This is definitely an unusual post for me, but on this rainy evening I decided to dig deep and rewatch possibly my favorite live production of all time: The Phantom of the Opera’s 25th Anniversary Performance. For some reason I have a really vivid memory of watching it when it aired live on PBS and my eight year old self thought it was the greatest thing ever. I haven’t watched it for many years and just now realized how weird and (forgive me for using this word) cringe-worthy the story is. I don’t know if this is correct but I got the feeling that Christine is like 15 and the Phantom is around 40. And I don’t know if it was just this performance or if all of them are like this but parts of it seemed quite sexual which is really weird.
I’m not actually sure if this qualifies as a real movie, but I have it on DVD so that must count for something. Also, the production itself was MASSIVE. A normal phantom show has a cast of about 40, but this one had 140. Also, they retrofitted a concert hall to suit a theatre production which is an amazing feat for a show that ran for just two nights. I also appreciated the careful camerawork. Not to say I wouldn’t have given a lot to be at this performance live, but I do feel you tend to miss a lot when you’re sitting from a far and only seeing one angle. Especially because I believe a lot of this particular performance relies heavily on subtleties that you just wouldn’t pick up unless you’re in the front row. Anyway, believe me when I say I’m generally not a fan of musicals. But I do know and appreciate a high quality live production when I see one. As someone whose not a big fan of musicals, I’ve seen a lot of them over the years including multiple productions of this very play. So take my word when I say no other production that I’ve seen even comes CLOSE to this. I actually saw it on Broadway and it was fantastic but I left semi disappointed because, well, it just wasn’t nearly as good as this production. I was curious so I watched some video of the original cast from the 80s and this might offend some musical theatre aficionados, but I thought they weren’t nearly as good. Crawford’s voice wasn’t strong enough and Brightman’s voice kinda just annoyed me, and the two of them together seemed like an awkward match. But these singers specifically are, to put it shortly, incredible, not to mention their effortless chemistry. I shouldn’t be surprised by this because this is the 25th anniversary and they handpicked the best Phantom and Christine for this performance. If you’re someone who’s into musical theatre at all, this performance is a must watch. It’s honestly unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
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I watched this movie over a month ago, but I hated it so much that I had to write about it. The movie sets you up for disappointment right from the beginning. They show a montage of all these insane coincidences so I was like cool, this movie is gonna end in an awesome coincidence that ties all these strangers together. But, that never happened. It just shows these random characters who have no meaningful connection other than the fact that all their lives suck. For THREE HOURS. It just keeps going on and on and on, jumping between these different characters, but doesn’t show quite enough of any of them for me to really care about their background or story. All I know is that none of them were likable they were all actually really annoying to be honest. Actually I outright hated all of them. The most interesting character would have to be Tom Cruises character. Mostly because he was a psycho. So basically it was Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise. Now we’re just getting to the point that annoys me the most. Picture this: you sit through two and a half hours of extremely boring and senseless material, and then frogs start raining from the sky. No explanation is given. And then the movie ends.
This movie shouldn’t exist. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. P.S. The Master sucks too. I think watching Memento and this movie back to back might have been a mistake. They’re both very unsettling and existential in their own way. It’s been more than a few years since I’ve seen this movie and I forgot how messed up it was. I also forgot how it’s really not very good. Its another simple case of interesting concept, bad execution. I mean, it’s not horrible by any means, but it could have been way better. Apparently Rotten Tomatoes hated it (33%), but what do they know. I guess they didn’t like the huge gaping plot hole at a crucial point in the film that actually contradicts chaos theory aka the butterfly effect aka the film’s title. But to enjoy this movie, you kind of have to just turn your brain off and accept it’s mistakes, even though the film tries so hard to get you to take it seriously. This film also suffers from bad acting and just overall looks very low budget. It also might be the most 2004 movie I’ve ever seen which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not just the clothes or hairstyles or slang… it’s more like an ambiance, if you know what I mean. I really like movies that are true to their time period. They’re like a little time capsule for people who weren’t around or don’t remember the era.
Anyway, I personally find this movie very entertaining. I even referenced it heavily in my AP Lang exam in some essay about Rosa Parks. I regretted it afterwards but apparently the reader liked it because by some miracle I got a 5, so thanks Butterfly Effect! Wow, this is the first movie I’ve watched in over a month, aside from a Harry Potter here and there. Oh, and a spontaneous Spy Kids binge one day. I’ve been away on a herculean task to watch The Sopranos, since my dad keeps saying it’s so great and I neeeed to watch it. It’s alright. I also recently got distracted with Ozark season 4. But I’ve returned to movies and decided to start with this… gem?
