75. Chicago (2002)

Plot Intro

Wannabe cabaret singer, Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) finds herself on trial for the murder of a man she was having an extra-marital affair with in order to further her career (Dominic West). Whilst in prison awaiting her trial, she finds herself sharing a block with her favourite singer, Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones) who is also on trial for murder. Through Velma, Roxie makes contact with superstar lawyer, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) who is defending both murderesses. But a rivalry develops between them to ensure that they maintain Billy’s attention, and save their singing careers once they are free from jail…

Doug says...

Coming at the time it does, Chicago feels very much like an apology for Moulin Rouge not winning the year before. It’s telling too that Nicole Kidman nabbed her Oscar for The Hours this year, after missing out for her turn as Satine. Chicago isn’t as stunning and complete as Moulin Rouge, but it still plays an important part in the reinvention of movie musicals. 

What director Rob Marshall does so brilliantly is he transposes a very theatrical musical to the cinema in such a way that it feels built for the silver screen. He reinvents and re-angles the entire thing so that the musical numbers play out on a Vaudeville stage obviously in Roxie’s head. And this then allows for very exciting choreography. His staging of The Cell Block Tango has become iconic (you can tell because it’s often heavily spoofed), while the opening All That Jazz is half the reason Catherine Zeta-Jones won the Supporting Actress Oscar. 

I love Marshall’s bravery and imagination here (it would later lead him into failure with his godawful version of Nine) and the way he utilises the considerable talents of Renee Zellweger, Zeta Jones, and Queen Latifah (whose rip-roaring Matron Mama Morton is scene-stealing done to a tee) is fabulous. The comparison of a murderess being hanged to a circus performer doing a vanishing act is something that can only be done in cinema, and it’s sublime in its sudden darkness. 

Where the film feels occasionally flat is in its quieter moments. Re-watching, I found the slower songs and dialogue-heavy scenes to be quite a drag. Zeta Jones lifts the tone every time she’s on it with some whip-sharp choreo, but there are moments (including the very drawn out ‘Roxie’) where I was itching for the fast-forward button. A great reimagining of a slightly dusty musical, but I still feel that it was partly an attempt to apologise for Moulin Rouge missing out the year before. 

Highlight 

Catherine Zeta Jones roars through All That Jazz in a way that sets the duo tone of glamour and darkness from the very beginning. A consummate, professional turn.

Lowlight

Numbers like Mr Cellophane and Roxie end up dragging quite a bit, and Richard Gere has a few stumbles as the slick lawyer Billy Flynn. 

Mark 

8/10

Paul says...

This is our first musical since 1968’s Oliver! over 30 years beforehand and, so far, this is the most recent musical to win Best Picture. The films of the noughties seem to be all about resurgences of old genres. We saw the swords-and-sandals epic reinvented through Gladiator, we’ll see the big-budget fantasy return to fashion in next week’s Lord of the Rings, and Chicago, along with the previous year’s Moulin Rouge, sits perfectly in the resurgence of the movie musical, with Phantom of the Opera, The Producers, Rent, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Sweeney Todd, Mamma Mia, Les Mis and Into the Woods all following in quick succession. 

However, I would never place Chicago amongst my favourite musicals. For starters, I just don’t like the songs. I would never re-listen to any of them, and generally they grind the plot to a halt. All of them take place within the heads of one of the characters, and are used to further accentuate a character’s motivations or traits. A couple work quite well plot-wise, such as the opening number, ‘All That Jazz’, in which Roxie watches Velma perform it then fantasises about herself taking Velma’s place. And ‘Cell Block Tango’ has a strong sense of fun. But many others are forgettable and by the final half an hour, it feels like the writers are just filling up time with even more vaguely jazz-inspired numbers involving excessive amounts of fishnet stockings and feathers.

The film looks great too, although it’s nowhere near on a par with the vivacity of Moulin Rouge, or the light and dark of Victorian London in Oliver! I think because it’s such a heavily idealised vision of the 20s. The whole thing is an extended version of the naff 20s-themed office parties, where queues for elaborate cocktails are made all the more excruciating by Brenda from HR trying to wrap her feather boa around you (I’m not speaking from personal experience, here). The sheer falseness of it means that it’s hard to see how the musical is based on real life events, and the biting satire of America’s corrupt judiciary system gets lost amidst the lights and glamour. The Great Gatsby, it ain’t.

