Jul 20 2010

On the occasion of the jailing of Lindsay Lohan…Time magazine has a list of top 10 women in prison movies

The mainstream media never misses an opportunity to capitalize on personal tragedy.  On the occasion of Lindsay Lohan going to jail, Time Magazine offers us a list of the top ten women in prison films.  Here’s what it has to say about the movie Chicago.

Chicago, 2002
The only WIP movie to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture (not to mention a Supporting Actress win for Catherine Zeta-Jones), Chicago was based on Maurine Watkins’ 1926 Broadway play and its 1975 musical version directed by Bob Fosse. Set in the 1920s and mining the same rich loam as The Front Page — corrupt lawmen, predatory newsmen and winsome cons — the story throws two murderesses, faux-naïve Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) and world-hardened Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones), into a prison run by Mama (Queen Latifah), the typical tough lesbian warden. But this one spells out her demands in song in “When You’re Good to Mama.” (“Let’s all stroke together/ Like the Princeton crew./ When you’re strokin’ Mama,/ Mama’s strokin’ you.”) The movie’s message: when all life is show business, notoriety is celebrity. That’s a truism Lindsay Lohan can take to heart, and we don’t mean Roxie.

This is just another example of what I blogged about earlier.  Making light of prison is toxic and supremely unhelpful.  Prison as depicted in glossy films like Chicago bears no resemblance to any institutions that I have ever visited.