I feel like I’m one of the few people I know who can confidently say that I don’t like Chris Nolan movies. The cold and calculated nature of the films are very, very boring to me. Sure, the concept of time is fun to think about and play with but it surely does not always make for the best movie. His dialogue is unnatural and seems only to be present to dum down what is happening for the audience who is clearly too stupid to understand Nolan’s brilliant ideas. Does anyone ever talk about the acting in these movies? the substance? the cultural impact? The answer is no. It’s all spectacle. His movies are basically like Marvel movies minus the beloved superheroes. You may be asking yourself, did I watch this film and write this post just to have an excuse to bash Chris Nolan? Well, yes, obviously. Now that that rant is over with, I was surprised to find that I quite liked this film. It was much more… endearing, in a sense—as many directors early films are. I actually felt somewhat of a connection to the main character and his motives which I consider to be a miracle with this director. The ambiance was a little bit ruined because I kept associating that guys face with the nerdy terrorist from the dreadful mistake that is Iron Man 3, even though he was actually great in this film. I liked this movie but I didn’t love it. Maybe that’s because I generally don’t like the big plot twist in the last five minutes kinda thing. But this also seems like a film that would get better with each watch, so maybe I’ll prove myself wrong sometime in the future. This is another movie that was on my list for a long time. People say it’s very artsy and one of those must watch films. I finally knocked it out late on New Year’s Eve. Right after I watched this I watched She’s All That because I saw it on HBO Max and was like ‘I have to watch this now’. It was a fun surprise to see that the two stars were the guys from the Scooby-Doo movies I used to watch all the time as a kid (and sometimes still do). Nevertheless, it was an interesting double feature to close out the year.
This movie felt like a mix of a realllllly long anti drug PSA and an edgy college film student project. After watching this movie I just felt…. icky. Going into it, I knew it was going to be disturbing given the director, but nothing could have prepared me for the last 20 minutes when it descended into pure disgusting chaos. Im not going to go into detail but it’s the type of thing that will make anyone swear to abstinence for a lifetime. I think this is an important movie that shows the reality of usage of hard drugs. It kind of makes me mad when shows like Breaking Bad and especially the new show Euphoria (which I’m sure a lot of younger teens who shouldn’t be watching it but are) show usage of hard drugs. Yes, these shows make a point to show withdraws and the other consequences of meth/opioids/etc use, but fail to show that in reality, hard drug use often leads to life ruining results. But this movie portrays this in a very real and unnerving way. But I think what this movie is applauded most for is it’s revolutionary (for year 2000, mind you) use of editing. If their goal was to emulate the feeling of a bad high within the viewer, they surely achieved it. (Disclaimer: I don’t know what it feels like to be high, but I would imagine what I experienced watching this film would be comparable to a bad high, from what I’ve heard). I really felt like I was going paranoid along with the lady on the diet pills (basically meth in disguise). This is a movie that will stick with me for a long time, and I think that was it’s main goal. So last night I was watching The Office and there was an episode where they get CPR training and learned to do it to the beat of “Staying Alive”. That reminded me that this movie has been on my watchlist for quite sometime. I feel like I’ve heard about it a lot over the years (probably because my mom is a Bee Gees fan) but had absolutely no idea what to expect. Ive always been under the impression it was going to be another one of those family friendly musicals like Grease but I could not have been more wrong. Outside of the awesome disco scenes, the film was pretty basic, not to mention unnecessarily crude. The dancing is what saves this movie from being forgettable. I must say I’ve seen few people dance with as much confidence as Travolta does in this movie. And as for his acting, well, let’s just say maybe he should have pursued a career in dance. Anyway, this movie is full of that ‘70s charm that I love so dearly. The colors, culture, fashion, and grainy look of the film are all part of what make the ‘70s possibly my favorite decade as far as films go. They tended to test the limits as far as what was shown on screen and the way it was shown. The cinematography in this film was excellent. It really brought the dance scenes to life and was very bland outside of the disco club to show the characters boredom with his average life.