A massive saving grace for me is the lead performance. Most viewers rave about Catherine Zeta-Jones and she is great, thoroughly deserving of her Best Supporting Actress Oscar because she plays against her “nice, virginal girl” type so well. She probably had an absolute ball throwing snarks left, right and centre. But it’s Zellweger that steals it for me. Her character is ridiculous. A bloke she is sleeping with turns out to be a liar so that first thing she does is reach for the gun. And she’s so fixated on a fame identical to Velma Kelly’s that the performance could have been a poor man’s Anne Baxter in All About Eve (indeed, the two films are very similar). But every facial expression, dance move, and exclamation felt spontaneous and real to me. It’s a shame she lost out on Best Actress, but at least she lost to the powerhouse that is Nicole Kidman. 

So no, I’m not a Chicago fanatic. Like Doug, I think it only won because Moulin Rouge lost out the year before- a sort of Academy Awards-style compensation. I think there are stronger, more original, and more gripping musicals out there. For a show that requires a huge amount of energy to perform in it, it doesn’t half slog towards the end.

Highlight

The opening number establishes the two main characters and their situations through music, movement and camera work so creatively, it’s a real shame that the film doesn’t keep it up

Lowlight

John C. Reilly’s a great actor but his character gets nothing except pathetic buffoonery, occasional displays of misogyny and an incredibly boring solo number.

Mark

4/10

74. A Beautiful Mind (2001) (feat. Moulin Rouge)

A Beautiful Mind Plot Intro

Brilliant mathematician John Forbes Nash (Russell Crowe) is desperate to assert his position in the academic sector and gain the undying respect and admiration of his peers. Unfortunately, he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia which causes him to see and believe that he has been employed by a mysterious US government official (Ed Harris) to foil coded messages sent by the Soviet Union. As he comes to terms with his life-long illness, it has a huge impact on his career, his relationship with his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) and his friendships.

Moulin Rouge Plot Intro 

Paris, 1900. Scottish aspiring writer and romantic soul, Christian (Ewan McGregor) arrives in Paris looking to enjoy the flamboyant, Bohemian, turn-of-the-century lifestyle epitomised by the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Montmartre. Whilst there, he becomes infatuated with their star dancer, Satine (Nicole Kidman). But her employer, Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent) wants her married to a nefarious aristocrat called the Duke (Richard Roxburgh) who will invest in the Moulin Rouge’s future productions in return. But Christian and Satine continue their romance covertly, desperately hoping that they will not get discovered. 

Paul says...

We have decided to do a “comparison” post, which we last wrote when comparing regularly-voted movie favourite, Citizen Kane, to its lesser-remembered Best Picture champion, How Green Was My Valley. Whilst Citizen Kane is generally regarded as the more worthy winner in 1941, opinions on the outcome of the 2001 Academy Awards is perhaps currently a little less contentious (although in years to come I suspect Moulin Rouge may achieve the same “should have won” status that Citizen Kane has). But we’ve decided to review both movies because, quite frankly, we much prefer Moulin Rouge (I know, shocking, right?) and our opinions on A Beautiful Mind are much cooler.

So what’s wrong with A Beautiful Mind? Well, in all fairness, it starts pretty well. It sets up an enigmatic and watchable central character (although Russell Crowe ain’t no Dustin Hoffman), and it presents the topic of schizophrenia in ways similar to films such as Fight Club, Black Swan and Shutter Island in that you’re not entirely certain if what you’re seeing is real. Nash’s hallucinations take the form of a pretty conventional political-thriller, which contrasts horribly with the gentle, reverential biopic tone in the “real” scenes. Even if you haven’t done your research on Nash like we did, the viewer gets a distinct sense that something is not right, which helps us to see the world through the eyes of someone with schizophrenia pretty well. Granted, it doesn’t quite have the thrill of Fight Club or the relentless discomfort of Black Swan, but it still drew me in.

