Official "Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera" Reviews Thread- Page 2

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 2:51am

NY Post Review:

Crashing chandelier, crashing bore.

"JOEL Schumacher has not so much directed the movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's hugely successful "The Phantom of the Opera" as embalmed it."

http://www.nypost.com/movies/36866.htm

[bronxboundexpress]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 2:55am

Notice how none of the reviews have just come right out and bashed Gerard Butler's voice like some people on this board have? I'm really wondering if he DOES sound better on screen than on the soundtrack.

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 3:01am

USA TODAY Review:

'Phantom' is lavishly escapist
By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Those who enjoyed Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera on stage surely will like the movie version
( * * * out of four).

And even audiences who are not familiar with the production — one of musical theater's biggest successes since its Broadway debut in 1988 — might be drawn to the slightly more contemporary-sounding and sumptuously staged movie.

The look is dazzling, befitting the romantic tale of a tortured musical genius who lives in the catacombs of the Paris opera house and takes a promising young singer as his protégée.

Scotsman Gerard Butler does a fine job as the charismatic, ghostly character who hides away in the opera house because of his disfigurement. Emmy Rossum, only 16 when the film was shot, seems born to play Christine, the trusting ingénue. She has a lovely voice, and her scenes with the Phantom in the cavernous nether regions of the opera house are the movie's finest moments. His resplendent but sinister lair, reached via gondola, is wonderfully stylized and seductive.

For those whose primary experience with musicals is on the screen, this melodramatic tale with the familiar soundtrack should hold substantial appeal. (There is one new song written by Lloyd Webber, Learn to be Lonely, sung by Minnie Driver during the closing credits.) The film Phantom is more in the overblown, extravagant mold of Moulin Rouge than the sophisticated Chicago.

And there are some jarringly flat notes. Driver as the diva whom Christine replaces is a ridiculous caricature, and ballet mistress Miranda Richardson's over-the-top French accent is off-putting. Christine's suitor Raoul, played by Patrick Wilson, is meant to be swashbuckling but is a bit of a drip. Butler's brooding Phantom is a much more compelling screen presence, and the half of his face we do see is manly and handsome.

But the shortcomings don't stop the whole lavish affair from being a guilty pleasure. The Phantom offers a couple of hours of escapist and macabre fun.

[elvenprincess971]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 3:07am

is it just me, or does it bother anyone else of the minor changes in words? that, if nothing else, will throw me off in seeing the movie, because im one that likes to know the libretto frontward and back before seeing it.

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 3:09am

Newsday Review:

'Phantom of the Opera'
No wonder he wears a mask

BY JAN STUART
STAFF WRITER

December 22, 2004

Broadway's indefatigable masked man comes to the screen, and doesn't know when to leave. Everything's bigger: the chandelier, the orchestra, the chorus, the tedium. 2:23 (brief violent images). At area theaters.

The history of the Broadway musical on film is a potholed trail strewn with butchered scores, songs patched in from other shows, frantically edited dance numbers, movie stars who can't sing, screenplays ludicrously tailored to the inappropriate age of the leading lady, mismatched directors (John Huston's "Annie," anyone?), gratuitous extravagance and the wistful echo of legendary stage performances that shall be forever lost because the original stars did not have the unstoppable screen box office appeal of Mitzi Gaynor or Topol.

If you are as mighty as Andrew Lloyd Webber, however, this needn't happen. You can be your own producer. You can help write the screenplay. You can keep every insipid line of dialogue and every last, stultifying note of your famously repetitious music. You can hire a director who appreciates extravagance from his days as a costume designer and fully understands the diva temperament, having once transformed Philip Seymour Hoffman into a drag queen. And why embarrass a Hollywood star who can't sing when you can hire a nonentity who can't sing?

Thus, a smash-hit show that has run longer than a prison sentence for manslaughter has been transformed into a movie that crawls like a lifetime on death row. Webber and director-co-screenwriter Joel Schumacher have adapted "The Phantom of the Opera" with the pomp and reverence usually accorded a holy relic or the Book of Kells. It goes on for an eternity, though rarely has eternity seemed so sumptuously decorated and studiously researched.

