Chicago: Windy City Chutzpah

O.J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran ain't got nothing on the deadly cast of characters in the odds on Oscar favorite, Chicago, nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Based on Bob Fosse's 1975 Broadway musical, Chicago chronicles the adventures of Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) and Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Two beauties with a penchant for murder that leads them to Cook County Jail, they vie for the ultimate prize -- innocence.

Set during an era when vaudeville plagued the nation's culture like a chronic outbreak of tuberculosis, Chicago reflects the sumptuous flair of the Jazz Age. Right on down to its show stopping musical numbers that epitomize the frank sexuality of a time when women bobbed their hair and worked to liberate themselves from men. With this precursory feminist movement comes a whole lot of passion, played out via song and dance by each of the scintillating characters. Chief among these passionate performances, "Cellblock Tango" qualifies as a certifiable crowd pleaser and demonstrates the kind of moxie that makes Chicago a trumpet blaring, knee-slapping rush.

A few minutes into Chicago, the audience meets Velma Kelly, a woman who knows how to make an entrance. Murder may bloody Velma's hands, but that doesn't stop her from hitting the stage with the kind of chutzpah that screams, "The Show Must Go On." In a seductive rendition of "All That Jazz," Zeta-Jones jump-starts an introduction that bobs and weaves throughout Velma's raspy, insatiable display of onstage antics. The number, which culminates in her arrest for the murder of her bed-hopping husband and sister, also reveals Roxie's adulterous relationship with Fred Casely, the two-timing phony that she shoots dead.

Next comes a melodic montage of "Razzle Dazzle" summoned by Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), a charlatan lawyer who circumnavigates the courtroom like a big top ringleader. With a knack for reinventing the facts, Billy accepts Roxie's case and helps her become "the sweetest little Jazz killer Chicago's ever seen."

In this case, seeing translates to believing, courtesy of Renée Zellweger's stunningly dynamic performance as Roxie Hart. Zellweger, an Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, sizzles as the doll-faced vixen hell-bent on becoming front-page news. Clearly the "Hart" of the picture, Zellweger brings a winning combination of impish charm and fearless fury to the role of Roxie. She allows the character to break out of the starting gate like a naïve, young, long shot that rallies hard before seizing victory.

But the biggest obstacle in adapting a musical from stage to screen remains the direction. Luckily, director Rob Marshall knew how to make it happen, taking Bill Condon's crafty, pitch perfect script and letting it sing. The result, a series of scenes that crosscut between stark reality and sheer fantasy, transform Chicago into an ingenious musical masterpiece reminiscent of Hollywood's Golden Age. Bottom line: Chicago ranks as a film worthy of Oscar's high praise, right on down to its contemporary stance on murder, in which art imitates life.

The Pianist: Enduring Testament to Survival

Few films in cinema history depict the harsh reality of the holocaust with as much gut wrenching power as the Academy Award nominated film for Best Picture, The Pianist.

Roman Polanski, who spent his early childhood in the Kraków ghetto, directs this riveting, real life story of Polish-Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody). Based on Szpilman's 1946 memoir, The Pianist paints a painstakingly honest portrait of a man whose musical talent led him down the harrowing six-year path toward survival.

Set in Warsaw, The Pianist begins with an eerie sense of vitality. The first half hour glows with rich bursts of color that counterbalance the day-to-day activities of a city besieged by the initial onslaught of military bombing. The vista slowly evolves toward the permanent gray patchiness of a full fledged Nazi invasion, when the Germans seize all Polish-Jews and relocate them to the city's ghetto.

Here, the film turns from grim to downright degrading as Szpilman and his family confront the frightening thought of being shipped off to the camps. Just as time starts to fade, diminishing all hope of a miracle, Szpilman receives an offer to become a member of a Jewish police force. Hired to enforce the rules and regulations of the Nazis, the Jewish police force will, on occasion, beat Polish Jews as a means of appeasing commanding officers. Outraged, Szpilman declines the proposition, opting to stare death in the face rather than inflict further pain and suffering on his people.

As a result of his moral defiance, Szpilman and his family are sent to a train bound for the death camps. During a climatic scene at the train, Szpilman sees a Jewish patrolling officer who knew him from his days as a piano virtuoso at a local café. The officer, who waves Szpilman off to the side, decides to grant him freedom but leaves Szpilman's family to board the train with hundreds of other Jews. With tears streaming down his face, Szpilman scans the area where his father stands ready to step inside the car. It's in this heartbreaking moment that he decides to run, disappearing into the distance like a frightened, young rabbit loose in a forest full of wolves.

