Perhaps it's because the camera is the ultimate apologist. It's gorgeous nonsense to look at, and in director Joel Schumacher's hands, "Phantom" emerges as one of those queer works of art that actually improve somehow as they get tackier and more removed from the original. anger? - leads almost instantly to a metaphysical logjam.įortunately, the movie version of Lloyd Webber's smash hit does to the music what the music did to the words and story: It distracts the mind and cajoles the eyes to the point that one doesn't really care that everything the ears are hearing is pure nonsense. Certainly not on the philosophical level, where any attempt to reduce it to an intelligible conflict - art vs. And the plot of this drastic adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel, about a soprano seduced by a murderous genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera, simply makes no sense. When words are set willy-nilly to repetitive music, you don't pay much attention to them - this can be a blessing - and if you're not paying attention to the words, then you can't scrutinize the plot. There wasn't a lot of actual music in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical "The Phantom of the Opera." A handful of maddeningly catchy tunes did triple and quadruple duty, suggesting often contradictory emotions: love and malevolence, resolution and anxiety.
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