CHICAGO….For what it’s worth, I saw Chicago this weekend and it was pretty good. It seems like movie musicals are making a comeback, so maybe the Hollywood powers will finally get around to making that movie version of Phantom of the Opera that’s been in the talking stages since around the time of George Bush Sr.’s Gulf War.
(I remember reading once that Andrew Lloyd Webber was originally not that interested in making Phantom into a move. “How much could you make from it?” he asked. Oh, maybe $50 or $100 million, he was told. “Is that all? Hardly sounds worth it.” I don’t know if this is actually true, but it seems like a good story anyway.)
For some reason, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind after seeing Chicago was that musicals are just grown up comic books. The plots are broad and don’t really make a lot of sense, but it doesn’t matter much because you go for the music and the visual flash. So why is it that nobody complains about this with musicals (“it’s just part of the genre”) but they complain about it constantly with movies based on comics? It’s all just part of the genre, folks, so who cares if Spiderman shouldn’t be able to keep that aerial tram from falling? That kind of three-impossible-things-before-breakfast heroics is all part of the fun.
