ninme

I love Phantom. I spent a year listening to the soundtrack. (Weird? Yes. But I listened to 2 years of Les Mis.) And I’m looking forward to the movie.

Bill at INDC Journal’s irritated by the WaPo review of it, because the guy makes snarky comments about the lead actresses voice.

It apologizes for the fact that when Rossum’s character, the ingenue soprano Christine, gets her first big break, she doesn’t actually produce very good music. But there’s the ever-loving camera, emphasizing not her singing but the response of others to the music, so we love her through them, and forgive a voice that would be laughed out of a real opera house.

Bill argues with him, and wins (even if it is one-sided), but it’s kind of pointless arguing. I’ve spent a lot of time with creative types in my day, and especially theater types are the biggest snobs known to man. They can’t have a conversation with anyone about anything remotely musical without saying something to sound better, smarter, with more educated tastes, (especially reviewers, because they can only compete with their superior intellect, not talent). This guy could be talking to his 5-year-old niece about Barbie’s performance in her latest movie and he’d just have to say that her voice lacked clarity, and no one has shone in that role since Snooty Patootie in 1956 at the Met.

Plus, it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and artsy types love to hate him, because he’s so…middle america.

Lloyd Webber’s musical was, quite possibly, the composer’s inside joke on opera, robbing it blind and insulting it at the same time. In Schumacher’s movie, there’s a scene in a graveyard, with a swordfight and an open tomb beckoning to the heroine, that is so over-the-top with cliches it invites cynics to consider this: The director is daring you to notice the artifice, the theft, the threadbareness of it all, by showing you the graveyard as a symbol of popular entertainment that refuses to die.

Yeah, well, it’s refusing to die all the way to the bank. How much does the Met have to raise every year just to keep its seats in velvet and its patrons in caviar crudites and petit fours.

And another thing: I hate opera singers. They can’t get off their high horses. Has anyone actually heard Luciano PavarottiI sing Christmas Carols? For the love of God, man, “Jingle Bells” does not require gutsy vibrato.