Word: hollywoodism
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...make her college musical just may play a pivotal role in reviving the whole movie-musical genre. Zellweger stars in Chicago, a big-screen version of the Broadway hit that opens Dec. 27 and is already generating big-time buzz. With last year's hit Moulin Rouge still on Hollywood's mind and Chicago about to break, the studios are gearing up for a new era of movie musicals. Being talked about is a new screen version of Guys and Dolls, Grease 3, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John and a big-screen version of choreographer Susan Stroman...
...Hollywood is realizing that audiences didn't tire of musicals. They tired of bad musicals. When good ones came along--Cabaret in 1972 and Grease in 1978--audiences proved more than willing. While Chicago doesn't have the stylistic daring of Moulin Rouge, it is a crowd-pleasing reimagining of a show that is kept current by its up-to-the-minute cynicism, its skewering of the media and its heroines' obsession with stardom...
...Broadway play, which became a silent movie in 1927, then a film starring Ginger Rogers in 1942. The current Broadway revival of the musical recently celebrated its 2,500th performance. This new big-screen version of Chicago restores the old routine of hit Broadway musicals becoming Hollywood movies. In recent years Broadway has taken from Hollywood without giving back, turning movies like The Producers and Hairspray into splashy hit shows. By finally making its way back to the screen, Chicago helps even the score...
...Hollywood, most of the cynicism is found behind the scenes--in the conference rooms where a film's every truckling nuance is debated. Chicago, in director Rob Marshall's bold, strutting, rapaciously funny version, puts the cynicism up front, where it can titillate, horrify and instruct us. The movie cheerfully displays the backstabbing and lies--the desperation to be No. 1 and have everyone else be zero--that go into making the tabloid and celluloid shams that beguile...
...film has lots of terrific turns to support its leading ladies: from Richard Gere, as the sexy weasel lawyer; from Queen Latifah, exuding the wry sizzle of a star who doesn't mind that Hollywood has yet to figure out how to use her; and, we almost forgot, from John C. Reilly--another in his sad gallery of losers not even daring to hope for sympathy...