Recently Seen: The Producers (2005)

The Producers is not your typical movie musical. It is based on the identically monikered Broadway musical which was in turn based on the 1968 Mel Brooks movie, which was about a musical but was not itself a musical.

So, The Producers is a movie musical based on a stage musical based on a non-musical movie. What makes it all so very meta is that the stage musical is typically Broadway and the musical-within-the-musical is presented as a parody of typical Broadway musicals. The movie version essentially has the challenge of filming two musicals - the Broadway musical "The Producers" and the musical-within-the-musical "Springtime in Hitler". How to do this without making "The Producers" a parody of Broadway and making "Springtime in Hitler" a parody within a parody?? (Okay, I have thoroughly confused myself now).

In a way, director Susan Stroman began batting with two strikes against her. It is a Herculean feat to film such an ostensibly old-school Broadway musical and not have the whole thing come across as precious or ridiculous. In the more intimate medium of film, the extravagance of musical theatre can appear exaggerated. And this is a musical so over the top that it almost parodies itself as a stage production, never mind as a movie. The musical was such a big hit precisely because of its exuberantly unapologetic excesses .Toning it down for the filmed version would have been neutering the energy that makes it work on stage.

Does Stroman avoid the pitfalls of unwitting parody? I suppose it is a matter of taste or perhaps, exposure. I love the old Hollywood musicals with the big production numbers and the likes of Ethel Merman pitching it to the back rows. Once you have seen any of the Zigfield Follies, you become rather inured against gaudiness in movie musicals. The OTT elements of The Producers are nothing I haven't seen before. I think Stroman just about avoided parody, but she did not alleviate the movie beyond being a filmed stage production. Her inexperience as a movie director told; too many scenes seemed bound them to their stage origins rather than being enacted in the language of cinema. In a way, it is both a good and a bad thing. I personally liked the staged quality of the film as a reminder of its Broadway roots. But cinema magic is very different from theatre magic. In keeping to theatrical conventions in the cinematic medium, Stroman captures the magic of neither.

Still, The Producers as a movie should succeed at some level on the strength of its source material. It is after all based on a very fine musical with a strong book. Musically, The Producers is not in Sondheim territory nor does it pretend or aspire to such lofty heights. The tunes are simple and almost repetitive; Broadway-by-numbers, if you will. (Just take these two songs -"I wanna be a producer" and "When you've got it, flaunt it". They are practically the same number in terms of their melodic lines.) The genius is in the lyrics, which are often bitingly clever, scan brilliantly and achieve rhymes of such virtuoso dexterity that they rival Ira Gershwin's work. "You Never Say Good Luck on Opening Night" and "Keep it Gay" are particular highlights for their words, if not the music.

Most of the original Broadway cast reprise their roles in the movie, with headliners Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick playing the producers, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom. They inhabit the roles effortlessly, although I think the charm of the performances is less well served on film than it would have been in the theatre.

Broderick has the especially difficult task of playing straight ... well, straighter ... man to practically every other character in the show. Leo Bloom is not without his idiosyncrasies but he is the closest thing to an Everyman in the main cast. Much of the time, Broderick has to react to insanities around him and the script calls for much eyebrow popping, lip quivering and other exaggerated facial expressions. On film, his is the performance that seems most stagey, precisely because it is the least extoverted and the character the most normal. Everyone else gets to go to town with bombast and gleefully cross the line into caricature.

On Broadway, Nathan Lane must have been the show-stopper. This role is almost the perfect Nathan Lane role, giving him plenty of opportunity to do his Nathan Lane thing. It does not translate quite as successfully on film, but I can see how he would have prompted standing ovations on Broadway after his two bravura numbers, "Along came Bialy" and the one-man tour-de-force "Betrayed". In the movie, "Betrayed" seems out of place and too long (I think Roger Ebert commented on this), mainly because it is unimaginatively filmed. But in the theatre, this must have brought the house down every night and probably won Nathan Lane his Tony.

Two big names not in the original Broadway cast were brought in for the movie - Uma Thurman playing Swedish bombshell Ulla and Will Ferrell taking on the role of Nazi nut Franz Liebkind. Stunt casting? Maybe, but not necessarily bad casting. Franz Liebkind is exactly the kind of role that Ferrell can pull off almost as second nature. Thurman certainly has the necessary physical attributes to play Ulla, and she purrs her way through the role nicely. I wish she was a more graceful dancer, but perhaps the point is that Ulla is not supposed to be all that talented.

Gary Beach plays Broadway's worst director Roger de Bris and is an absolute hoot. When he assumes the role of Hitler in "Springtime for Hitler", he is marvelously, simperingly campy and fey. I just loved how he actually looks physically like Hitler once they get the moustache on him, much more so than any of the Hitler auditionees or Franz Liebkind. Then his entire body becomes limp-wristed, and we are suddenly watching drag!Hitler and the rest is history.

The castmember that stands out the most for me is Roger Bart as Carmen Ghia, "common-law assistant" of Roger de Bris. It is not a large role, but Bart is hilarious and steals every scene in which he appears. He is in turn and all at once bitchy, gossipy, loving, ascerbic, fawning and disdainful. I cannot believe this is the same man that played psycho-pharmacist George on Desperate Housewives.

Talking about cast members, special mention goes to John Barrowman who plays the lead tenor who plays a German soldier in "Springtime for Hitler". He gets to sing the titular opening number of the show-within-the-show. It is the most memorable song in The Producers, and is the only one which featured in the original 1968 Mel Brooks movie. I have only seen the original movie once, more than 15 years ago. In all that time, I have never forgotten the tune of "Springtime for Hitler". Barrowman (another versatile talent; he was Captain Jack in Dr Who) sings this wonderfully, in a very authentically musical theatre style and in full control of his very fine lyric tenor voice.

For what it is - the filmed version of a stage musical - this movie is thoroughly enjoyable. It moves along at a fair pace, is visually eye-catching and makes no intellectual demands on its audience. The tunes are hummable and grateful to the ear, if not always memorable. The dance numbers are well-choreographed and excellently performed. Mel Brook's screenplay is full of intentionally corny jokes at which one can laugh or groan and enjoy doing it. The songs have clever lyrics which are good for at least a chuckle or two. It is a fun little diversion for its two-hour running time.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Recently Seen: The 40 Year Old Virgin

Up until last week, I was a The 40 Year Old Virgin virgin. I am suitably ashamed.

The 40 YOV, a gross-out comedy in the vein of American Pie and There's Something About Mary, is directed by TV veteran Judd Apatow and stars my favourite American, Steve Carell, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Apatow.

Like the typical gross comedy, the screenplay is peppered with mentions of bodily fluids and gases and jokes about various body parts especially reproductive organs. Unlike the typical gross comedy, the movie has many genuinely tender and touching moments. Even the gross jokes are non-sophomoric.

Despite the title and the genre, the movie is not preoccupied with sex. It's not about sex, or even about a man trying to have sex. It's a buddy movie and a rather sweet one, at that. It is also a romantic comedy and a coming-of-age drama.

Steve Carell plays Andy, the titular 40 YOV. He is shy, rides a bicycle to work, collects action figures and plays computer video games. His home is probably every teenaged geek's wetdream. He is a stockist in an electronics store, where he is buddies with David, Jay and Cal. They are his cadre of cherry-popping enablers, intent on helping him relieve himself of his virginity. Hilariously, their own love-lives are either disastrous or non-starters. David (Paul Rudd) is particularly tragic, being hung up on a woman who dumped him two years ago. For me, Andy's friendships with these guys are the best thing about the movie. There is affection and warmth in their interactions, even while they are making gross jokes.

Their efforts to accomplish "Mission: V Loss" make for several classic set-pieces. There is the by-now infamous chest-hair waxing scene. It is crude and pandering to the lowest common denominator, but it is also laugh-out-loud funny. The speed-dating segment is especially memorable, with an inspired assortment of single women including a lesbian re-entering the market and David's ex, played by Carell's The Office co-star, Mindy Kaling.

The rom-com plot charmingly handled, with Catherine Keener striking all the right notes as Trish, the love interest. Trish runs a business, is confident and go-getter. She exudes a joie de vivre that could potentially overwhelm Andy but around him, she shows her vulnerability and insecurities as a single mother and a woman who has failed in relationships. Importantly, Keener and Carell have chemistry and their on-screen relationship is believable.

The movie works because Andy is likable and worth rooting for. He could so very easily have been overplayed as one of life's pathetic sad-sack losers, deserving of contempt rather than sympathy. This does not happen in the movie. Even as he stumbles from one embarrassing encounter to another, we admire him for his own brand of sweet-natured courage to pick himself up and enter the fray again. Carell pitches this performance perfectly, as does all the cast.

This is not a movie for people with low tolerance for crass and crude comedy. But for the rest of us, this is one of the funniest movies of recent years.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Recently Seen: Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest (2006)

This first of two sequels to the megahit Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl is a very, very strange creature. As strange as the creatures that man Davy Jones's Flying Dutchman, and the multi-tentacled sea-monster that wreaks havoc at the end of the movie.

The first Pirates movie was a rollicking adventure, with innovative special effects and an iconic anti-hero in Captain Jack Sparrow (Johny Depp). This follow-up appears to have amplified everything ten-fold: the music, sets, special effects, locations, monsters, creatures, action sequences. And despite all the visible effort, it is around one tenth as much fun as the original. Everyone seemed to be trying too hard and everything came across as much too effortful.

The entire episode with Jack Sparrow as the "king of the savages" was unwatchable to me. It dragged, was predictable and felt like something that could have been heavily edited and we would have all been the happier for it.

And then there was the interminable island scene with the three-way fight for the key to Dead Man's Chest, leading to the wheel sequence and Davy Jones's men chasing after Elizabeth in the jungle. It should have been heart-thumping, but I was left strangely unmoved and just wanted them to get on with it.

Davy Jones and Flying Dutchman crew are no doubt magnificent achievements in special effects and make-up, but does anyone really want to watch 90 minutes of THAT? All those boils and sores, and the rotting flesh and slimy tentacles - had they had less money in the budget, would we have had a movie less likely to induce mass loss of appetite?

