I went into this thinking I’d either love it or loathe it. The experience was a little more varied than that, but I certainly hit both ends of the spectrum at various points in the movie.

Phantom has never been one of my favourite Lloyd Webber musicals, though that’s probably greatly due to the way I’ve come to know it – through cheap instrumental compilation CDs, from schooldays easy piano sheet music, where it would always make an appearance (did I ever do a concert where I didn’t play “All I Ask of You”??), and an Andrew Lloyd Webber “Premiere Collection” VHS that I watched far too much when I was 13 and 14 and just coming into my first musical-loving phase. So I knew the songs, but not the story; and I can’t say even after seeing this movie that I totally understand the point of it – it may just be me, but there seem to be vast chunks missing (not that I could name them, they’re just not there), vast depths and possibilities that aren’t explored. Maybe Lloyd Webber will provide some answers if that Phantom Sequel rumour comes to fruition.

When this movie’s good, it’s great. I found myself loving the songs I don’t usually love (because I haven’t been overexposed to them as I describe above, like “All I Ask of You”, “Music of the Night”, and the title song) – “Masquerade”, for example, is maybe my favourite scene: beautifully choreographed, all the edits match up, simple, elegant, costume designs, it just moves perfectly. When it’s bad, it’s damn near awful as I’d heard. I’m sure some of the lip-sync isn’t right: I’d put it down to the cinema’s projection system (yes I saw a movie in a cinema! lol), but mostly it stayed perfectly in time, only to then look like a dubbed foreign language movie in incredibly annoying flashes. And there’s so much that could be cut. There are places, for example where a character speaks some exposition, only to then sing the exact same thing. It reminds me of my old R.S. teacher. This extraneous material makes me even more annoyed at those mystical things I feel are missing.

But it’s done now: we have a Phantom movie, and my guess is it couldn’t be a lot better as far as fans of the show are concerned. I love that the big musicals are being turned into movies these days, and usually I don’t mind if they aren’t that good. They’re another way to experience something that’s often difficult to do unless you either live in a big city like NYC or London, or you just get lucky with a touring production. Like I said, this isn’t one of my favourite shows in any form, so considering that, it’s pretty fab. I was astonished by Emmy Rossum’s performance, I’ll be updating my Oscar predictions to maybe turn the Best Picture nod I was looking at for this movie into a Best Actress nod instead. I’d forgotten Jennifer Ellison was in the movie too. I love her, so I’ll end this review with her and Emmy: I’d choose the one on the right please

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2004 at 5:24 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.