芝加哥 Chicago review by Stephanie Zacharek

The legs go on for a mile and a half in "Chicago" -- Catherine Zeta Jones' take up the first mile and Renée Zellweger's the extra half. But the two actresses, who play Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart in Rob Marshall's devilishly grand movie version of the Bob Fosse Broadway musical, are equals in all other respects. They balance each other wonderfully, and it doesn't hurt that Marshall orchestrates everything else around them with near perfection: "Chicago" has almost single-handedly resurrected the tradition of the movie musical, a genre that has for the most part languished since its last great masterpiece, Herbert Ross's 1981 "Pennies From Heaven," which didn't attract the audience it should have. "Chicago" is sophisticated, brash, sardonic, completely joyful in its execution. It gives anyone who ever loved movie musicals, and lamented their demise, something to live for.

Marshall is a first-time director whose other movie work has been as a choreographer. Choreographers have to understand composition, what the body can and can't do, how arcs of movement mesh together seamlessly or disconnect, and, of course, how to conjoin movement with music so that the two seem inseparable. Marshall has the advantage of having a great eye as well: He seems to instinctively understand the link between physical and visual movement in the movies. (Fosse himself started out as a choreographer.) Marshall's picture is an object lesson in the ways a whole movie can be considered a dance routine: You need an instinct for pacing, a sense of what goes where and when, an understanding of where action must build and where it must recede, and a firm idea of where, in each frame, you want to draw the eye. (Do you want your audience to drink in the complete spectacle of a stage full of dancers, or is it time to narrow the focus on one fabulously garter-belted set of stems?)

Marshall pulls it all together in "Chicago," in a way that's suitably Fosse-like but also bears his own stamp of individuality. Its editing, by Martin Walsh, at first seems a little busy, but once you learn to trust it, you see how crucial it is to the movie's energy and lightness.

And "Chicago" doesn't bother to ratchet up the irony quotient to underscore the applicability of this sarcastic little tale of media manipulation at the beginning of the 21st century, because Marshall knows he doesn't have to. The material speaks for itself. Fosse's musical was based on a '20s era play by court reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins (it was turned into the 1942 Ginger Rogers movie "Roxie Hart"); Fosse and Fred Ebb reworked it, and Ebb and John Kander wrote the musical numbers. (The movie's sleek screenplay was written by Bill Condon, director of "Gods and Monsters.") "Chicago" is the story of a cute but tough jazz-age show-biz wannabe, Roxie Hart, who kills her lover in a fit of jealousy and while awaiting trial lands in the same jail where one of her idols from the stage, Velma Kelly, is awaiting trial for killing her husband and sister (who were doing her wrong). Advised by the slick, nobody's-fool prison matron "Mama" Morton (here played by Queen Latifah), Roxie persuades her gentle, devoted, milquetoast husband Amos (John C. Reilly) to raise enough money to hire hotshot lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) to get her off the hook. Flynn launches a publicity campaign that turns Roxie into a media darling -- and enrages Velma, also one of Flynn's clients, because it draws attention away from her own case. And Roxie, not content to just lap up the attention, embellishes it with her own sympathy-milking P.R. touches, including a faux pregnancy.

*小建议*如果你喜欢这篇文章,可以顶上去;或者Copy下这篇文章的链接发给MSN或QQ上的朋友; 我们永远相信,分享是一种美德,Great People Share Knowledge... (130影萍网谢谢您的关注和支持！)