Even Jack Sparrow seems less fun and not quite as outrageous this time around. He is also quite unlikeable in this movie, which is a major problem. He is not meant to be heroic and he is certainly petty, mercurial, selfish and all manner of non-indefensible traits, but in the first movie, there was always a vulnerability about him that made him sympathetic. In this sequel, I did not care if he survived. Not Depp's fault; he played the character he was given to play. It was the writing that served him most poorly.

As for the rest of them; despite Depp's scoring an Oscar nomination for The Black Pearl, this is hardly the sort of movie that brings out award-worthy performances. Orlando Bloom gets a story line involving his long lost father and with that, an opportunity to emote. He has improved as an actor since his days gracing the LOTR trilogy with his outstanding prettiness, but he is not quite an Ian McKellan yet. I was moved by the father-son sub-plot but mainly because Jonathan Pryce, who played Will's father, was tremendously affecting despite the layers of make-up. Keira Knightley fares about as well as Bloom does. She gets to play the cliched 18th century proto-feminist, who dons men's clothes, wields a gun and fights off the baddies with not one but two swords. It's not much of a role, really and she does not very much with it. (Oh, and I really could have done without seeing Knightley kissing Depp - a tremendous lack of chemistry even given the context of the scene).

The supporting actor that really caught the eye was Jack Davenport, reprising his role the former Captain Norrington, now just plain old Norrington, dispossessed of wealth and status. He makes a wonderful down and out villain. From a purely shallow perspective, Davenport also really suits the scruffy, unkempt appearance of a pirate - much more so than the more conventionally pretty Bloom.

All in all, this was a bit of a damp squib. It certainly does not leave me craving the final installment. Although, I suppose I would watch that just to see Chow Yun Fatt and Hollywood's recreation of Singapore.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Recently Seen: The Lake House (2006)

Apparently, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock have a shipname. And it's Keendra. That blew my mind when I first heard it, although it is no worse than most of the mashed up shipnames out there.

Anyway, The Lake House is THE Keeandra movie. Attempting to recapture the chemistry that the pair showed on screen all those eons ago in Speed, this movie is an unabashed old fashioned romance. Unlike many modern romcoms, there is no sex and the two protagonists do not even meet properly until the last 3 minutes of the movie. In that way, The Lake House has rather a lot in common with Sleepless in Seattle.

I don't think this will become a classic like Sleepless, although it is certainly as romantic and the leads are certainly equally as attractive. (In fact, some may say that with Reeves as the male lead, this movie comes out top on the attractiveness score.) This movie is very sweet and likeable and propelled by a genuine romantic compulsion, something missing from many movies with pretensions of being romantic. It is based on a screenplay from Korea, where they know a thing or two about romance. There is a sincerity in the writing of this movie that is the hallmark of the best Korean movie romances.

However, Korean romances also tend toward sentimentality and melodrama. Some of this has made the journey to Hollywood and unfortunately bogs down parts of The Lake House. There is a pivotal scene in the middle of the film where the two leads have an encounter, involving a dance and an almost kiss (or maybe an actual kiss? I don't know, I was too bored to pay full attention). It was a scene with potential for great angst or some clever humour. Instead, the writers and director chose to play it as sentimental, with a ballad playing in the background and the scene lit by the glow of dusk.

Still it is churlish to nitpick when the film so clearly has its heart in the right place. The plot device is a time-slip and it is expectedly in turn clever, full of holes, illogical and plausible. She is in the present, he is in the past. They manage to communicate with each other while both remain in their respective times. Neither know where he is in the present, and he is loathe to approach her in the past as she did not yet know him. Certainly, as plot devices go, this is one of the more effective ways to keep the star-crossed lovers decidedly apart until the final joyous rapproachment. I have to admit to rather liking the conceit behind the resolution of the time-slip. It was predictable, yes, but done without any nod-winking and self-conscious cleverness.

In the lead roles, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are not stretched but do what they need to do. They are both thoroughly sympathetic and believable. I find myself rooting for them as individuals and for their relationship as a couple. Sandra Bullock plays noble workaholic doctor Kate, who works too hard and seems to have no life outside the hospital. Bullock rather specialises in pulling off these types of roles - the single modern woman who is somewhat lonely, who views her lot with good humour but is on the verge of sadness. The Keanu Reeves character, Alex, is an architect who is building the lake house. He has a side-arc involving his uneasy relationship with his father, played by Christopher Plummer. Usually, such sub-plots can come across as padding or filler material, but this was sensitively handled and relevant to the development of Reeves's character.

There are a few pretty illustrious names in supporting roles, including the great Shohreh Aghdashloo, the aforementioned Plummer and Niptuck's Dylan Walsh as Bullock's putative boyfriend.

You don't get a cast like this to put on a shoddy show. This is definitely not a shoddy show; the production values are superb. The eponymous lake house is a gorgeous glass construction and there are numerous scenes that showcase the beauties of the lake area in the fall and winter. It is a beautiful film to look at in more than one way. It is also heartfelt, feel-good and a pretty good way to while away a couple of hours.

Over-zealous Austen purist alert: I did have a major point to pick with the movie's use of Jane Austen's Persuasion as a symbolism for its themes of waiting and people being kept apart by time. It does not really mar my enjoyment of the show, but Persuasion is among my favourite books of all time, and it was rather jarring to have it quite thoroughly misrepresented.

A few of the Persuasion references worked very well. The initial almost-encounter between Kate and Alex takes place when he picks up her copy of Persuasion that she leaves behind on a train station bench. This neatly serves as a character note for Kate; she is an Austen reader, which tells us that she is slightly old-fashioned, a romantic and something of a softie.

The physical copy of the book also establishes a link between the two characters. Towards the end of the movie, Kate finds the exact same copy (now well thumbed and read, in a rather nice production touch) that he leaves under the floorboards of the lake house. She reads from it the line that Austen wrote about Wentworth and Anne Eliot during their first engagement - "... no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar ...". It reminds her of herself and Alex and she is shaken anew by the impossibility of their relationship. This works well, because at the same point in the book, Anne Eliot is similarly distressed at the distance that had grown between Frederick Wentworth and herself, despite their earlier compatibility.

If only they had kept the Austen references to these two scenes. Of course, Hollywood is never content until a piece of symbolism has hit us on our heads often and hard enough to induce a coma. And so, we have Kate and Alex discussing "Persuasion" just before they dance at Kate's birthday party. And what a wildly inaccurate discussion! Kate tells us that Persuasion is "wonderful" (it is), and that it is purportedly about two people who meet and "almost fall in love" (NO! NO! NO!) but the timing was not right (NO! NO! NO!) and then they meet again years later and have another chance at their relationship (yes, but only in a most oblique way).

Anyone who is halfway familiar with Persuasion knows that there is nothing "almost" about Wentworth's and Anne's first attachment. It was her family who stood in their way, not "timing", nor any lack of emotions. And when they meet again years later, he is not at all interested in a second chance and she is resigned that there would be none. Yes, Persuasion is about constancy, and in this respect, it has something in common with this movie. Persuasion is also about many other things that bear no parallel to the movie. And Persuasion is not about 'waiting' - had Wentworth overcome his pride 6 years earlier, there would have been no need for the long separation of time before seeing Anne again.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Recently Seen: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Based on Roald Dahl's beloved story of the same name, this Tim Burton movie is visually inspired. It is bright candy-coloured rollicking good fun while being rather dark and disturbing at the same time. Standard Tim Burton, one might say.

Charlie Bucket lives with his parents and four grandparents in near-impoverishment in an unnamed town, most Dickensian in look but where people speak in a mix of English and American accents and the currency is apparently dollars. The family lives on cabbage soup and the meagre wages that Charlie's father earns as a cap-screwer in a toothpaste factory. They are poor, but delightfully cheery and loving. The early part of the movie, setting up Charlie's story and the charming dynamics of his family life, is my favourite.

In the same town is the chocolate factory of Willy Wonka, mysterious reclusive millionaire chocolatier. Wonka announces that five lucky children will be invited to tour the factory and one of them will win an extra special prize. The lucky five will be those who find five randomly placed Golden Tickets in Wonka Bars.

One by one, the winners are revealed to us in a series of hilarious media spots. They are the greedy Augustus Gloop, spoiled Veruca Salt, overly competitive Violet Bouregarde and TV-brat Mike Teavee. The fifth, of course, is Charlie.

These ill assortment of children, each with a guardian, gather at the gate of Wonka's factory. Charlie is accompanied by his grandfather, who had years ago worked in the Wonka factory, before it was closed down and later mysteriously reopened and resumed operations without any workers, apparently. From this point, the movie takes on a different tone altogether. We are introduced to Willy Wonka, a strange man in both appearance and behaviour. He brings us into his factory, run by the Oompa-Loompas, where we see many wonderous sights and a few disconcerting ones. The production and set designeers outdo themselves here.

One by one, the children encounter horrible fates until only Charlie is left. In the end, this is a morality fable for children and only Charlie has shown himself deserving of the reward that awaits him.

Roald Dahl was not a fuzzy writer. This story has a very dark edge, what with the rather horrific accidents that befall the four children. Tim Burton does not flinch at these scenes, which is to his credit. When the squirrels set themselves upon Veruca Salt, it was a true horror movie moment, minus the blood and gore. I also loved the scene with the cow being suspended above ground while being whipped by the Oompa-Loompas - to make whipped cream, of course. It is a bravura moment, so unpolitically correct that I half-thought that I had imagined it. I wonder what the animal rights activists have to say about that.

Wonka himself is not a nice character; he is meant to be strange, but surely, even Dahl could not have imagined as odd a creation as Johny Depp's Willy Wonka! Depp is a marvelous actor and an incredibly risk-taking one. Here, he chooses to play Wonka as a deeply weird eccentric who obviously hates children and does not quite know how to deal with people generally. The page-boy hair-cut is reminiscent of Michael Jackson, and some of the mannerisms could even be said to be based on the gloved one. Truth be told, I did not really see much of Michael Jackson in the portrayal; Depp's Wonka is less disingenuous, much more caustic and more genuinely disengaged from people. This performance of Depp's is never less than interesting, altogether unsettling and yet, strangely sympathetic.

