Life > January 16, 2003

By Susannah Rosenblatt

Senior Reporter

After a summer filled with dreck like Swimfan and Blue Crush, this past holiday season offered moviegoers ample excuse to sit in the dark for hours on end.  As the Academy Award race heats up, studios have released a spate of killer films.  At the risk of a sore bum, most of the movies out these days are worth seeing.

Chicago

The most dazzling offering is the cinematic adaptation of the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical, Chicago.  With eye-popping editing and show-stopping song and dance numbers, this dark crime caper is a faithful rendering of the Broadway hit.  Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger vamp masterfully in various sequined get-ups, singing and dancing with surprising aplomb.  Queen Latifah shines as prison warden Mama, a role that earned her a Golden Globe nomination.  Plus, Richard Gere tap dances.  Who knew?

Adaptation

For more thinking and less shimmying, check out Spike Jonze’s Adaptation.  This is a mind-bending trip through the screwball head of screenwriter Charles Kaufman.  Kaufman, the actual writer responsible for Being John Malkovich’s wildly original screenplay, has again written a film that shatters convention.  Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) is the film’s main character; the plot revolves around Kaufman’s struggle to write a script for the very movie you are watching.

The movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie’s metanarrative becomes a little hard to wrap your head around at times, but is so novel and creative it’s easy to forgive some of the smarty-pants quality.  Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper also deliver stellar supporting turns.  High on the weird quotient, Adaptation explores the love-hate relationship between artists and their craft, and the twisted world of Hollywood to fascinating, though at times clunky, effect.

Catch Me if You Can

If you’re looking for something more mainstream, uberdirector Steven Spielberg’s latest trifle, Catch Me if You Can, is just entertaining enough.  This ‘60s era adventure features Tom Hanks as a grumpy FBI agent chasing a cheeky Leonardo DiCaprio, in the real-life story of check forger Frank Abagnale.  Abagnale’s inventiveness in creating false identities for himself