Failure Bread

So something almost funny happened to me today.  I was sitting in the bathroom, minding my own business.  All of a sudden, I heard a God-awful noise.  It was nigh indescribable, but imagine if you crossed the sound of a turkey being strangled with the sound of Luciano Pavarotti singing Tiny Tim’s greatest hits while he has laryngitis.  It was kind of like that.

That’s right.  My housemate was watching The Phantom Of The Opera.  And because he’s like that, he was watching it LOUDLY.

There was no escape; all my long-since-repressed memories came flooding forth with staggering force, and I suddenly knew what I was going to write about today.

I remember seeing the first preview for this junk-heap of a movie; I distinctly remember thinking, “Huh, so they finally went and did it, well, I guess it could be okay if you’re into that sort of OH MY GOD, THEY PUT SCHUMACHER IN CHARGE?!”

As if a movie version of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s tribute to finally getting himself laid wasn’t going to be handicapped enough by it’s subpar source material, someone decided to cripple it completely by hiring Joel “Still-Coasting-Off-Of-My-Lost-Boys-Success” Schumacher to direct.  Nipples on the Batsuit aside, this was the guy who ran a perfectly good franchise into the ground by missing the days of Adam West just a little too much.  Tim Burton’s first two Batman movies were awesome, with just enough camp to keep them true to their comic book roots without being ridiculous.  By the time Schumacher got done with his two Batman movies, any self-respecting movie-goer would have rather sat through a six hour documentary about ringworm than watch them.

I wouldn’t trust Joel Schumacher to water my houseplants, but someone decided, “Meh.  Let’s give him another shot.  How bad could it be?”

That’s exactly what my sister and I said to each other before we rented Phantom: how bad could it be?

How bad indeed!

For starters, the girl playing Christine (one of the most useless female characters in the history of the written word, trumped only by Bella Swann) has only two facial expressions:

• awestruck
• awestruck with a tear in her eye

Now granted, her voice definitely beats Sarah Brightman’s banshee shriek and she is quite pretty, which is important if you’re playing a character whose only attributes are being a good singer and being beautiful, but she’s the most boring actress I’ve ever seen.  Bitch, raise your eyebrows!  Emote!  Do something to prove to the audience that you are not, in fact, a mannequin.

But even her wooden performance beats Gerard Butler’s.  This was the first movie I’d ever seen him in and it left such a bad taste in my mouth, I almost skipped 300.  When I saw him in other movies, I was blown away.  How can he be so good in these movies, I thought, when he was absolutely abysmal in Phantom?  The obvious answer is: poor direction.  And given the director, I’m willing to pin a lot of Butler’s shortcomings on that excuse.  But even that can’t hide the fact that Gerard?  Yeah, not the world’s best singer.

Now, I know that The Phantom Of The Opera is the most overrated musical of all time and that I shouldn’t take it too seriously, but for the love of God, shouldn’t the dude in the title role be able to oh, I don’t know, SING ON KEY?!  I wanted to reach through the screen and beat him to death with a pitch pipe.  Tune up or shut up!

Not to mention that Raoul looks and acts exactly like a Ken doll, everyone’s wig looks like an escapee from a taxidermy shop, and Meg walks out of a thigh-deep underground river with perfectly dry pants.  Nice.

The whole movie is laughable.  It wants to be dramatic and intense, but there wasn’t a single person involved with the whole film that did their job well enough to support it’s whiny pathos, and thus it became melodrama.  It is a suck sandwich on failure bread.  If I didn’t know ahead of time that it wasn’t a parody, I would have written Joel Schumaker a letter of congratulations.

In short, save your money.  If you really need to see a good Broadway-gone-Hollywood flick, go for Cabaret or Chicago or even Hairspray.  Better yet, just screw the songbirds and rent 300 instead.  More underwear models, less crying, and who can’t get behind that?