As memorable as Depp is, the performance that defines the heart of this movie is young Freddie Highmore, who plays Charlie. Has there ever been a child actor that is more likeable and endearing? His acting is so natural, so honest and unmannered, that Charlie becomes more than a caricature of a good boy with a sweet nature. When Highmore says that he will never give up his family, a scene that could have turned cheesy and over-sentimental in a million ways miraculously becomes genuinely moving and resonant with sincere emotions.

This is a well-made movie and a wonderful treat for the eyes. I felt that the pacing was uneven, with periods of longeur especially during the factory visit. At the start of the movie, we are introduced to the different children and in extended scenes with the Buckets, to root for young Charlie. Once we get to the factory, Charlie and his grandfather take a back-seat to Willy Wonka and the wonders of his factory. There is a discordance here that disrupts the narrative thread and our identification with the protagonist. It does become a different movie once Johny Depp comes into the picture and begins engineering the come-uppance of the more rotten kids. The episodic nature of the children's denouement contributed to the uneven pacing in this second half of the movie.

Suddenly, at the end, we are back in Charlie's world and Charlie's story. There is a tacked-on backstory for Willy Wonka, involving his dentist dad, that is resolved in these last few minutes. It seems unnecessary to me, an attempt at softening a character that is perhaps otherwise too unlikeable. This scripting decision perhaps underlines the main problem that Burton had with this story - to balance his own instincts for the macabre with the need to bring out the positive message of this children's morality tale. We'll never know, of course, but I think he could have succeeded without bringing in Wonka's parental issues. Depp would have brought the macabre in spades and Highmore would have supplied the moral message with aplomb.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

Recently Seen: Angels in America

It took two years to get here, but finally HBO Asia has televised Angels In America. This is the long awaited and long-in-making screen adaptation of Tony Kushner's Tony Award winning plays - Angels in America: Millenium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika.

I saw all five hours plus within one day and was rather overwhelmed and initially, a little intimidated. This is fiercely erudite writing, a piece of work that wears its intelligence on its sleeves. Kushner was concerned with big themes and important ideas. As a viewer, one is challenged to look beneath what is said to discern what is meant.

The plays deal with gritty reality using the language of the theatre. It is ostensibly about AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. But Kushner was also exploring larger ideas of a world (and a Heaven) which has been abandoned by God, and our resilience in surviving this abandonment. There is an actual Heaven in Angels in America, and actual angels, as conceived by Kushner. The flights of fantasy (or at least what is fantasy to us, but is supposed to be as good as reality in the world of the plays) are plentiful and frequent.

I think Angels in America is a brilliant piece of work and a masterpiece of late 20th century American theatre. I also think it is probably a work that is best seen on stage. Because it is concerned with such large themes, it sacrifices nuanced characterisation for concepts, metaphors and symbolism. Characters in the play represent ideas, rather than being individual personalities. On television, this sort of stylisation is not 100% successful.

This TV version, directed by Mike Nichols, is as bold and audacious as Kushner's plays. It is a significant achievement and compulsively watchable, fully deserving of its multiple Golden Globe and Emmy Awards. But the medium of television focuses our attention differently and we find ourselves sympathising with the characters as people, rather than what they represent. It is here that I think Kushner's personal biases were revealed and this weakens Angels in America as a story about people and personal growth (of course, it could be said that Kushner was not telling that story, but these plays are about America; and what makes America what it is, if not its people?)

This review in the New York Review of Books says it better, more eloquently and more coherently than I ever could.

I can only say this. I found myself not reacting to the characters the way I think Kushner wanted me to.

The characters I find myself most interested in are Pryor, Joe and Roy Conn. Pryor is probably the central character in Angels in America, notwithstanding top billing going to the Roy Conn character. The writing makes sure that Pryor is always sympathetic; reminding us every so often of how he is coping with AIDS. We are obviously supposed to like Pryor and he gets a happy ending of sorts. I am glad that Pryor got his happy ending and I like Pryor as a character for his complexity and his genuine pathos. But Pryor the person was not always likeable and after the burden of prophetdom, has a creepy edge. I sensed I am supposed to like him, I don't actually like him, but I want him to be well.

Joe is a rather different prospect. Poor closeted Joe is left with no closure at all and in pretty bad shape when we last see him. Kushner does not mean for us to like Joe; he is closeted, he is repressed, he voted for Reagan and he likes Roy Conn. We are pointedly directed to blame Joe for the breakdown in his relationship with his wife Harper. And yet, in this TV version, I find Harper severely unsympathetic, whiny and unreasonable. Joe, despite his many flaws, is almost admirable in his struggle to reconcile his conservative value systems with the truth of his sexuality.

Roy Conn is of course the representative of all things evil in the Angels in America world. He says outrageous, terrible, insensitive things. He is a bigot, a homophone, a racist, a hypocrite, a liar and pretty much a murderer. For all that, I find Roy entertaining rather than evil. Ultimately, his character is just very, very sad. His death is not a comeuppance to me, but a tragedy of a life gone badly wrong.

How much of this is in the acting?

Jefferey Wright played Pryor on Broadway and interprets the role with care. He knows better than to portray Pryor as a martyr (and the writing would have easily allowed for this). Because he chooses this difficult and more honest route, I find myself becoming less irritated with Kushner's manipulation of his characters, and able to care for Pryor as a very real person.

Patrick Wilson (unrecognisable from his Raoul in the Phantom of the Opera) plays Joe with heartbreaking honesty and vulnerability. In this role, his face has a clear-eyed purity and innocence that contrasts so startlingly with his internal demons; the struggle within him is palpable every time we see him on screen. Mary Louise Parker, on the other hand, is somewhat mannered and makes Harper annoying rather than a tragic figure. When she is stoned on valium, she is manic in a way that reminds me of a whiny teenager having her period. We are supposed to sympathise with Harper when Joe leaves, and to blame him for his heartless abandonment. The way these roles are played, Joe's leaving seems an act of courage while Harper's reaction is that of an ungrateful and self-centred brat.

Al Pacino is Roy Conn. But of course, Al Pacino is always also Al Pacino. He does a remarkable job in this role, almost entirely escaping hamminess. I have learnt to forgive hamminess in Al Pacino because he has such an incredible ability to tailor a role to his own persona and strengths as an actor. As he spits out Roy Conn's vitriol, I get a sense of a man who says outrageous things partly for the effect of it. This reading makes Roy Conn seem more human, and I have no doubt that he must have been at least somewhat less of a beast than some writers would have us think. Roy Conn was no doubt a nasty piece of work, but Al Pacino plays him as more than just a caricature of evil.

In other roles, Meryl Streep is her usual terrific self as Joe's mother. Emma Thomson (whom I have said before is one of my favourite people in the world whom I don't actually know) is unfortunately miscast as Pryor's Italian nurse, and somewhat better cast as the Angel. As a classically trained actress, she pulls off the Angel's bombast and verbosity with aplomb, but the special effects rendered these scenes somewhat comical, rather than terrifying. Justin Kirk plays Louis, Pryor's lover who leaves after learning about Pryor having AIDS. Kirk makes Louis a lot more likeable than we are supposed to think, because he conveys such a genuine sense of self loathing even while Louis is being a complete bastard.

On the whole, this is a superlative production of a massive work. Mike Nichols has drawn wonderful performances from his cast and structured the movie (or mini-series or whatever) meticulously, playing up the advantages of the TV medium in choosing effects and locations. The issues, though, seem somewhat dated in light of what has happened in the world since the 1980s.

Recently Seen: House of Flying Daggers

I had no expectations of what I was going to get from Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers. If I had put my mind to it, I would have been less taken aback by the visual extravaganza that awaited me. Zhang Yimou has after all made his name as the director of such cinematically beautiful movies as Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and The Road Home (which was also Zhang Ziyi's movie debut).

What I did know about the movie was that it starred three big names of Asian cinema, China's Zhang Ziyi, Hong Kong's Andy Lau and Japan's Takeshi Kaneshiro (who is also partly Taiwan's and Hong Kong's, such are his muti-lingual skills). That was a promising start. Any movie that took the trouble to gather such star power together should at least have a decent budget, and hopefully, a reasonable screenplay.

In the end, I am not sure if the screenplay counted for much. It was certainly not bad, by any means, but plot, dialogue and characterisation all seemed rather secondary to the visual splendours served up on the screen. This was such a sumptuous production, with scene after scene of breathtaking beauty.

Set in the 9th century, during the waning years of the Tang Dynasty, this is a ostensibly a tale of duplicity, hidden identities, political upheaval and double-crossing. Essentially, though, this is an old-fashioned love triangle, a romance that is swooningly ardent for the most part, with occasional injections of raging jealousy.

But emotional undercurrents take a back seat to visual ingenuity. The movie begins with two major set-pieces in interior sets. The rooms of the brothel named the Peony Pavillion are wondeful to behold, with intricate details in the draperies and decorations. The ladies of the brothel are decked out in vibrant colours and seemed like a hundred butterflies in a field of wild-flowers. In these early scenes, Zhang Yimou stages a wonderful ballet, in which the blind Xiao Mei (Zhang Ziyi) dances and flicks her long sleeves to beat a circle of drums, echoing the drums that Leo (Andy Lau) had earlier struck using a well-aimed nut.

Shortly after, Mei is revealed to be a spy; she is a member of the House of Flying Daggers, a dangerous rebel group. She is arrested by Leo and his partner, Jin (Takeshi Keneshiro), who are the Tang Dynasty equivalent of policemen. Leo and Jin hatch a plot to use Mei to discover the identity of the Flying Daggers' leader and the location of their stronghold. Jin stages a rescue of Mei, in the hopes that she will lead him to the Flying Daggers' secrets.

As they flee, we watch Jin and Mei fall cagily in love, while dodging attacks from the army sent after them (the secret plot is not known to the entire army, and pretty soon, Jin finds himself being forced to save his own life for real). The action moves outdoors and what glorious outdoors it is. The scenes alternate between autumnal forest glades with their shades of gold and red, open fields of wild flowers, a pond covered in lotus leaves, hilltops with spectacular views and most significantly, a bamboo grove.