Ooh, the costumes! Aah, the opera house! Eeek, the chandelier! From the opening moment, when a mysterious wind blows the dust from the balcony and gaslights erupt in a chorus line of flame, you know that someone has done his homework, and that someone else has paid more than a Wal-Mart heiress for their labors. Exquisite color and detailing abound in every outfit and set. Even the sheep that are herded onstage for a pastoral ballet seem perfectly in place.

But it is still Webber's "Phantom," a woozy admixture of grandiloquent musical posturing and cardboard characters. In keeping with the tradition of karaoke Phantoms initiated with Michael Crawford, Webber has found a sincere croaker in Gerald Butler, whose howling high note in "Music of the Night" is the most terrifying thing in the picture. Emmy Rossum fares somewhat better as his beloved Christine, but her folk-singer soprano would never turn heads in real opera companies as it does here.

Neither stands a chance against Minnie Driver, camping it up to uproarious effect as the diva Carlotta, or Miranda Richardson, glowering about like "Rebecca's" Mrs. Danvers as Madame Giry. I still don't understand who Madame Giry is, or why there is break dancing in the "Masquerade" number, for that matter. For some of us, the phenomenal popularity of "Phantom" remains the greatest mystery of all, one left unsolved by this interminable screen spectacle.

[DAME]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 8:02am

Well;lt is now looking like the movie has recieved mixed to bad reviews. One thing which is obvious now; is that all the over eager posters that were saying that this movie is a award contender without even having seen it. were wrong.

As I stated in another thread; I saw this movie about a month ago in a studio screening. It sucked big time.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 8:40am

The Slate review is, um...negative. To say the least. My favorite quote:

Reportedly a fine stage actor, Butler is a less-than-agreeable vocalist. During his high notes, I covered my ears and then checked my hands for blood.

Ouch.
Slate

[Michael Strathmore]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 9:42am

Thank goodness someone wasn't taken in by it...

The review in the Toronto Star:

The mucus of the night


PETER HOWELL
MOVIE CRITIC


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Phantom

Of The Opera



Starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson and Miranda Richardson. Directed by Joel Schumacher. 143 minutes. At major theatres. PG

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The celebrated chandelier takes its sweet time smashing down in the long-awaited screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera, waiting until near the end to make a climactic clamour.

The movie itself crashes to Earth long before that.

In attempting to update the story while also remaining true to its popular stage musical rendering, director Joel Schumacher commits the cardinal sin of choosing sex appeal over sincerity.

He rejected original stage Phantom Michael Crawford for the role of the Paris Opera spook of the title, reasoning that Crawford was too old to play a convincing lover at 62 — despite Crawford's youthful looks and his undisputed mastery of songs that sound ludicrous and too loud when not properly performed.

Crawford has been supplanted by Scottish actor Gerard Butler, an unskilled singer and largely unheralded actor who once haunted a Tomb Raider sequel. Butler's woeful lack of vocal chops is just one of his painful deficiencies. He's the eighth screen Phantom since Lon Chaney's 1925 silent-film original and he's quite possibly the worst. (And yes, I have seen the Freddy Krueger slasher version.)

Schumacher argues, unconvincingly, that the Phantom needs to be sexed up to appeal to contemporary audiences and to make Butler seem a more appropriate romantic foil for 18-year-old co-star Emmy Rossum (Mystic River), who plays Christine Daaé, the rising opera diva and object of too much male attention.

Butler's Phantom still calls himself a "loathsome gargoyle," but he is really just a pretty boy with a skin infection, as evidenced by his skimpy mask revealing a mostly handsome face. In making him only slightly less shaggable than Patrick Wilson's Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, the gentleman opera patron who jousts for Christine's affections, Schumacher reduces the love dilemma to its most ridiculous terms.

Should Christine choose as her suitor the suave and caring society man with loads of cash and a sweet disposition? Or should she go with the psychopathic killer, extortionist and egotist, who is madly swinging about the rafters and laying waste to the Opera Populaire? Hmm, can she get back to us on this?

The story has been robbed of its raison d'etre, which is to dramatize the yearning of unrequited love, the cruel vagaries of fate and the shallowness of human behaviour, where people pay only lip service to the notion that beauty is only skin deep.

