I’m still baffled this won Best Picture at the Oscars even though I watched it just this morning and yet again enjoyed it more than expected, and I’m always baffled it won Best Picture at the Oscars even though I always enjoy it more than expected. I don’t know what my prejudice against the movie is, I think it’s that the whole seediness that strikes you while watching the movie is so perfectly glossed over that it’s easy to look at the poster, see stills from the movie, even listen to the songs, and forget all the brilliant things inside. This is a movie that can go clean over the heads of those who don’t care about how corrupt the whole world is even as they have a wild time with the costumes and the music, while those sitting next to them more frightened about where we’re headed can recognise exactly what’s being said with each sequence and song… it’s very sneaky indeed, probably the most cynical film to ever win an Oscar – it almost seems wrong that it got such an award.

As I’ve written before on the film, I haven’t seen the stage show, so I have no idea how it is staged, but I loved the way this film version is presented, how the songs are done. At first it feels lazy, just basically film what you can like a regular film and shoot the musical parts literally on a stage… but it’s so much more than that, it becomes an extension of Roxie et al.’s inner thoughts: everything’s a performance to these people (such is life). I don’t know how this could be achieved onstage, I mean, you can’t have such a separation of real/theatrical when you’re already in a theatre. I don’t know, I should stop there before I sound stupid… I hope I get to see the stage show some time and I’ll come back to that thought.

All the performances are brilliant and at least two of the actors are ones I don’t generally like watching – Richard Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones – they just seem perfectly cast here. The songs, of course, are brilliant. I guess I can see why this won Best Picture at the Oscars… I can’t imagine anybody truly not liking this movie. You can gawk at the eye-candy of good-looking actors and actresses, great costumes and set-design (I love the exteriors), take in the famous songs, and just enjoy it for the surface gloss; or you can really chuckle at the digs at society, the media, etc, which are as pointed as a completely different movie about our glorification of killers, Natural Born Killers. It’s a bizarre combination, so bizarre that I hardly even think of how good the movie is until it’s playing in front of my eyes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2004 at 4:55 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as broadway, musical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.