After escaping the Nazis, Szpilman seeks refuge with the Polish resistance, hiding out in a series of safe houses, one located in the heart of German headquarters. At this point, The Pianist delivers its most debilitating blow -- showing rather than telling what Szpilman must endure.

Adrien Brody, an Academy Award nominee for Best Actor, gives the performance of his career in the most realistic film ever made about the Holocaust. Moment after moment, Brody draws the audience deeper and deeper into his morose retreat until he almost vanishes into the surface of the film like an emaciated ghost with a fixating stare.

This unequivocal intensity and integrity makes The Pianist a rare cinematic gift. It stands as an enduring testament to the power of survival, a cinematic vow never to forget the plight of the World War II Jews.

Gangs of New York: Accuracy Versus Cohesion

Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese's epic tale of immigrant assimilation during the mid 19th century, examines America's bitter struggle for democracy as freedom at nearly any cost.

Based on Herbert Asbury's 1927 book of the same title, Gangs of New York depicts the New York of 1846-1863, a grim and bloody period in our nation's history. The era saw the first major wave of ethnic immigration following the Great Irish Potato Famine and the beginning of the Civil War, a war in which many immigrants died but few understood.

The film opens with a graphic battle scene between an Irish-American immigrant named Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) and the merciless William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), appropriately known as "Bill the Butcher." The two men gather their gangs, the Dead Rabbits and the Nativists, to fight it out amongst the snowy squalor of tenement buildings and the decaying façade of a Catholic Church. The competing gangs seek to win control of the Five Points -- Manhattan's Lower East Side and the place these gangs call home. The battle ends in the untimely death of Vallon at the cleaver toting hand of Bill the Butcher. Bill, whose menacing smile begs comparison to Saddam Hussein, watches as Vallon's young son rushes over to his father just as Vallon falls into a bed of fresh snow.

The remainder of the film follows Vallon's son, now called Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he avenges the death of his father. At the same time, Gangs of New York boldly journeys through the visceral, blood-stained pages of our nation's history to re-establish America's less than virtuous foundation.

In an attempt to gain Bill's trust, Amsterdam must do just about anything for the tyrannically charged Nativist, including kill for him. But all of this soon backfires for the less than cautious Amsterdam when he learns that Johnny (Henry Thomas), his friend and fellow Irishman, betrayed him to Bill.

Known for his intense perfectionism, the meticulous Scorsese hired a team of production designers to recreate the entire city. The city, which sprawled over a 1.5-square mile set, featured three separate neighborhoods and a waterfront pier with no less than a dozen boats. The sets give the film an authentic look that spurs it toward the climactic, fever pitched showdown between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher in the midst of the Draft Riots.

But what Gangs of New York gains in historical relevance, it loses in overall balance. The film never develops enough momentum to sustain the weight of its message. The results can be chalked up to an epic sized battle between accuracy and editorial cohesion. Ultimately, his otherwise noteworthy picture becomes tedious and unfocused, despite a valiant attempt at resurrecting a seldom depicted period in our national history when the principles of democracy were carved out to form a patriotic work in progress.

The Fellowship of the Ring: Cinematic Sorcery

Thanks to the magic of Hollywood, the classic, best-selling fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings jumps from the page to the screen in a major motion picture trilogy.

December 19, 2001, marked the official beginning of this saga with the much-anticipated release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The movie recounts the quest a nine-member fellowship led by Aragorn, the skilled Ranger also called Strider (Viggo Mortensen); the elf Legolas; Gimli, the hirsute dwarf (John Rhys-Davies); and Frodo, the ring bearing hobbit (Elijah Wood). The heroes travel to the dark castle of Saruman (Christopher Lee) in Mordor to destroy Middle Earth's most dangerous magic ring and prevent it from wrecking further havoc. In 2002, The Two Towers picks up where The Fellowship of the Ring so gallantly left off, focusing on the events that split the Fellowship, in what some cult-like Tolkien fans call a slightly altered adaptation of the book's actual narrative.

Divided into groups, the heroes embark on three separate journeys. In the most compelling of these treks, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas travel to Helm's Deep and join forces with the citizens of Rohan in an attempt to defeat Saruman's evil army of Uruk-Hai warriors besieging the Rohan stronghold. Writer-director Peter Jackson's brilliant sequence of battle scenes play out against the fortress like a visual feast for the senses.