None of this might matter to the many who cherish The Phantom Of The Opera for its thunder and lightning, which Schumacher provides at sonic-blast volume. No expense has been spared on costumes, which are beautiful to behold, and when the film remains true to the play's campy heart — as in Minnie Driver's winking portrayal of the uppity Italian opera diva Carlotta — it revels in gaudy glory.

A commendable attempt has been made to give the story some context, notably with an Elephant Man-style flashback in which Miranda Richardson's opera matron Madame Giry takes in the young Phantom-to-be, sheltering him from cruel stares and threats of freak-show abduction. But this Phantom remains as wispy as ever on the Opera Ghost's essential link with Christine, who has followed the whispered coaching of her unseen "Angel of Music" since childhood.

The songs occasionally rise above the din. When Rossum sings solo, as she does the aria "Think Of Me," she is indeed a revelation, justifying the faith of her risky casting. And not even Butler's hollering can ruin the beauty of "The Music Of The Night," the one great song of the entire production.

But most of the time, the film overflows with overkill, from the amped-up orchestra that constantly threatens to submerge the singers to the ornate silliness of each and every scene involving the Phantom. There haven't been this many roses and candles since Princess Diana's funeral, and the obviousness of the lad's sexual innuendo (including the clamshell bed he takes Christine to) would make Austin Powers cringe.

Weirder still is the lack of anything truly sexy in this hormone-fuelled endeavour. This Phantom is all phoreplay and no phun. Phancy that.

One would have thought after Schumacher destroyed a lucrative comic-book franchise with Batman & Robin — a kitschy travesty memorable for its leather fetish wear — that he would never again be handed a big budget and free reign to indulge his inner Liberace. Schumacher should only be allowed to make small movies with strong actors, like the Colin Farrell-starring Tigerland and Phone Booth that helped restore his lost lustre.

But Lloyd Webber apparently dotes on the man, having fallen for the director's earlier exercise in grotesque behaviour, The Lost Boys, and he was amenable to the idea of tarting up The Phantom Of The Opera. Lloyd Webber's only stipulation was that the actors should be able to actually sing, an edict that Butler somehow managed to skirt.

It's a case of two out of three being okay, I suppose, since Emmy Rossum, despite her youth (she was 16 when she made this) is more than capable as Christine, a role originally brought to life by Lloyd Webber's then-wife Sarah Brightman.

The opera-trained Rossum actually does know how to sing, as does Patrick Wilson (The Alamo), who starred in a Broadway redo of Oklahoma! Wilson's acting may be another thing, although he's not given much to work with, at least until the cacophonous final act when he engages in a snowy swordfight with the Phantom in a mist-shrouded graveyard that may have been last glimpsed in Michael Jackson's Thriller video.

Joel Schumacher's The Phantom Of The Opera is a textbook example of how difficult it is to transfer the thrills of a powerful live stage musical, one steeped in the showiness of 1980s event theatre, to the subtleties demanded by the very different medium of film.

Saddest of all is the thought of how good this movie might have been, had Lloyd Webber proceeded with his original plans to make it in 1990 with original leads Crawford and Brightman. To quote another song murdered by Butler, waiting this long has taken this Phantom literally past "The Point Of No Return."
Toronto Star review Updated On: 12/22/04 at 09:42 AM

[Bobby457]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 9:53am

Saw it last night....Its pretty to look at.....and thats about it. I was bored outa my mind.

Not good

[BWW Contests]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 10:41am

If you were one our Phantom screening winners and attended last night- let us all know what you thought of the film!

[Matt_G]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 10:50am

I was a winner of the contest and went to the screening last night. You know, I absolutely loved it. I'm a big fan of this show to begin with and thought it was a very faithful adaptation. I will definately be seeing it again.

But hey, different strokes for different folks.

[WOSQ]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 11:13am

I thought this movie was great trashy fun.

I have no idea if it is any 'good' or not. Who cares? Reviewers seem to be taking this enterprise far far too seriously. Come on! The musical is not very good, but thanks to Hal Prince it is a great show. I do know that this is a movie that is all about production values and orchestrations.

There are good movies. There are bad movies. And there are fabulous movies, as in "You have to see this. Its fabulous."

Guess what kind Phantom is?

Baroque, rococo and over the top.