In this bamboo grove, with a hint of mist and soft sunlight streaming through the trees, the movie stages an audacious martial arts combat, that pretty much rendered me speechless. Soldiers leap from tree to tree, raining bamboo spears down upon Jin and Mei as they dodge with quick-footed grace. The guards swoop down the bamboo branches to attack up-close and devise a trap of sharpened bamboo spears portruding from the ground. This is just extraordinary cinematic imagination, choreographed like a dance and filmed with loving attention to detail. I particularly enjoyed the play of lights as the attacking guards cast shadows on the ground through which the lovers are running.

In the end, the movie reveals that Leo is also a Flying Dagger and has been undercover as a policeman for three years. Mei is in fact not blind and hadbeen double-crossing Jin just as he was double-crossing her. Leo is in love with Mei and enraged by her feelings for Jin. And so, while everyone turned out to be a double-crosser of some sort, the final denouement had less to do with this and everything to do with the love triangle.

For this resolution, we moved to a vast field against a backdrop of autumnal hills. Leo and Jin battle to the death, while the season changes and a snow storm transforms the landscape from green and gold to shades of white. This transition is handled marvelously; the film-makers have truly used the visual language of cinema here. When blood is spilled, it splahes crimson against the snow - a spectacular effect.

The visual beauty of the movie extends to its cast.

Zhang Ziyi's fine-boned features are a boon to any cinematographer. I must admit to finding her somewhat irritating, ever since seeing her petulant brat role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Her role in Rush Hour 2 (the only other film I had seen her in, apart from her debut in The Road Home) did not help to endear her to me better. I thought at first that House of Flying Daggers would serve up more of the same petulance, but this role called for something different and more likeable. I will give credit where it is due; she is most sympathetic in this role and looks a dream (in this movie, a very important achievement).

Takeshi Kaneshiro is blessed with good genes. His half-Chinese, half-Japanese heritage gave him striking looks and a cut-glass profile that is the hallmark of a movie star. Jin is not a particularly demanding role, calling more for charm and charisma than actual thespic endeavour. Kaneshiro handles charm and charisma without any apparent effort. Most importantly, he has sizzling chemistry with Zhang Ziyi and in their scenes together, they add not only to the beauty of the scenery but also to our emotional engagement with the proceedings.

Andy Lau has looked better in his life. There, I have said it. I know he is wildly popular in Asia, due in some part to his cultured good looks. But he really is not looking so hot nowadays. In the 1980s, this was one of the best looking people in East Asian cinema. With age, he has become rather gaunt and haggard. The camera that used to so love him is rather less enamoured nowadays. I think part of the problem that we are supposed to believe him to be younger than his appearance (at least, that is the impression that I get). Andy Lau's current visual appearance is of a man in 40's. This is not a slight; the man is 44 years old. He is certainly a fine specimen for his age. But I get the sense that he is trying to pass off as someone ten years younger. And it does not work for me as a viewer. In House of Flying Dagger, he professes a romantic interest in Zhang Ziyi's character when he looks old enough to be her father. When he reveals his relationship to Mei (the spiel about "It's been 3 years since I saw her), in all seriousness, I kept expecting him to say that she was his daughter! But putting the issue of looks aside, I think this was one of Andy Lau's better acted roles. It stretched his range and he rose to the challenge well.

Ultimately, when I think of House of Flying Daggers, I will remember it mainly for it's beauty. I suspect that the plot will slip my mind within days, but that bamboo grove battle will go down as a cinematic highlight for all time.

Overall rating: 10 out of 10 (for style), 8 out of 10 (overall)

Recently Rewatched: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Ahead of the release of GoF, HBO gifted us with the TV premiere of PoA last weekend.

I had seen this only once last year, and found it enjoyable enough and visually gorgeous, but a letdown compared to the general excellence of the book.

The movie does not really improve upon a second viewing. In fact, if anything, I find myself being less forgiving of the liberties taken with the screenplay and the elements that they chose to excise. They made a good action-fantasy movie, but a poor adaptation of a Harry Potter book regarded by many fans as the best in the series.

The good things are quite wonderful.

The Scottish scenery is wondrous and shot on film like a tribute to beauty. (A related aside: I was in Edinburgh last year and saw the building upon which JKR allegedly based Hogwarts. The film captures that great blend of grandeur and intimacy that makes Scotland so rewarding on the eye.) The outdoor shots are so lovely, you feel like packing your bags for the Highlands.

The acting from the adult actors was top-notch, as one has come to expect of British-cast films. Emma Thompson is one of my favourite people-I-don't-actually-know in the world. She is tremendously funny, touching and irritating all at the same time as Professor Trelawney. Michael Gambon assumes the role of Dumbledore after the passing of Richard Harris and the transition is flawless. He brings dignity and a sense of fun to the role. David Thewliss is physically so different from the Lupin that I expected to see, but he is a fine and subtle actor who overcomes this handicap (which is not inconsiderable in a visual medium). Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith are their usual quietly excellent selfs.

Note on the child actors playing the Trio: They are improving, particularly young Daniel Radcliffe. All three are still given to moments of over-acting, but Cuaron's darker, more meandering style seems to have dampened those tendencies.

Barring the werewolf (too thin, too hairless and not at all wolf-like), the effects were convincing and suitably awe-inspiring. The dementors were especially inspired; truly bone-chillingly scary. Buckbeak was also a much better effect than Fawkes had been in Chamber of Secrets, so things definitely looked up in the birds department.


And now the not-so-good.

First and foremost, the complete absence of any exposition about Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs is just mind-boggling. The fact that the four of them knew each other was mentioned in passing but not the fact that these were four great friends. Even James Potter's and Sirius Black's very close friendship was not ever made explicitly clear. There was nothing that explained that the creators of the Marauder's Map were also Harry's father and his friends. The fact that three of them became animagus because of Lupin was not mentioned. The fact that James Potter was a stag in animagus form was never connected to Harry's patronus (if a viewer had not read the book, the stag-shaped shimmer of light would have been nothing more than a rather cool effect). An entire emotional layer was lost by this screenwriting choice. Worse, by omitting this, the film-makers seemed to have missed quite a lot of the point of PoA: the link to Harry's past, the events of the first war and the dynamics of friendship and betrayal as it played out between the four friends.

I understand that a movie cannot adapt every event in the book and excisions are necessary. Much as I bemoaned the loss of the Quidditch matches and the Scabbers and Crookshanks side plot, I understand why they could not fit into a 120+ minute movie. But why drop plot points and elements that are central to the original story? It would not even have taken much more screentime to accomplish; a couple of sentences from Lupin and Black would have managed it just fine.

If I had not read the book before, so many things would have seemed out of the blue, with no narrative motivation. Why did three boys become animagi for no apparent reason? (Or were we supposed to assume that turning into animals is rather normal in the wizarding world?) Why the vague stag-like shape of Harry's patronus? Why did Lupin hug Black when he learnt he was not the traitor (the movie never drove home the friendships of the MWPP foursome)? How did Lupin know how to work the Marauder's Map? Why did Snape bear so much animosity towards both Lupin and Black (and no, it was not enough to simply say that Snape never much likes anyone anyway)?

The movie also downplayed the foreboding that permeated the book. The sights of the Grim and Trelawney's many predictions of Harry's impending doom were not used to any effect at all. In fact, the cloud Grim was a complete misfire; it would have made so much more sense for Harry to actually see a black dog, rather than just a dog-shaped cloud! There was an ongoing thread in the book about Harry's paranoia, fear and anger. These barely registered in the movie. Harry's character development suffers as a result.

And while on the topic of character development, Ron in the movies is annoyingly one-dimensional, played for comic relief and nothing more. The film-makers seem intent to make him seem stupid, which is not how JKR writes him at all. It is a disservice to the character. Hermione, on the other hand, is annoyingly and boringly competent and smart and brave. Definitely a case of "positive role model" gone wrong. A smart know-it-all, action super-heroine is just not very interesting. Again, Hermione is not like that at all in the books.

While I loved the look of the film's sets and scenery, the costuming drove me out of mind. Just not wizard-y enough! The Harry Potter series is about fantasy; I expect to see everyone floating around in robes, whether they be flowing, billowing or flapping. All those practical clothes were just too colourless, dull and uninteresting.

On the whole, there was something that seemed off about the pacing and tone of the film. I can't quite put my finger on it - there was an overall unevenness to the whole enterprise. It seemed all at once too rushed and yet too leisurely, too dark and yet not weighty enough, too sombre and yet too flippant, too melancholic and yet too uplifting.

Despite my gripes, I would watch it again, if only to see the gorgeous scenery again and to watch a bunch of British actors at the top of their game.

Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10.

The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy (Recently Seen: Revenge of the Sith)

I am in the midst of reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and just watched RotS. Interesting parallels to be drawn between these two, especially the emphasis on the protagonists' status as "The Chosen One". And the death of a much beloved character in Half Blood Prince mirrors the "death" of Obi Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie (now called Star Wars IV: A New Hope, but which will always just be Star Wars to me).

I hope that RotS is the last movie that George Lucas plans to make on the Star Wars saga. I did not dislike this movie, but the entire "prequels" trilogy has been a disappointment. The first two misconceived prequels damaged the franchise and robbed the Star Wars mythology of some its magic. For those of us who watched Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Jedi as children and young adults, this is unforgiveable.

In keeping with my previous posts on the Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies, I will dredge up painful memories of the first two prequels. I saw both movies only once each, and had no desire to see either again.

Ep 1: The Phantom Menace.
AKA The One with the Non-Acting Moppet
This was okay, passably entertaining summer-movie fare. The action sequences were exciting and made for a thrilling experience when watched in a super large-screen cineplex. I rather liked the pod race with little Anakin Skywalker. Seeing young Obi Wan, Yoda and the Order of the Jedi was also rather cool. On the minus side, Jake Lloyd, the child actor who played Anakin, was cute but an unconvincing actor. He was no doubt hampered by George Lucas's famous preference for CGI characters over human performers. This was also the movie that inflicted Jar Jar Binks on the world, so I am compelled to hate it on principle.

