Chicago

Chicago

2002

Woozah.

If I had to describe Chicago in one word, that would be it. On a completely shallow note, this movie is spectacular. The shiny sparkly (I am not ADD I swear) costumes draw help draw you into the 1920’s setting. It’s a movie that the female actresses carry, which is a pleasant change. The musical numbers are flawless, drawing you into the imagination of whoever is singing. They are so cool! The actors even sing the songs themselves. The actual pieces get stuck in your head forever and you can’t help but tap your toes to them. I just love musicals.

But on a deeper level this movie so epically fails. It tells us as long as you have a good lawyer and are a good liar, you can get away with murder! Literally!

At yet, I loved it! Call me a horrible person. Go ahead. See if I care! This movie is so well made I don’t care if its morals are ridiculously horrid.

The movie starts out with Velma, a singer and dancer in the great city of, go figure, Chicago. She just murdered her sister and husband because they were cheating with each other. Always a good reason to murder someone. She is caught and thrown in jail.

Now we go to Roxie. She is cheating on her husband with a furniture salesman because he told her he could get her in with some really good manager. See, she wants to be a singer and a dancer. But OMG GUESS WHAT? The furniture guy doesn’t know a manager. He just wants sex. So she shoots him! That seems to be the answer to everything in Chicago.

Now she is in jail. Poor Roxie. Not really. She is in jail with Velma not so coincidentally.

After being in jail for awhile waiting for her trial she overhears Velma and the matron of the prison “Mama” talking about Velma’s amazing brilliant lawyer who has never lost a female case. His name is Billy. This makes me think of a bullfrog.

Anywho Roxie decides to get this lawyer but she has no money. Her poor-dumb-still-madly-in-love-for some-reason-husband somehow gets five grand and she has the best lawyer money can buy. Yay!

They work on completely changing the story to make it self defense and a bunch of stuff happens, including pretending to be pregnant and learning killing people is the only way to make people interested in you, and her trial comes. A lot of fancy tongue tricks are performed by Billy and Roxie gets off scot free. And so does Velma somehow. They go into business together doing a song and dance act and the movie ends.

So what does Chicago tell us? LEARN TO LIE! It is a most valuable skill to have! You can get away with even murder, as long as you can lie! In fact, the only person who actually was punished for a crime in this movie was the innocent Hungarian! Oh the irony!

But besides an extremely faulty moral story, this movie is terrific! Okay you can argue that it’s not faulty it really is a satire of the media and how it can twist everything to make it look wonderful. Which is true, it definitely had that, but people do still get away with murder, so it’s still real screwy. But that doesn’t matter at all because it’s very creative, both my movie watching partner for this film Rose, and I thought. What really carried this movie were the spectacular songs and dance parts. They are just too hard to explain here. Go watch the movie and see them for yourself even though you now know how it all ends. It’s the best part.

In the end I would highly recommend this movie as long as you don’t mind being morally corrupted for one hundred and thirteen minutes. You may take this as sarcasm but it’s actually not! Watch it! Be a little bad! It’s okay.