The halfway turning-point is where Nash realises that his work with the Pentagon and his best friend (played by Paul Bettany) are totally fabricated, and this is where the film goes downhill. We could have had a tense and emotional dissection of life married to someone with very severe mental illnesses. But Jennifer Connelly gets little except constantly tell her husband that he’s ill, sigh sadly, occasionally scream, and mention that her life is hard. In other words, what started as an unconventional psychological study has descended into schmaltzy tick-box biopic, and it continues this way until it limps to the finish line. It’s a wonder that Connelly beat both Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith in Gosford Park to win Best Supporting Actress. She’s not bad, but I didn’t feel she was given anything interesting enough to do to demonstrate her skill.

Moulin Rouge, meanwhile, is a magnificent example of how melodrama is done well. Like most Baz Luhrmann productions, it’s frenetic, flamboyant and sometimes downright insane. But it skilfully balances the adrenaline rush of Bohemian life with the real, human stories of heartbreak that lie underneath the thin veneer of false exuberance. It also boasts one of Nicole Kidman’s best performances (and before you claim that it’s her ONLY best performance, I suggest you watch Big Little Lies which has led to a bit of a Nicolaissance over the last year).

I’m sure Doug will wax lyrical about Moulin Rouge more than me as he has seen it more, and understands it even better. But I do think that this film losing to A Beautiful Mind is one of those decisions that, in hindsight, should not have happened. Moulin Rouge is credited with instigating a resurgence in the movie musical, with Chicago winning Best Picture next year and the releases of Rent, The Phantom of the Opera and Hairspray dominating the next few years. One can hardly claim that A Beautiful Mind caused a resurgence of Mathematics. 

A Beautiful Mind Highlight

The first hour skilfully moves between biopic and thriller, and director Ron Howard wisely chooses to just have the two genres sitting side by side without much transition, creating a sense of unease and surrealism.

A Beautiful Mind Lowlight

There’s a horribly calculated and overdone scene later on when Nash says goodbye to his hallucinatory friends, including a small girl who is crying. Considering that we know she is not real, what are we supposed to be feeling here? Just have her disappear and get on with it.

Moulin Rouge Highlight

The Elephant Love Medley section has the power to enthral even the most heartless of audience members.

Moulin Rouge Lowlight

I know it’s SUPPOSED to be like this, but sometimes Lurhmann’s direction is hard to keep track of because his camera shots are so quick and numerous. Especially after the half-bottle of wine that I drank beforehand.

A Beautiful Mind Mark

6/10

Moulin Rouge Mark 
10/10 

Doug says...

There’s a line in Mindy Kaling’s sitcom Champions where the young gay son is asked to ‘A Beautiful Mind’ up his homework. He stops, appalled, and says ‘“The movie that took the Oscar from Moulin Rouge? How dare you.”

He is entirely correct. This is an utter mistake on the part of the Academy, and they were particularly cruel on Moulin Rouge, with Baz Luhrmann not even getting a Best Director nod. It was so noticed at the time that Oscars host Whoopi Goldberg ironically suggested that the film had directed itself. 

But I’ll come to Moulin Rouge. Firstly we sat through A Beautiful Mind which frankly wasn’t worth my time. It feels like a rip off of Fight Club which came out only a year or two before and is far superior. We know quickly that these hallucinations aren’t real, and Russell Crowe is such a bad actor (how has he won an Oscar?! how?!) that it’s all a bit boring. 

But the real issue with A Beautiful Mind is that it basically sets up the premise that serious mental health issues are scary. Which they are - at first. But at no point do they look seriously into the treatment and how people can actually get better - there’s some limp analysis but it’s lip-service rather than actual investigation. 

In our world, where mental health has become a huge topic and greater sensitivity and knowledge is demanded around it, this film at times seems almost voyeuristic. We are supposed to shudder and say ‘oh god how scary’, but there’s no real mention of how people survive and thrive despite mental health issues. It’s not just predictable and dull - it’s irresponsible. 

Moulin Rouge. I could talk for hours about the subtleties and brilliance of this film, having been obsessed with it since it came out nearly twenty years ago. I love it. It deals with the ‘underworld’ of Paris, showing the grime beneath the glitter and uses modern music as a startling method of showing quite how ahead of its time this society was. Luhrmann uses whirling shots and often uses call-backs and call-aheads to both remind and warn of the various action. His use of group numbers (the extraordinary Tango de la Roxanne) show how cinematography can revolutionise the theatrical. 