Ep 2: Attack of the Clones
AKA The One with the Non-Acting Pin-Up Boy
This movie should have been subtitled The Annoying Adolocence of the Chosen One. It was downright painful and cringe-inducing. The effects were better than ever and the movie looked great, but the action sequences seemed to drag. When the action scenes are not going well in a Star Wars movie, you know you are in deep trouble because the talking scenes are not going to save the show. My goodness, the screenplay was simply atrocious. Each time Anakin or Padme were given lines to say, my eyes got a rigourous rolling workout. The whole story line about the clone army was also boring - surely Lucas could have found a more interesting narrative device to tell his story about Dooku and the Dark Side. And the entire Harlequin-tinted romance between Padme and Skywalker took up far too much screentime. The scenes showing the "development" of their relationship were overwrought and yet managed to leave me completely cold. And as for the actor who inherited the role of Anakin Skywalker, the good news was that Hayden Christensen is a strapping and fine-looking young fellow. The not so good news was that his acting was unbearably bad. To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he just could not rise above the awful dialogue. Although, it has to be said that most of the other actors had equally bad dialogue and did manage to come across better.

And now, onto Ep 3: Revenge of the Sith, AKA The One where Things Improved.

Judged by the standards of the preceding movies, this is a masterpiece. It's certainly the best of the three prequels, and in some ways, a better movie than the rather cheesy Return of the Jedi (but it lacks the charm and satisfying closure of RotJ). On its own merits, this is a very flawed movie, but nevertheless a thoroughly respectable addition to the Star Wars canon.

Because there were more things I liked than disliked, let me get the negative points out of the way.

• The screenplay has more than its fair share of clunkers. George Lucas cannot write a love scene to save his life, as evidenced by these gems:
  
  Anakin: You are so ... (huge, awkward pause) ... beautiful.
  Padme: It's only because I am so in love.
  Anakin: No, it's because I am so in love with you.
  Padme: So, love has blinded you?
  
  Padme: Hold me, like you did by the lake at Naboo, so long ago, when there was nothing but our love.
  
  As some might say, OY! Kudos to the actors for not falling about laughing. Poor Natalie Portman - that "Hold me, like you did ..." line is just excruciating, like something from a parody of bad Gothic romance novels.
  
  Apart from the love scenes, bad writing abounds. Obi-Wan's speeches, Palpatine's lines when he seduces Anakin to the dark side, even the expositional exchanges between members of the Jedi Council; all could have done with some tighter editing.
  
  
• I am sorry, but Hayden Christensen is almost as bad here as he was in Ep 2. It is especially frustrating because he plays Darth Vader, iconic evil bad guy whose name alone is supposed to strike fear in every heart. As played by Christensen, the guy is petulant and a bit of a love-lorn wimp; it's difficult to imagine being terrified of this Darth Vader. Even at the height of his madness and fury, he seemed little more than a teenager that didn't get his own way.
  
  
• I don't know if these were intended, but the allusions to Bush's decisions on Iraq and the corruption that comes with absolute power were extremely heavy handed. Yes, a movie can have topical relevance and a movie can be a cutting commentary on the norms and mores of our times. But not this movie. The screenplay is nowhere clever enough to be taken that seriously.
  
  
• Either because of the screenplay or the direction (or both), Anakin's motive for joining the Dark Side is rather muddled. I think that Lucas was trying to say that Anakin was first attracted to Palpatine's offer because of the promise that he could save Padme from foreseen death. It was later that he began to crave power in and of itself because of his disillusionment and frustrations with the Jedi. If this was Lucas's intention, it was never communicated clearly enough (or perhaps, acted well enough) such that we understand and feel the full impact of Anakin's journey into darkness.
  
  I found this annoying because the overwhelming impression I got was that Anakin did it primarily to save Padme. I suppose this is not implausible, but to hinge the creation of Darth Vader on this makes a mockery of the greatest villain in pop culture. The big bad man killed all those people, including innocent kids (albeit kids in Jedi training), all to keep his one true love alive. Excuse me while I gag. If this was true, and if Padme had survived, she would have divorced his lame ass faster than you can say "Naboo".
  
  For the story to have true gravitas, Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader should be underpinned by his attraction to his own darker side; his own weakness for power and power's promise of invincibility. Oh well, that is the story I have in my mind, and I think it is also the story that Lucas was trying to tell. It's just too bad that it didn't quite come out that way.
  
  
• General Grievous is George Lucas's latest CGI wet-dream. A blah and uninteresting character, despite all the CGI wizardry, this was a character we could have done without. He seemed to have been included so that Lucas could film another light sabre duel.
  
  
• Darth Vader's cry of "NOOOO!" when he learned that Padme has died was laughable, mainly because it took so long to get out. After Palpatine told him that she was dead, Darth Vader seemed to just lumber around aimlessly for quite a long while, before letting out that wail. I suppose he could have been emoting, coming to grasp with the horrible revelation, but when the actor is in a mask, we cannot see what he is doing. I thought he was just coming to grips with his new metal encased body, because the whole sequence suggested a physical rather than emotional struggle.
  

Unlike the first two movies, the good stuff makes up for the bad. What I particularly liked about this movie that the Star Wars universe now looks like the one we first encountered in 1978. The costumes and hairstyles are especially well chosen, with special mention to Padme's breadroll hair that appropriately acknowledges Carrie Fisher's famous Leia 'do. The design for the Imperial Army's uniform and the space crafts and the look of the droid units are also spot-on.

As in all Lucas films, the set designs are dazzling and the look of the movie breath-taking. As Anakin and Obi Wan fly through intergalactic space in the first sequence, you have to admire the details on large spaceships, small crafts, distant planets and various bits of flying and floating objects.

Any Star Wars film must first and foremost be an entertaining summer movie and RotS fares well in this department. The action sequences (including many light sabre duels) are well staged and everything moves along at a snappy pace. The rescue of Palpatine, which opens the movie, harkens back to the tongue-in-cheek campiness of the original trilogy. It's all great fun and reassures the viewer that whatever else might happen, this is an entertaining movie.

Lucas spent the entire wretched Ep 2 on showing the Padme-Anakin relationship, but the true love story in the prequels is the bond between Obi Wan and Anakin. This is the relationship that will have the greatest repercussions in the future that takes place in the original trilogy. Obi Wan's sacrifice of his life in Star Wars is even more poignant in light of the events of RotS. The first part of the movie establishes the brotherly camaraderie between Anakin and Obi Wan and the easy banter between them is reminiscent of Redford and Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The buddy movie touch was a nice one and worked far better in establishing the tone of this relationship than all the romantic scenes did in establishing the Padme-Anakin relationship. As the movie progressed, we see that Obi Wan was genuinely concerned for Anakin and devastated when he learned of Anakin's brutal acts of murder. Anakin's side of the story is not so clear, again, because he's generally portrayed as a temperamental teenager.

Obi Wan emerged as the true hero of this film, and maybe even of the entire prequel trilogy. He had been a bit of a wet noodle previously, a little more so in Phantom Menace and less so in Attack of the Clones, but in Sith, he was classically heroic. More so than almost anyone else, he was betrayed by Anakin, yet could not bring himself to kill him. He was not as skilled as Anakin, but took him on and defeated him. Ewan McGregor gets first billing, and rightly so. He has the true leading role, and does it justice. (I had thought that McGregor seemed somewhat uninvolved in the first two movies, where the problem mostly laid with the under-written Obi Wan character.) In the buddy movie sequences, he displayed a cheeky sense of mischief which is his great gift as an actor. As the tone of the movie got darker, Obi Wan Kenobi was saddled with much speechifying, and McGregor did his best with clumsily written lines. His great accomplishment is that he succeeded in sounding like Alec Guinness. I could see how this Obi Wan will age graciously into the much-loved Ben Kenobi of Star Wars.

Apart from Christensen, most of the actors acquit themselves well. Ian McDiarmid is a standout as Palpatine. This was an over the top portrayal with much hamming going on, but with the lines he had to say, this was a brilliant approach to the role. He dropped the hamminess when the scene called for it and there was a genuine menace about his Palpatine. Even while he played off a rather stiff Christensen, McDiarmid was dynamic. Natalie Portman had to deal with corny lines and bad hair, and while this was not great acting, it was at least better acting than her screen husband managed. She even managed to inject deep anguish into the line "Anni, you are breaking my heart" (which Lucas wrote in such a "literal" manner). In smaller roles, Frank Oz (as the voice of Yoda), Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson provided reliable support.

This is an emotional movie, telling the tragic tale of a man's descent into darkness as he yields to the temptation of power. Notwithstanding the muddled motives (see above), Lucas handled this with the right dramatic touch, and resisted the temptation to relegate the emotions to second place behind the razzle-dazzle of special effects. Even as Obi Wan Kenobi fought Anakin in the final light sabre duel, the underlying emotions of betrayal, disappointment and resentment took pride of place over choreographed moves and the background CGI. I particularly liked how Lucas handled the pivotal moment when Obi Wan disarms (yeah, bad pun) Anakin. In that one second, we finally learned the background behind the powerful visual image we have always had of Darth Vader, in dark helmet and suit. Also in that one second, we begin to more deeply understand the words that the older Ben Kenobi spoke to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and the dying words of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Lucas could have indulged in excruciating slow motion (ala John Woo!) to underline the importance of this one second, but he resisted it. The moment is all the more powerful for its brevity and its suddenness (it did come from nowhere and I found myself thinking, "Holy S***! Did Obi Wan just kick Anakin's ass?").

After all the fighting is done, Lucas takes time to tell us the backstory to the separation of Luke and Leia and to set up the events in the first Star Wars movie. These scenes are filled with great pathos. We also learn how Yoda and Obi Wan ended up in their separate planets in the future. Lucas also explained how Obi Wan was able to come back to communicate with Luke, after seeming to die at Darth Vader's hand in Star Wars. I appreciated these touches, as Lucas is acknowledging the devotion of fans who had grown up with these movies.

When I watch the original trilogy again, any scenes with Luke interacting with Yoda and Obi Wan will take on greater significance. This, then, is the ultimate endorsement for RotS. I don't think it's quite great enough for me to forgive the first two prequels, but it's good enough to stand on its own without the baggage of those two films.

Recently Seen: The Aviator

Martin Scorcese is a master of the language of film. He understands the possibilities of cinema and brings this faith in the medium to every film that he makes. This does not always result in great movies, but a Martin Scorcese movie will always be authentic and innovative.