And fabulous.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 11:14am

Right, who cares if a movie is good? We all have money to spare, and few things are more fulfilling than financially rewarding mediocrity. Yay! Updated On: 12/22/04 at 11:14 AM

[bronxboundexpress]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 11:41am

I don't think the reviews are mixed to bad. I think they're pretty much 50/50. I think a lot of the bad ones are getting highlighted more because it's more fun to hear bashing.

[LilMiZBroADwaY23]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:21pm

I was watching red light, green light on VH1, with Loni something or other, Ant, and some other guy. ((See how much I really pay attention))

Loni and Ant loved it. But the other guy said he hated it and gave it a red light. He said he didn't enjoy the extra scenes and the lip synching, due to the fact he had seen the stage version multiple times.

They also commented on Minnie Driver's accent, which was either Italian or Puerto Rican, they couldn't really tell.

It's not exactly reliable. But also a mixed review.

[elvenprincess971]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:35pm

okay, i have a comment on the one from the "toronto star" review. Those who dont know that a show that is redone on Broadway is called a "revival" as opposed to a "redo", really shouldnt be commenting on a Broadway show at all, even if it's a movie, if they are basing it on musical talent.

Just a thought.

[Feathah]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:35pm

I usually only lurk on this board but had to emerge when it came to this topic. I have a habit of loving things that most hate - Dance of the Vampires for example. :) I am not a huge fan of Phantom or ALW but I did enjoy the show when I finally saw it for the first time 2 years ago. And one of my favorite shows of all time is Aspects of Love. SO I don't love ALW but I definitely don't hate him.

Anyway - I am determined to remain positive when it comes to the film version of Phantom. I'm seeing it tonight, have been listening to the full recording from the film for about 2 weeks now, and I really think I'm going to enjoy it! I love Emmy Rossum's voice. Maybe it's my untrained ear but I think her voice is gorgeous. (Sarah Brightman on the other hand makes me want to hold my ears and scream.) I enjoyed Gerard Butler as well.

I really think that many reviews are coming from their hatred of ALW.

[elvenprincess971]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:38pm

sry, but, is that eddie izzard as your icon?

[Matt_G]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:38pm

If you enjoy the soundtrack, than you are going to love the film. It's simply gorgeous and and some of the most beautiful filmmaking I've seen in a long time. Enjoy!

[Feathah]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:43pm

I'm glad you liked it Matt! I think I will too. :)

Yes - that's Eddie Izzard as my icon. :)

[elvenprincess971]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 12:47pm

nice. i love eddie. he would have to be my favorite comedian of all time.

[elvenprincess971]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 1:11pm

On the topic of whether or not this movie will be an award contender:

Whether or not the critics liked the movie, they seem to agree that it could definitely be up for all the visual categories. So, personally, i think there is still hope for some sort of award for this very ambitious project.

[JohnPopa]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 1:15pm

Think, this is one of the rare shows where you can compare the lip synching in the stage version vs. the lip synching in the movie!

[iluvtheatertrash]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 1:16pm

Saw a review that gave the film just one star. I haven't seen it yet. Honestly, I'm not in much of a hurry. I'll probably go some time next week.

However, did give the soundtrack a listening to today while wrapping massive amounts of Christmas packing. I actually found a bit of a love for Gerard Butler's voice. I've never been much of a Michael Crawford fan to be honest. I love his version of 'Gethsemmanae' but as someone who didn't thoroughly enjoy POTO on Broadway and found the score to be boring, for the first time, I listened to 'Music of the Night' more than two times in a row. He doesn't have a wonderful voice but it makes you feel something. It isn't just plain and beautiful. Something about it gave me chills. It's a raw sound that I love. Maybe I'm crazy.

Frankly, the fact that they dubbed Minnie Driver really aggrivates me. It's as if putting her in the film was simply an attempt to bring in her fans and make more of a profit. She's a talented actress, and from what I hear, a decent singer. But why bother putting her in if she's going to lipsync?

All the reviews I've read seem to lean toward the negative side but majority of them agree that the sets are absolutely stunning as well of the costumes. So that will be something to look forward to.

The soundtrack is beautiful. Give it (and Gerard Butler) another listen and chance.

[JohnPopa]

Posted: 12/22/04 at 1:20pm

Interesting how the movie reviews are paralleling the original show's reviews: debatable material saved by great sets and direction.