Chicago

Part throwback and part reworking of the movie musical, Chicago both gleefully celebrates and casually refutes various hallmarks of the genre. Less consciously postmodern and in-your-face than Moulin Rouge, it nevertheless retains a “stagier” feeling than the latter movie, ultimately coming across as slightly more theatrical than cinematic, and never fully shaking its Broadway roots. Still, its performances, not its mise-en-scene, have garnered the most attention from the press, and rightfully so—Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, and John C. Reilly all offer up their share of showstopping numbers.

Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Velma Kelly, a singer/dancer who saunters onto stage without missing a beat right after shooting her husband and his mistress (who also happens to be her sister) dead. As the saying goes, any press is good press, and Velma basks in the limelight, giving interviews from her prison cell and hawking her story to anyone who will listen.

Unfortunately for her, the attention proves to be short-lived, as she is soon upstaged by the arrival of Roxie Hart (Zellweger), a wannabe stage performer who shoots her lover dead when she finds him lacking in theater connections. Roxie promptly hires showboat attorney Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), and the flashbulbs start coming in her direction.

Packed neatly in-between the musical numbers is a surprisingly relevant message about the fleeting nature of celebrity, and the bread and circuses people willingly surround themselves with even during the most troubled times (Chicago is set during the Depression). The courtroom scenes are no less of a circus than say, the O.J. Simpson trial, complete with a terrific tap dance (both literal and around the facts) by Gere.

In the end, it’s nothing terribly profound, but those bread and circuses make for a fun two hours of movie-watching.