They will embrace the movie, and I congratulate them, because they have waited too long to be disappointed. People have seen it 10, 20, 100 times - have never done anything else in their lives but see it. For a decade in London, you couldn't go past Her Majesty's Theater without seeing them with their backpacks, camped out, waiting all night in hopes of a standby ticket. She has feelings her character must generate from within, and she is so emotionally tortured and romantically torn that both Raoul and the Phantom should ask themselves if there is another man.
She responds to more genuine tragedy than the film provides for her.
The scarlet of the Phantom's cape acts like a bloodstain against the monochrome cityscape and Christine's pale skin, and she rises to an occasion her rival lovers have not earned. I admire the cellars and dungeons and the Styx-like sewer with its funereal gondola, and the sensational masked ball, and I was impressed by the rooftop scenes, with Paris as a backdrop in the snow. Here, working with production designer Anthony Pratt (" Excalibur"), art director John Fenner (" Raiders of the Lost Ark"), set decorator Celia Bobak (Branagh's " Henry V" and "Hamlet") and costume designer Alexandra Byrne (" Elizabeth"), he creates a film so visually resonant you want to float in it. His " Batman Forever" was the best of the Batman movies, not least because of its sets. He has a sure sense for the macabre, going back to his 1987 teenage vampire movie " The Lost Boys" and certainly including his " Flatliners" (1990), about the medical students who induce technical death. I focus on how it moves, how it looks, and how it plays." One wonders if Schumacher felt the same way - not that it would be polite to ask him. "I don't even know if they're singing on key. "I don't know $#!+ about the music," he told me. I recently attended a rehearsal of the Lyric Opera's new production of " A Wedding," and talked with its co-writer and director, Robert Altman. Schumacher knows more about making a movie than the material deserves, and he simply goes off on his own, bringing greatness to his department and leaving the material to fend for itself. But the songs are dirges or show-lounge retreads the dialogue laboriously makes its archaic points, and meanwhile, the movie looks simply sensational. I concede that Emmy Rossum, who is only 18 and sings her own songs and carries the show, is a phenomenal talent, and I wish her all the best - starting with better material.
To have seen, that is, as opposed to have heard. Yet Schumacher has bravely taken aboard this dreck and made of it a movie I am pleased to have seen. Wouldn't get past Simon Cowell, let alone Rodgers & Hammerstein. Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world/Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before/Let your soul take you where you long to be/Only then can you belong to me. (I have the same difficulty with "Waltzing Matilda.") Lyrics like: Every time I see Lloyd Webber's " Phantom," the bit about the "darkness of the music of the night" bounces between my ears, as if, like Howard Hughes, I am condemned to repeat the words until I go mad. You do remember the tunes as you leave the theater, but you don't walk out humming them, you wonder if you'll be able to get them out of your mind. When the chandelier comes crashing down, it's not a shock, it's a historical reenactment. The story is thin beer for the time it takes to tell it, and the music is maddeningly repetitious. I do not think Lloyd Webber wrote a very good musical. In this version, any red-blooded woman would choose the Phantom over Raoul, even knowing what she knows now.īut what I am essentially disliking is not the film, but the underlying material. The character of Raoul, Christine's nominal lover, has always been a fatuous twerp, but at least in the 1925 version, Christine is attracted to the Phantom only until she removes his mask. The modern Phantom is more like a perverse Batman with a really neat cave. There was something unwholesome and pathetic about the 1925 Phantom, who scuttled like a rat in the undercellars of the Paris Opera and nourished a hopeless love for Christine.
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