With The Two Towers, Jackson proves that he's no mere mortal. With the skill of the wizard Gandalf, Jackson brings the book's on-going theme of good versus evil to the forefront through computer-generated and time-honored special effects, which in his hands double as magic wands. Witness the computer-generated character named Gollum. Gollum, a former hobbit guided by the power of the ring, appears so lifelike that the audience can't imagine him not being real.

But the real star of The Two Towers remains the heroic Aragorn, played with chivalrous intensity by Mortensen. Mortensen, star of G.I. Jane and A Perfect Murder, adds a much-needed dose of credibility to this installment of The Lord of the Rings. Mortensen gives Aragorn a unique sense of humility that makes him worthy of the duties of the Lord of the Dúnedain. At the same time, Mortensen attacks his swashbuckling scenes -- and the foes of Middle Earth -- with the same steely-eyed intensity of the young Errol Flynn.

Yet for all its sorcery, The Two Towers lacks the coherence to integrate all three story lines, placing its high-speed action above a tepid plot. For this reason, look for it to lose the Academy Awards race for Best Picture. But don't let that diminish the film's overall appeal. For if The Two Towers accomplishes anything, it succeeds in dramatically evolving beyond the parameters set forth by the book, making it one of the most visually stimulating films to ever grace the silver screen.

The Hours: Multi-Dimensional Lyricism

How does a director like Stephen Daldry tackle a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about three women confronting the complexities of life with the same multi-dimensional lyricism as its literary inspiration?

The answer: talent. With a team of collaborators like Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep -- plus playwright-turned-screenwriter David Hare -- Daldry forms one of Tinseltown's most celebrated casts with his latest Academy Award nominated film, The Hours.

The Hours recounts the stories of three women from three different eras: Virginia Woolf (Kidman), the elusive novelist who wrote the 1925 book, Mrs. Dalloway; Laura Brown (Moore), the 1950s housewife who reads Mrs. Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), the 52-year-old book editor named after Mrs. Dalloway. Ironically enough, the connection between these women doesn't end there. It evolves beyond literary irony, paralleling the women's psychological struggles, including their suicide attempts.

The film encompasses the lives of all three women and develops three separate yet convergent vignettes which intermingle with the ease and precision of one. At the same time, The Hours composes a cinematic ode to Woolf, the passionate, reclusive novelist who in 1941 waded into the River Ouse with heavy rocks weighing down her coat pockets and drowned herself.

The film begins amid a sea of paperwork and a pool of ink. The highly cognizant Virginia, consumed by the character of Clarissa, ponders the now infamous sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." Enter Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary New Yorker planning a party with the same sweeping grandeur as her namesake. Clarissa, who likes to do everything herself, sets off for the local florist. Selecting a few dozen choice bouquets for the party she plans in honor of her ex-husband and now terminally ill friend, Richard (Ed Harris).

From there, the film transitions to Laura Brown, a pregnant wife and mother living in Los Angeles. Laura, who lacks the party planning skills of a proper 1950s housewife, decides to take a cue from Mrs. Dalloway and bakes her husband Dan (John C. Reilly) a birthday cake with the help of their young son.

There follows a series of scenes symbiotically arranged to depict one woman with three distinct lives. Haunted by the monotony of life, all three personalities feel stifled by a lack of freedom, the root of the unhappiness that ultimately leads to three different paths on one mind-bendingly windy road.

Guided by its strong narrative, The Hours becomes a solid character study about three lives shrouded in a haze of uncertainty, desperation and guilt. Though it meanders through lengthy swells of introspection and darkness raising questions about suicide and sexuality, the film's main focus remains as ambiguous and mysterious as the woman it honors. The Hours paints a realistic portrait of life that elicits the same depth and metamorphic perspective as Virginia Woolf and her beloved alter ego, Clarissa Dalloway, reaffirming the notion that "you can't find peace by avoiding life." For when you avoid life, you are left with nothing but The Hours.

Tiffany Sanchez

Tiffany Sanchez is an entertainment writer based out of San Jose, Calif. Her work has appeared in publications such as Bay Area Parent, CircuiTree, Access Magazine, Etc. Magazine, The Brown Daily Herald, and The Spartan Daily.

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