).

Thumbs up, thumbs down? Three-and-a-half stars? As much as I love quantifying value, I haven’t developed such a system for Sunset Blvd yet. Go see this movie. Does that work? It is a spectacular showbiz triumph, tightening the garrote around the neck of gen X irony. Where Moulin Rouge was a vertiginous carnival binge, Chicago is jazzy, sexy ecstasy.

Somewhere in Chicago’s second reel I felt sure I was witnessing firsthand the prophesied Hollywood Renaissance. True, Renée Zellweger looks like a puckered turnip screwed onto the body of a petite fiberglass mannequin (here’s Queen Latifah in one frame with a queen-sized waterbed full of bosoms, and in the next we see Renée (when did she add an accent to her name?) all tarted up like a chorus girl despite those two deflated flapjacks on her gym-hardened torso) and the John C. Reilly number is a total bore.

But Catherine Zeta-Jones, oh Catherine, with your flawless symmetry and shimmering, vivacious kinesis, as a transcendental sex goddess for the 21st century you are such a diamond as Hollywood has been missing from her crown! I see you even now as in a dream, hounded by the media Pharisees and besieged by paparazzi, stomping your deco heel and saying “I tell you the truth, before Hollywood was born, I AM!”

But then again, like so many ex-Christians I am prone to such messianic fantasies, especially when the house lights go down. There’s something about being in the dark with a beautiful woman that brings even me to my knees. As far as I could tell, the music was vibrant and soulful, but who listens to music in the theater? The opening dance number (to the only song I recognized, “All That Jazz”) was electrifying, and featured Zeta-Jones’s most prominent performance. It’s a timeless Bob Fosse burlesque number that made clear to me why Las Vegas isn’t just about gambling.

Bob Fosse understood that music in movies is just an excuse for dancing! The cinema as a medium of motion (take note, Meryl Streep, I said “motion,” not “accents”) is the perfect vehicle for kinetic physical expression, and the exhilarating final dance sequence with Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones) and Roxie Hart (Zellweger—the name strangely fits, doesn’t it?) will jazz you right out of the theater and home again.

Chicago is cinema. It's about poetic choreography (keep that in mind during “The Cell-Block Tango”), it’s about Catherine Zeta-Jones, it’s about the moment you forget all the hot air the high-school kid behind you was blowing onto the back of your neck and you enter a glittering pagan realm full of angels who serenely disdain to annihilate you. Welcome to Sunset Blvd!

:: Posted by Anonymous @ 11:12 PM [+] ::
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