 Change the last word of the opening line of the song "Chicago" from "town" to "movie" and you've got the theme for most of the reviews of Chicago, the movie. Joel Siegel of ABC's Good Morning America is among those who found it wonderful -- "the only movie of a Broadway musical I've seen where the movie is better than the Broadway show," he said on GMA, adding: "It's gonna razzle-dazzle you. It's gonna razzle-dazzle the Oscar voters, too." Similarly, Elvis Mitchell writes in the New York Times: "It's the raw expenditure of energy and the canniness of the staging that should pull audiences in and keep them rooted." Invoking the slang of the '20s, the period in which the movie is set, Stephen Hunter comments in the Washington Post: "This Chicago doesn't toddle, it swings, it Lindy Hops, it Charlestons the night away, and probably all your woes along with it. It's the bee's knees." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times describes it as "a dazzling song-and-dance extravaganza, with just enough words to support the music and allow everyone to catch their breath between songs. (Another Chicago critic, Michael Wilmington of the Tribune, observes that one of the things the movie lacks is Chicago itself; it was filmed mostly in Toronto.) But beyond the razzle-dazzle, Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post, observes that the movie improves on the Broadway show in other ways: "The plot makes more sense. There are characters you can feel for. And there's now an overarching theme -- society's appetite for spectacle - that seems better fitted to our era." Some critics suggest that Chicago could revive the movie musical (as they did following the opening of Moulin Rouge. Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun remarked: "Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since Cabaret. It leaves viewers feeling juiced-up, smart, alive -- clamoring for a new era of big-screen musicals with sass and sensibility." On the other hand, that's not the way several critics felt after watching it. "Anyone who has seen Chicago on stage will leave the theater feeling they've watched nothing but a pale imitation of the real deal," comments Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News. And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal clearly left the theater unimpressed. "The production is engulfed by barely controlled frenzy", he writes, "all decor and no air, music as lo-cal ear candy, scenes as merchandise to be sold, people as two-dimensional props." |