The Aviator is not a great Scorcese film, but it is a perfectly fine one. It tells the tale of Howard Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), one of the great originals of 20th Century America. Hughes was one of the richest men in the world. He led an eventful life, finding success in the glitzy world of film-making and blazing a path in the early days of commercial and military aviation. This dual career was dazzling and all the more amazing because Hughes was obsessive about both pursuits, although flying was always his most enduring love (hence The Aviator, and not The Producer). Hughes was also to die a recluse, having been mentally ill for years.

The movie traces Hughes's life in the 1920's up to 1946, ending with a triumphant maiden flight for the Hercules, his flying boat that had seemed earth-bound and been laughingly called the Spruce Goose. But this is not a feel-good biopic. Early on, we learn that Hughes sees things that others do not and his OCD driven tics are also revealed gradually but surely. We know that this is not just an eccentric millionaire genius, but a mentally troubled man, driven by demons he could not understand,

Perhaps the reason why this is not a great film is that we do not understand these demons either. We do not really understand Hughes and as such, we cannot empathise with him, although we may sympathise and even root for him. I suppose this could be a problem that was not within the film-makers' powers to resolve. In choosing Hughes as a subject, they had to work with a character about whose inner motivations little was known.

What they did have was a man who lived a colourful life, who did many interesting things and knew many interesting people. The film is about these events in Hughes's life and about Hughes's relationships with the people he knew. As these are enacted, Scorcese weaves in scenes to show us Hughes's mental decline, some of which are masterful film-making (I particularly liked the scene in the men's washroom when Hughes scrubs his hands and uses up all the towels and then finds himself unable to place his bare hand on the doorknob). There are also several well produced aviation set pieces, including one where Hughes crashes into a house and burns three quarters of his body. The music is wonderful, drawing on popular songs from the period, with very clever jazzy, big-band sounds serving as background music to several scenes. Visually, this is also a marvelous looking film and as always with a Scorcese picture, the attention to period detail is fantastic.

The movie depicts the events very well, but is less successful in depicting the relationships. Because the movie is so centred around Hughes, we do not learn much about the people around him or what they might have thought of him. The movie shows his relationship with two very famous women, Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). Hepburn, in particular is featured prominently but always in relation to Hughes. The male characters fare rather better. We know without equivocation what rival airline owner, Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) thinks of Hughes and the spikiness of their relationship is obvious from the moment Trippe first shows up on screen. Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) launches an investigation in Hughes's dealings with the US Military. The interaction between Hughes and the Senator is the highlight of the movie for me. I wonder why it was that the characterisations of the women in his life could not be so balanced and well-fleshed out.

The acting has many hits but also a few misses. Leonardo Dicaprio is an intelligent actor who immerses himself in this role. He has several wonderful scenes and was especially convincing as a man in the grip of destructive phobia. However, as a whole, the performance is more admirable than laudatory. Perhaps it has to do with Dicaprio's ridiculously youthful appearance, which no amount of dishevelledness could cover. He just seemed rather light-weight in moments which called for greater gravity. That said, he has to carry the show as he is in almost all the scenes and he more than pulled his weight on this difficult project.

Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for her supporting role as Kate Hepburn. She perfectly reproduces Hepburn's singular speech patterns, physical traits and archness. It is something of a marvel to watch and listen to, because she did look and sound so much like Hepburn in her earlier movies (sidenote: In this period of Hepburn's life, she made Bringing Up Baby, which is a great, funny film). I understand why some critics had said that this was impersonation and mimicry, rather than acting. But I blame this on the role, which gives Blanchett little to work with. She is on screen a lot, but usually as a cipher for Hughes's latest display of eccentricity. I have read a couple of biographies on Kate Hepburn and she was a fascinating woman, not just a great actress but fiercely intelligent and independent. Her family background itself could make for a mini-series, with her parent's socialist leanings, her siblings' overachievements and her mother's activism in the suffragette movement. It is a pity that the movie could not give Blanchett a chance to play a more multi-faceted Hepburn. Taken on the terms of what she had to do, this was a very fine performance indeed.

Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was bland and did not register much. She looked gorgeous, but not at all like Ava Gardner who was sensuous and beautiful in a very unconventional manner, with her slanting cat eyes and full lips. Beckinsale is a much more mainstream beauty, so this was a visual mismatch.

Alan Alda was nominated for an Oscar and it was justified, in my opinion. His performance is very understated and edged with a guarded wariness. He does not have any big histrionic scene, but he makes an impact in all the scenes he appears in. His jousting with Dicaprio during the hearing is a highlight of the movie. Alda palpaby conveys the Senator's deflation and crumbling confidence as he senses the tide turning towards Hughes.

My favourite of the supporting roles is Hughes's long suffering assistant, Noah played very well by John C Reilly. I wished he had been given a few more scenes as Reilly made this beleagured man so sympathetic and likeable.

This is a very respectable movie indeed, with fine acting, great production values and Scorcese's trademark sure-handed direction. The technique and technicalities are superb, and while the artistry is not at the same high levels, this is fine film-making. The movie falls short of greatness but is a valuable addition to the film vaults.

Movie rating: 7.5 out of 10.

Recently Seen: Being Julia

Set in pre-war London, this movie enacts the tale of Julia Lambert (Annette Benning), a great actress approaching a difficult age. She is surrounded by an entourage of characters including her husband and manager (Jeremy Irons), the ghost of her her mentor (the great Michael Gambon), dresser (Juliet Stevenson), gay admirer (Bruce Greenwood) and patron-business partner (Miriam Margoyles). They are both enablers and detractors of her neediness, her ego and her melodramatic sense of self. She is acting every minute of her life, but as her son points out, she isn't just playing one character. She does not always know herself what "being" Julia means.

The movie has two distinct parts. In the first, Julia begins an affair with a young American, Tom (Shaun Evans). Playing yet another part, she convinces herself that she is in love with him and her inner glow enhances her stage performances. She supports him financially and brings him to her family's summer home, where she watches him as he favours the company of young people his age, including her son. He eventually strays to a young promising actress, Avice Crichton (Lucy Punch) and ends their affair.

In the second part of the movie, Tom convinces Julia to help Avice obtain a supporting part in a new play that Julia will star in. Avice gets the part and it is revealed to Julia that Avice is dallying with her husband, who is directing the play. Even before the play opens, Avice is much lauded and London is abuzz about this new star. We get into All About Eve territory, as Julia fights to keep her turf as London's pre-eminent actress. This culminates with Julia hijacking Avice's big scene on opening night, wearing an unplanned eye-catching gown, ad-libbing her lines, throwing counter-punches as Avice attempts to engineer the scene back to her own advantage. Julia emerges the undoubted star of the play as her entire entourage watches in admiration.

This movie is a slight, frothy affair. It is a comedy which is charming rather than amusing. There really is not much of a coherent plot and other than Julia, none of the characters are sufficiently developed enough for us to care about. The first part of the movie drags and the pace is generally just too leisurely. On the plus side, it has pretty period London scenes and a tuneful soundtrack of songs from the era.

This movie would be completely inconsequential if not for a great central performance by Annette Benning. She is tremendous in this role, dominating the screen every time she is on it. You find yourself becoming very fond of Julia despite her egoism and her ocassional bitchiness, because Benning infuses her portrayal with an always present humanity and compassion. Even when Julia is being difficult, Benning makes you care and remember Julia's generosity of spirit. Her playing of the ad-libbed opening night scene is masterful in the steeliness of her resolve and the mischief that steals through in the twinkle in her eyes. This is a great actress playing a great actress.

Movie rating : 5 out of 10 (discounting Annette Benning); 6.5 out of 10 (accounting for Annette Benning)

Recently Seen: The Machurian Candidate

Films about paranoia are hard to pull off. It requires a deft touch to sustain tension and reveal the truth in tantalising bits and pieces. The Jonathan Demme directed version of The Manchurian Candidate succeeds, although perhaps without the same impact as the original 1960's version. The story has been updated to make Raymond Shaw (Liv Schrieber) a candidate for US Vice President instead of a political assassin, as in the original movie. This new conceit works in the current US political climate, especially if you subscribe to Michael Moore's view of the unholy link between big business and the Bush administration. What it gains in relevancy, however, it loses in urgency because lifes are not as immediately at stake.

Nevertheless, I found this movie enjoyable. The screenplay is intelligent, with a notable absence of cringe-inducing lines. I particularly enjoyed the language used in the political convention, campaign speeches and the conversations involving the politicos. Jonathan Demme also kept proceedings moving at a snappy pace, so our attention never flags.

The performances are also uniformly excellent. Denzel Washington is one of the most reliable actors around, always able to believably inhabit any role. He particularly specialises in the noble Everyman, and the role of Ben Marco provides him with another chance to portray a damaged, confused and angry man, who is never anything less than a good at his core. Liv Schreiber is a scene stealer; the Raymond Shaw character is complex and calls for a duality - charming politician and conflicted introvert - which Schrieber manages with great subtlety. Schreiber has always been known for his serious acting chops, but I have only previuosly seen him in supporting roles in Scream and Kate & Leopold, and was not prepared for such a fine, nuanced performance. His performance made his sacrifice of his own life in the penultimate scene all the more touching. Meryl Streep plays Raymond's formidable mother, Senator Eleanor Shaw. She is as one usually expects Meryl Streep to be - exceptionally good. She can shift from cut-throat intensity to tenderness so gracefully, you almost cannot believe it while watching it.

All in, this is highly watchable, although perhaps less thought-provoking than it could have been. It would have been great if a movie could have caused us to really question the control that corporations have over polticians and government officials. But perhaps a movie like that would not have been half as entertaining as this movie is. It succeeds in keeping us interested for the duration of its running time, and perhaps to ask for more is being unreasonable.

Movie rating: 7 out of 10. Solid, enjoyable entertainment with great acting.

Recently Seen: Phantom of the Opera (the movie)

Obligatory Musical Theatre Nut Confession
As I have recounted elsewhere on Ascending Chaos, I love musical theatre. I don't have the highest opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber as a composer of "thru-sung" musicals, but he does churn out pretty melodies in the manner of other musicians who rank somewhat below the highest echelon (Meyerbeer and Mascagni, to name a couple in the same mould of composers of "popular opera"). I certainly don't get sniffy about ALW musicals. He is unashamedly mainstream and knows how to appeal to a mass audience. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not high art, but it brings pleasure to many more people than would an experimental opera by Phillip Glass (I have seen Einstein on the Beach, so I know that of which I speak).