Nicole Kidman is stunning at the heart of it. It’s a shame that Monster’s Ball was this year too, because I would never begrudge Halle Berry her Oscar, but I wish Kidman had got one for this. She’s sensual and hilarious, but manages always to show you the terrified street-worker beneath the glamorous courtesan. When I was younger I was obsessed by her glitz and performance, now I relish the moments when she lets the curtain fall and you see the (very real) fear of poverty and pain. For all the whirling colour and glamour, Lurhmann excels in choosing moments of stillness and grit that somehow undermine and accentuate the rest of the film. 

The cast also pull their finger out. Caroline O’Connor as the treacherous Nini is horrific and captivating (‘did I say penniless writer, I meant penniless sittar player’), while Jim Broadbent matches Kidman with his ebullient persona sometimes revealing a terrified, poverty-stricken man beneath. In numbers like ‘The Show Must Go On’ and ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’, the Bohemian movement seems tremulous, its very existence balancing on a knife edge between success and disaster. 

But sentimentally, as a young gay kid watching this, it spoke to me in a way very few films do. It deals with the artifice of life covering a well of emotions beneath - longing and hope all wrapped up in glittery faultless choreography.  

A Beautiful Mind Highlight

Jennifer Connelly does well in the little she’s given, and she gives good Acting in the moment Nash nearly accidentally drowns their baby.

A Beautiful Mind Lowlight

It’s quite dull. And considering Fight Club used very similar effects and styles, it’s surprising this got noted. Hollywood loves a biopic. 

Moulin Rouge Highlight

I love Kidman’s portrayal of ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’, but the whole ‘Tango de la Roxane’ set-piece is one of the greatest pieces of cinematic work ever.

Moulin Rouge Lowlight

Okay, it’s a tiny point but it’s always bugged me. Why does Satine change into the red dress, get praised by Zidler, take it off to put on the black ‘seductress’ outfit, and then later change back into the red dress to sing on the roof? Sort your stuff out Editors! 

A Beautiful Mind Mark

4/10

Moulin Rouge Mark 
15/10 

Foreign Language Film 8: Mother India (India, 1957)

Plot Intro

In a small Indian village, a young women named Radha (Nargis) marries her beloved Shamu (Raaj Kumar) and intend to live a peaceful, rural life with their two sons. However, to pay for the wedding, Shamu’s mother borrowed money from a scheming money-lender called Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal), which puts Radha under Sukhilala’s permanent financial control. Throughout her life, this leads on to a series of dramatic and often life-changing events that test her stoicism and survival instincts to the maximum. 

Doug says...

We decided we wanted to watch another Bollywood film because honestly, Bollywood is a bigger film industry than Hollywood and watching only one film from it is like saying you’ve eaten a piece of cheddar and now have an opinion on all cheese. 

And once again, I really enjoyed it. Bollywood films (from the limited selection I’ve seen in my life) really do focus on storytelling, throwing in music and humour with gay abandon. Although a three hour film, it rushes past, telling the story of the pious and graceful Radha as she faces struggles at every turn. 

The struggles are many. Her husband’s arms are crushed by a boulder as he works in the fields, her mother puts the whole family under permanent debt for the sake of a wedding, her house collapses in a monsoon, her sons Ramu and Birju turn out to be troublesome, and one of them in particular (Birju) ends up being a bandit, obsessively trying to steal his mother’s golden bracelets back from the money-lender. It’s a lot. 

Which is where the Bollywood style of cinema really comes in. This is a style where every so often characters stop and sing songs - apparently the music style was far more Western in this picture than usual, but it still sounds very old-school and the lyrics are far from incisive. They also come at bizarre moments. At one point Radha is chasing her bandit son Birju into the forest, the music is setting the pace, and there’s a real sense of danger. They then immediately stop the action so Radha and Birju can sing about a mother’s love for her son. 

And yet - it works. This is far from Hollywood’s style, and why should it not be? Paul will talk more about the title and where it came from, and it’s important that this is a backlash from director Mehboob Khan against the smug West. Radha is shown to be the essence of all things Hindu, as well as the essence of all things good, patient and kind. It’s a forceful point - that to be an Indian person is to be as sophisticated, emotional and full of complexity as anyone in the West. 

