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ellenkushnerThat was my year - the year I went from post-teenage weirdo with no feeling for mainstream culture, to MTV addict who suddenly wore black a lot and walked down the New York streets in a leather jacket with attitude - and I've never looked back.
Does this mean I should go see "The Phantom of the Opera" movie?
I think it does.
Every critic has panned it. My friend Anne says she hopes this will not discourage Hollywood from making many more like it, since the reviews have all been such masterpieces of clever vitriol that reading them makes it all worthwhile.
My friend Mike even sent me the link to the Onion's coverage of "Post-Melodramatic Stress Syndrome"
http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4051&n=1
(but I am the one who wrote the Melodrama of Manners (ca. 1985) - so how should I be deterred?)
And in his (very amusing) New Yorker review (“If you ever longed to know what it feels like to be asphyxiated by brocade, here is your chance”) Anthony Lane wrote: "It reminds us that ’The Phantom of the Opera’ is a period piece, and that the period in question is not 1870 but 1986, when Lloyd Webber first presented his production to the world. We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.”
I rest my case.
(And I didn’t even like Duran Duran that much – but they’ve become part of my nostalgia for the glory days that a new pop song so movingly evokes: “Way before Nirvana/There was U2 and Blondie/And music still on MTV….” . . .
But that’s another post.)
Does this mean I should go see "The Phantom of the Opera" movie?
I think it does.
Every critic has panned it. My friend Anne says she hopes this will not discourage Hollywood from making many more like it, since the reviews have all been such masterpieces of clever vitriol that reading them makes it all worthwhile.
My friend Mike even sent me the link to the Onion's coverage of "Post-Melodramatic Stress Syndrome"
http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4051&n=1
(but I am the one who wrote the Melodrama of Manners (ca. 1985) - so how should I be deterred?)
And in his (very amusing) New Yorker review (“If you ever longed to know what it feels like to be asphyxiated by brocade, here is your chance”) Anthony Lane wrote: "It reminds us that ’The Phantom of the Opera’ is a period piece, and that the period in question is not 1870 but 1986, when Lloyd Webber first presented his production to the world. We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.”
I rest my case.
(And I didn’t even like Duran Duran that much – but they’ve become part of my nostalgia for the glory days that a new pop song so movingly evokes: “Way before Nirvana/There was U2 and Blondie/And music still on MTV….” . . .
But that’s another post.)