I own a copy of the Original London Cast recording of Phantom, and have done so for 17 years. I saw the show on stage around 15 years ago. I have the VCD of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 50th Birthday Celebration concert. And I have two versions of Michael Ball singing All I Ask of You (Ball's voice is one of my favourite theatre voices).

At one stage in my life, I could sing along to the recording, even the overlapping parts, so imprinted had the libretto become in my mind. There was a time when I didn't listen to the recording for months on end, but each time I returned to it, I could remember every note, if not every word.

My favourite parts of the score:

• All I Ask of You (especially the introductory notes, that swell with romantic ardour approaching Puccinian levels. I also like the bittersweet aftermath, with the Phantom sobbing "Christine, Christine")
• Music of the Night (great theatrical piece and I especially like the ending, and the haunting chord changes when the singing stops)
• The three part harmony in the Graveyard scene (the fragment Wandering Child, after Christine sings Wishing you were Somehow Here Again),
• Prima Donna (a lush, swinging main melody and interesting overlapping lines)
• Notes (nice comedic writing and a welcome respite from the high drama of the lair scenes) and Notes 2 (clever lyrics)
• He is Nothing but a Man .... Twisted Every Way (Raoul tries to calm Christine as she voices her fear over his plan to trap the Phantom. It's a relatively short segment at the end of an ensemble piece but the music expresses the emotions with great economy - tender and wistful on his part, terrified and conflicted on hers).
  

I am pretty familiar with the music of Phantom, although not the staging, as I have only seen it once. This is why I was pretty excited to watch the Phantom movie, to see if the stage experience could be captured (I did not expect it to be emulated or even recreated, as these are two very different art forms). I saw Phantom on stage in Melbourne, with Anthony Warlow singing the role of the Phantom. This remains one of the most memorable nights I have spent in a theatre, and I have had a fair few of those. Whatever else you might think about the syrupy music and overwrought sentimentality, Gaston Leroux wrote a wonderfully atmospheric piece of Gothic romance and a halfway decent adaptation would be gripping. On stage, it worked marvellously. How would the movie do?

The Movie
I had not followed news about the movie, only knowing that they had cast relative unknowns, as the original cast of Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman are now too old to assume the roles. Other than this fact, I knew nothing else about the cast or crew.

Director: Joel Schumacher ??? Here's a head scratcher. Joel Schumacher made Batman and Robin, for crying out loud! This was the movie that killed the Batman franchise, before Chris Nolan's current rescue mission. What would Joel Schumacher know about making a musical? Could they not get Baz Lurhman? This was not promising.

And so it turned out that Joel Schumacher had a decidedly pop music-video approach to this movie. The movie is very glossy and visually beautiful but in achieveing this, Schumacher loses the Gothic edge and darkness that worked so well in the theatre. I suppose it helps to make the movie more accessible to audiences not familiar with the stage show.

This is also the Sexy Phantom of the Opera. Erik the Phantom (not named in this movie) is years younger than both the book and stage versions. In casting Gerald Butler, the film maker had a conventionally good looking leading man who is supposed to be horrifyingly disfigured. He wears a half mask, the edge of which traces his chiselled profile to perfection. He is filmed as often on his uncovered side as he is on his masked side. Before Christine ripped off his mask, I found myself thinking more than once that the actor must be quite nice looking if the right side of his face looked anything like the left.

When the mask came off to reveal the Phantom's deformity, I thought - "oh, is that all?" You see worse on an average episode of Nip/Tuck when they are introducing the case of the week. Really, the disfigurement was hardly terrifying, and the libretto describes the face as being so distorted, "it was hardly a face". This did not come anywhere close to that description.

Schumacher's directorial choices remove the mystic of the Phantom; he is supposed to be mysterious, other-worldly and a figure of horror. The mild disfigurement makes the character more tolerable to look at on a storey-high cinema screen, but ultimately, less complex and conflicted. This is compounded by having his illusions (so thrilling and inexplicable in the stage version) explained early in the game, so that we know from the start that this is NOT a ghost. I understand that the movie Phantom does need to be more human than the stage version; the nature of cinema dictates it. But to so completely strip him of his mystical qualities makes a mockery of the title Phantom of the Opera. In the end, this could have been a high-school teen-drama about a slightly deranged boy with skin problems, the newly discovered star of the cheer squad and the Porsche-driving football captain. The point of Gothic romance is that it is somewhat over the top and larger than life. It could have worked on screen - a Phantom at once human and supernatural. It just needed a better understanding of the material, and probably a better director.

Schumacher also plays up the sexual tension between Christine and the Phantom, rather than underlining the romance, which is inherent in the score or the theme of redemption which has always been the point of Leroux's novel. The Phantom is overtly an object of sexual desire. He stalks with feline grace into the Masquerade scene, generally exudes masculine swagger before his final breakdown, and enacts two seduction scenes, firstly during Music of the Night and later, on stage performing Point of No Return. In both seduction scenes, Schumacher drapes Christine provocatively over the Phantom, her cleavage heaving in time to the music.

Talking about cleavage, Christine wears one bosom-baring dress after another. Even in the cemetary scene, where she is wrapped up everywhere else, with snow falling around her, her cleavage is on decorative display. I suppose that part doesn't get cold?

In all, Schumacher's vision for this movie appears to have much more to do with sexuality than romantic tension. That is fine, in so far as that is the director's prerogative. Where I feel it fails is that this sexualised approach doesn't work with the music, which is rendered tawdry, instead of yearning, despairing and romantic (and I mean romantic in the sense of being about naked emotions, not in the sense of mist-swirled ardour). The danger has always existed with this particular ALW score; it is overwrought and unsubtle in construction. It can be served well if interpreted as a form of opera seria, self aware of its own cliched trappings within the conventions of the genre. Otherwise, it is one note away from being schlocky.

The Cast
It's not easy to cast a musical movie, especially if you insist that the actors do their own singing. They have to look right for the screen (all those close ups!) - something which is less critical for the stage, must sing reasonably well and must act decently. I would have thought that the best thing to do was to scour the musical-theatre stage for suitably photogenic actor-singers, but that is not apparently the way that Schumacher and gang went about it.

Gerard Butler (the Phantom)
As I said earlier, he is somewhat younger than expected and considerably better looking. He has screen presence, being tall and broad and having a gravelly speaking voice and an ability to emote through his eyes. Having such a good looking Phantom presents problems, as his burden of ugliness just does not seem that much to bear when the disfigurement on his face isn't particularly terrible. When Gerard Butler sighs, sobs and wails in anguish, I admire his craft and believe in his internal struggle, but wonder, all the same, if he isn't just being a tad melodramatic. But this is not the actor's fault, so much as the director's. Butler has obviously found a motivation for his character and portrays its many facets with subtlety, skill and charisma. His redemption scene at the end, when he releases Christine, evokes real pathos. He understands, more than his director seemingly does, that the key to the Phantom is his sadness and suffering. His acting is perfectly fine. He rises above Schumacher's mishandling of the character and delivers a heartfelt and emotionally nuanced Phantom.

His singing, though, is far from ideal. The voice itself is not bad; his tone has an unabrasive rock hoarseness, and he manages decent resonance on some of the head notes. But the Phantom is a difficult role to sing and his lack of training tells. He has trouble hitting notes and on Music of the Night and Point of No Return, he sounded like three completely different people singing as he moved between registers. His interpretation of the music was also sometimes overly forceful when subtlety or insinuating sensuality was called for; he resorted to shouting instead of singing, which probably has to do with lack of technique,

Emmy Rossum (Christine)
She received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, and I am not quite sure why. She certainly looks right for the part, with her doe-eyed beauty and unaffected screen presence. Christine Daae should have a touch of the unworldly innocent about her, and Rossum has the youth and charm to convey this. The camera loves her and she is simply luminous, with her glowing, flawless complexion and her dark hair and eyes. In terms of looking the part, she cannot be faulted.

I wish I could say the same about her acting. There are moments when I found her truly moving, but too many scenes where she seemed to completely lack emotion. Part of that might be Schumacher's fault, so it might not necessarily reflect her abilities as an actress. But she set the tone for the entire performance with her lack of facial expression during "Think of Me" when it transitioned to the gala performance. Here she was, with her big break, singing the star role, and she just stood there looking blank, her voice seemingly coming from an offstage recording (of course, it did!). It was almost like someone had said that singers look horrible on screen, with open mouth and possible sighting of tonsils, and she was determined to appear perfectly decorous, hardly opening her mouth at all. She relied on her eyes to do all the acting, but does not quite yet have the emotional maturity to be completely convincing.

Her singing was much vaunted as she had sung with the Met Opera Children Chorus. Her voice is certainly rich, especially in its lower register, but the girl needs lessons on technique. There were far too many cheats in hitting the high notes and in the transition between notes. And quite a few high notes were squeaked, rather than sung. When she wasn't struggling with unsupported notes, and resorting to scooping in and out of notes, she did sound lovely, rather like an old-style Hollywood soprano (Shirley Jones comes to mind, although I think Rossum might be more of a mezzo than a soprano). It's a pity they didn't give her more time to be properly trained; the promise is apparent, which makes the sour notes harder to take.

Patrick Wilson (Raoul)
Raoul is a thankless role to play, being essentially one dimensional and rather boring, compared to the complex Phantom. Patrick Wilson pulls off the acting about as well as expected; it's a dull, stereotypical romantic lead and he portrays it exactly as what it is. If it comes across as a somewhat bland performance, I think it has more to do with the role than the actor. Schumacher put in additional action-hero scenes to enlarge Raoul's role, but I felt these did nothing to make the character more interesting. Raoul is a narrative device; he is noble, impulsive-heroic and a bit dandyish - and is described as such by both Leroux's prose and Lloyd Webber's score; a fine and admirable character but not all that interesting. He is as an uncomplicated character functioning as a foil to the Phantom. A convincing performance of the role is one in which Raoul is superficially charming and ardent, and Christine's love for him is believable. In this, I think Wilson succeeded - he brings an easy laid-back charm to his early scenes and is suitably intense as the melodrama intensifies. I found Raoul in the movie to be extremely likeable, if not very interesting. It did take a while for me to warm to the character and I initially felt that he had been miscast, but much of that is because his appearance was so much fairer and paler than I expected.