Director Khan really pulls the stops out. There’s scenes with huge crowds, great natural scenery, and vivid close-ups, particularly of actress Nargis (one name, like Cher) who handles the main role with melodrama and feeling. She’s powerful, particularly in the scene when her house collapses in the mud and she literally flings herself around in it, covering herself with mud as she bewails her life. Meryl, she ain’t. But it’s a whole different kind of performance. It’s a whole different kind of film. 

Highlight 

The penultimate scene with the denouement is all kinds of crazy and yet somehow filled with feeling. Nargis particularly handles the way she makes an incredibly difficult decision with a lot of emotion. 

Lowlight

The placement of some of the songs does seem very random and ends up holding up the action rather than accompanying it. 

Mark 

8/10

Paul says...

Yes, we return to Bollywood! But we travel back in time 50 years before the last Bollywood film we reviewed, a stirring sports movie called Chak De! which tackled women’s participation in sports as well as the fractured relationships between the different ethnic groups that populate this vast country. 

Mother India is perhaps more representative of what Bollywood is known for than the slicker, more modern Chak De! As Doug says, the drama makes All About Eve look like Postman Pat, and the distribution of rather banal songs at points when the action is at its most extreme feels unusual to 21st-century Western eyes. The acting styles, even for their time, feel about 10 years out of date and more akin to the movements and expressions of the '20s when the grainy quality of filming meant that actors had to act like they’re on speed. 

Nonetheless, the ability to fill up three hours with an incredible array of events that kept both of us gripped is something to be admired. Mother India is comparable to ancient epics such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid in that the main character displays all the ideal attributes that one should have in the face of misfortune. Radha is the epitome of idealised Indian national values post-Empire, showing almost inhuman stoicism, persistence, familial love, community spirit, selflessness and survival instinct, and I couldn’t help but feel inspired myself by her actions even though I’m nowhere near close to the rural poverty that these characters endure.

Indeed, Mother India was a timely film that was understandably a massive hit in its day. It remains, after adjusting for inflation, one of the most expensive and profitable Bollywood films ever made, and was the first Hindi film to be nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film at the Oscars. It lost by one measly vote to the Italian entry. The film was released just 10 years after India’s freedom from British rule, the partition of India and Pakistan and Gandhi’s assassination, so these events would be still fresh in the minds of the Indian people who were still building what would eventually become one of the most significant and populated countries in the world. The message that the film perpetuates is a more serious Dory-from-Finding-Nemo philosophy of “Just keep swimming” no matter what tragedies and injustices life throws at you. And through that, India and its people can show the world that they are a force to be reckoned with.

The title itself is a massive “Fuck you” to the West, as it is also the title of a notorious book written by an American named Katherine Mayo. A quick Wikipedia search will tell you that Mayo’s book is anything but a celebration of India. Rather, it fully condoned Western rule over the country, and claimed India to be a country rife with crime, sexual promiscuity, misogyny, and dirt. Mayo also vehemently opposed non-white and non-Protestant immigration into the United States. In other words, she was a horrendous white supremacist, the far-right Trump supporter of her day. Mother India, the film, was not only designed to inspire the Indians but display India’s strength to the West. Judging by the way in which it was received, the film succeeded tremendously.

Don’t go into Mother India expecting a film reflective of modern-day Hollywood. Some of the acting and film-making styles are very outdated and may raise laughs rather than gasps. But despite this, the film works phenomenally well on two levels - as a piece of Indian and cinematic history, and as a fabulous piece of entertainment.

Highlight

The final 30 minutes, in which pretty much every event the writers could think of is thrown into the story along with, you guessed it, a song! It’s exhilarating stuff.

Lowlight

Sunil Dutt, who plays Radha’s more rebellious son, overacts horribly sometimes. Interestingly, a fire broke out on set and Dutt saved Nargis, who plays Radha. The two fell in love and married in 1958. Their son, Sanjay, is also a successful Bollywood actor. Their elder daughter, Priya, is an Indian politician. And their younger daughter Namrata married the son of their Mother India co-star. Small world!

Mark

8/10