He also gets saddled with a horrific hair-piece, which would be envied by any woman, so perfectly fine and silky are his tresses. This has the unfortunate effect of detracting from his great bone structure, and succeeds in making the character look even more foppish. Add the open-necked white shirts and tight breeches, and what you have is a Raoul that is styled from the cover of a bodice-ripping romance novel.

Raoul does get one of the best songs in the score, so while not a great role to act, it is a grateful role to sing. Patrick Wilson's singing is the best of the three leads, which is somewhat of a pity as he gets the least actual singing. He has a lovely lyric tenor, a light and sweet tone; it is a very "musical theatre" type of voice. He has two Tony Award nominations (one for playing Curly in Oklahoma! - I would love to hear his voice on Oh, What a Beautiful Morning) and his Broadway-cred is telling. He is the only one of the three leads without obvious vocal problems. Compared to Gerard Butler's rock-edge growl, he has less vocal heft, but considerably better technique and greater musicality.

The Supporting Cast
Miranda Richardson is a regal but human Madame Giry. Apart from the three leads, this is the most important role, at least in the movie version. Madame Giry is almost portrayed as an accomplice of the Phantom. It would have been easy for an audience to think that she approved of Buquet's murder and the obsessive stalking of Christine Daae. Miranda Richardson manages to infuse trepidation and remorse behind her icy gaze, so that this is never so clear-cut.

Minnie Driver plays Carlotta as a completely over the top caricature of an Italian Prima Donna. I found this somewhat grating, but the blame here lies squarely with the director. The singing is supplied by someone else who was instructed to indulge in the worst ever parody of an unmusical soprano, complete with broad vibrato and ear-splitting shrieks. This is just wrong, as Carlotta is the star of Opera Populaire and is supposed to be able to SING, whatever else might be wrong about her personality.

Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds play Andre and Firmin, the two theatre managers. They are possibly my favourite thing about the movie, especially their scenes in Notes and Prima Donna. Simon Callow is a wonderful comic actor and his lightness of touch never fails here. He also does a fine job with the singing and produces a few wonderfully plumy tones during Prima Donna. Ciaran Hinds (who played Captain Wentworth in the movie Persuasion, talk about versatility!) was a delight with his smirking and raised eyebrows. He has no singing experience, but a great speaking voice and manages to pull off the singing well enough.

General Comment on the Singing
They marshalled the resources to have a 105-piece orchestra perform the score. This is welcome news indeed to cast recording collectors. I had always wondered why there wasn't a Symphonic recording of Phantom, like the one done for Les Mis (which is a marvellous recording, sound wise). This movie soundtrack could have filled that gap. Unfortunately, the uneven singing abilities of the lead cast has voided this promise. They are by no means bad, but not equal to performers in cast recordings.


The Movie vs the Musical on Stage
Changes were made in the movie, presumably to make it more easily digestible by a movie audience. Some of it works better than others:

• Black and white flash-forward scenes, showing Raoul forty years after the main events. On stage, there is one future scene, right at the start, serving as a prologue. In the movie, the flash-forward scenes intersperse the set pieces and there is a substantial scene acting almost like an epilogue. As a cinematic device, this was useful but overused.
• Changing the Phantom's back story as told by Madame Giry. In the stage musical, she talks about a disfigured man escaping from the travelling fair, but does not know what had become of him. In the movie, she is the one who, as a child, showed him the way to the dungeons below the Opera Populaire. I did not care for this change in the Phantom's history. It establishes a strange relationship between Madame Giry and the Phantom which the movie does not satisfactorily resolve (I think it cannot be resolved, because it's not in the score at all). This backstory also wipes out the Phantom's history of being a known genious, who had built a maza of mirrors for the Shah of Persia.
• Adding spoken lines of exposition. The bulk of this took place in the first scenes as they established the characters. Later, Christine does a bit of explaining about her father and the Angel of Music and Madame Giry tells the story of how Erik came to the Opera's underground lair. I actually felt these were unecessary and broke the flow of a mostly sung-through musical.
• Having certain lines spoken instead of sung. This did not make any sense to me at all. They kep the music playing in the background, so perhas they were going for a Rex Harison style of speak singing. Why, though?
• Showing the backstage activities at the Opera. This was great, one example of how the cinematic medium can open up the action and show what happens off the scene on the stage.
• Raoul defeats the Phantom in a duel. This was a strange scene, tagged on for seemingly no reason, other than perhaps generating some Schumacher type action. In itself, that is a sound idea, to take advantage of the cinematic medium and to produce a movie that was more than just a filmed stage show. The scene was well-filmed and generated some excitement, but seemed to have come out of nowhere. Having Raoul win the duel was jarring, especially after the Phantom had been shown to be so assuredly masculine and powerful.
• Raoul almost drowning. I suppose they wanted to give the third lead a little more to do. The problem is that these scenes add nothing to the story at all. The thing that Patrick Wilson does best is sing, not play action hero. Couldn't ALW have written him a couple of extra verses if they wanted to give him more screentime? Although, I did not mind this addition as much, because it fit better with the structure of the movie - an active sequence in the midst of other sequences with people on the move - the Phantom dragging Christine to his lair and the group out to "track down this murderer".
  
• Cutting Raoul's part in the three part harmony in the Cemetary scene. As mentioned above, this is one of my favourite parts of the score. Chopping it up this way was quite unforgivable.
• Leaving out the final verse of Phantom of the Opera. So, it's the title song, right? And they left off the final verse. Go figure.
• Leaving out the entire Notes II segment and the subsequent scene showing rehearsals for Don Juan Triumphant. Some of my favourite "Notes" lines are in this scene - the one about the third trombone is particularly droll. In the stage show, Christine has her breakdown (leading to Twisted Every Way) in this section, in front of everyone. It's a powerful scene in the theatre. The movie version has this segment as a two-hander with Christine and Raoul. It's more intimate and works quite well, but I would have preferred the old version, if only to see more of Andre and Firmin.
• The chandelier dropping during Don Juan and not at the end of Il Muto. This was necessary because there is no intermission in the movie. In the musical, the chandelier comes crashing down just before intermission, creating a nice climax point. They saved this for a later point in the movie, but it did lose some impact because they then plunged headlong into the Phantom's kidnapping of Christine, Raoul's drowning scene and the group storming the lair, out for the Phantom's blood (while the theatre supposedly burnt above them - logic gap?)

For me, the movie does not have even a fraction of the energy and magic of the theatre experience. Scenes that grip you by the throat in the theatre seems oddly flat on screen. On stage, Music of the Night is a masterpiece of creepiness and mystery. In the movie, it lacks atmosphere because of poor direction that did nothing to sustain tension. The lair was also too well lit and too beautifully appointed. On stage, All I Ask of You is truly swooningly romantic, the Phantom's sob afterwards is heart-rending and his final declaimation "You will curse the day ... " is chilling. In the movie, these scenes play out and are pleasing to the eye and not too uneasy on the ear (see comments on the leads' singing above), but lack drama. Masquerade in the theatre is simply fantastic, a great set-piece and meta-commentary on the Phantom story. In the movie, there were a few too many cuts and the gold and black theme was visually arresting, but lacked the gaudy colour demanded by the bachinallian intentions of the music.

It has been said that this movie is not only for the fans, but for those who might not otherwise watch a staged musical. Hence the young, good looking stars, sexy costumes and heightened sexuality. I suspect the movie succeeds better in pleasing these casual viewers than the long-time fan of the show. And on those terms, we have to regard the movie as a success.

It is rather hard for me to watch this from the perspective of a movie-goer without the "baggage" of a having expectations formed from the musical on stage and on recordings. I imagine, though, that in terms of appealing to a wider audience, Schumacher probably made an astute decision to cast younger actors and ramping up the sex appeal of the story. How would audiences have responded to an uglier, older Phantom, a modestly dressed Christine and a less swashbuckling Raoul? Would the lack of sword-fighting and a more dingy lair diminish the movie as a cinematic spectacle?

Schumacher set out to make a movie, not a film of the stage musical. He remained faithful to much of the material in the sense of excising very little from the original score and book. Through casting and direction, he did change the psychology underlying the events. (In particular, Schumacher alludes to the "sexual and deeply soulful" connection between Christine and the Phantom, which is more than vaguely disturbing in an Oedipal sense. Christine spends much of her time believing the angel of music to be the spirit of her father - Schumacher even has the Phantom sing "Far from my fathering gaze" during Wandering Child, instead of "Far from my far-reaching gaze", as in the original libretto.) Lloyd Webber's Phantom still owed much to Leroux's Erik. Schumacher's Phantom seems to have been inspired less by Leroux and more by Alexander Dumas or even the Baroness Orczy. It makes for an enjoyable enough 2 hours in the cinema, but it isn't really The Phantom of the Opera, neither Lloyd Webber's or Leroux's.

Final Thoughts

For those who have never seen Phantom on stage, this is not a substitute, because it isn't even really the same work once Schumacher has had his way with it. As a movie, it achieves the virtue of being entertaining. The cast provides enough eye candy to satisfy the sweetest tooth. The sets are sumptuous and beautiful, and the cinematography showcases one visual highpoint after another (sometimes at the expense of logical story-telling). Movie-goers who are not allergic to on-screen singing and wall-to-wall swelling violins would probably enjoy this. I think it would especially appeal to women because it is so ostensibly romantic, especially the dramatic denouement in final lair scene with both Butler and Wilson in half-open white shirts and Rossum in a shoulder-baring wedding dress.

This is well worth watching for any fan of the musical, if only to see how it translates onto the big screen. It is wonderful to look at and certainly never boring. For me, it lacks the spark of the live theatre experience and most disappointingly, the singing is uneven. That said, it is a welcome edition to the video library, as there has been no recorded version of the stage play or even a concert performance.

Movie rating: 7.5 out of 10 (as a movie), 6 out of 10 (as a movie version of the stage musical)