I would only recommend this movie to someone seeking some ‘70s nostalgia. And I would warn them of the 2 hours of very off-color material they are about to witness. Racial and homophobic slurs are thrown around. A graphic sexual assault is played off like nothing. Not to mention the never ending derogatory words and actions toward women. Though I realize this was the reality of the ‘70s, it’s still shocking to watch on film in this day and age. This is a dark coming of age story disguised as a fun disco movie. Though some scenes were difficult to watch, I enjoyed it overall (especially the soundtrack) and it was no doubt an important part of pop culture and film history. This is the only movie I’ve ever some across that it not available to stream anywhere. I literally had to buy the $10 DVD on Amazon. I only watched this movie because I found the idea of a Scorsese-directed “musical” intriguing. I put musical in quotation marks because upon watching, it wasn’t really a musical at all as advertised. There was like a 10 minute old timey musical sequence near the end of the almost three hour film and that’s it. I thought the story behind the making of this film was interesting. After the relatively good reception of Taxi Driver in ‘76, Scorsese decided to go the complete opposite direction in ‘77. And apparently he got so depressed after it failed at the box office that he almost lethally overdosed on cocaine and was inspired to make Raging Bull as his last attempt at American cinema. It definately seems as though there was a lot of cocaine involved in the making of this film. My biggest issue is that the scenes together do not form a whole. Each scene seems so disconnected from the last, and there is no sense of time passing whatsoever (sometimes that’s a good thing, but it didn’t work in the film). I genuinely don’t know if this movie took place over a week or a year. You have to make big logical jumps between how and why we got from the last scene to the current scene, which makes it hard to watch. It’s no surprise to me this movie as a commercial disaster. And the pacing is all over the place. Some scenes are action packed and some scenes are just closeups Liza Minnelli or De Niro staring into space for 30 seconds or more. Another issue in this film is that the main characters were so…. uninteresting. There’s nothing special, memorable, or likable about them. My biggest takeaways from this film were “ohhhh, so that’s where that Frank Sinatra song comes from” and that the story runs almost exactly parallel to La La Land. After realizing just how many older movies La La Land copied off of, you start to wonder if it was original at all. At its core, this film is a story about two artists who meet, struggle to achieve their dreams due to their relationship, ultimately choose to follow their dream, finally see each other again after a few years, and then go their separate ways again. La La Land really should have included the writers of this film in the credits. Same with King of Comedy in Joker. Is it just a trend to reinvent old box office bombs that become huge successes? I hope so. I’m not going to even start my rant about how very little (mainstream) films I see today have any originality but… it makes me angry. I like when movies take inspiration from older films—all directors do to some extent— but recently it just seems like some movies are straight up stealing entire plots. I can say with certainty that I won’t be using this in my auteur theory project because… it’s not present in this film. I would have absolutely no idea that this was a Scorsese movie. The camera movement and editing is very plain and the characters are barely explored. I don’t really know what the point of this film was. I thought it was entertaining enough, but I see where a lot of the dislike comes from.
Well, it’s officially Christmas season so it’s time to rewatch my favorite Christmas movie. I went back and forth debating if I should even write this review since this movie has somewhat of a stigma surrounding it. But considering this is one of Kubrick’s greatest masterpieces and probably my favorite film in terms of visuals, I think it’s important to discuss. I think we all know Kubrick is a creep and that is apparent in many of his films, but once you get around that, they’re simply magnificent. A Clockwork Orange and The Shining are some of my favorite films and I’m really looking forward to watching 2001 for the first time hopefully sometime over Christmas break. The main message in this film is what insecurity within a relationship can do in the most extreme circumstances. But there’s another much more interesting theme that lingers throughout the film is money/status as a means of power and control. It’s most prominently displayed with the whole cult storyline that the main character gets involved with, but I think it’s most powerful usage that likely goes unnoticed by many is that literally every time the main character wants something, he gets it by bribing with money or using his status as a doctor. There’s also a subtle but constant looming threat of death and dread throughout the film. I watched a YouTube video that talked about how Kubrick associates death with the color green. There’s a lot of green in this film. It also touches on consumerism culture. If you think about it, everything and everyone is up for sale in this movie. And the fact that it takes place during Christmas time, with Christmas trees and lights in almost every scene, only makes it more gross and creepy. Also, there’s a scene where Alice is helping their daughter with a math problem and it’s basically about figuring out which boy has more money. This is a not so subtle hint that she’s grooming the kid to be a trophy wife just like her. Now, I’m not a huge fan of the story. He finally goes “where the rainbow ends” after trying and failing like three different times and then predictably regrets it. What I really love about this film is it’s production design. The multi color Christmas lights as practical lighting in nearly every scene are *chef’s kiss*. I love movies that feel like a dream, and this movie feels even dreamier than a dream. First of all, it’s like a weird but awesome mix of New York and London in the middle of the night. Fun fact: this is only because the movie is set in New York but Kubrick lived in London and was afraid to fly, so all exterior shots were filmed in London or were sets. For some of the walking scenes they had Tom Cruise walk on a treadmill in front of a screen of New York City streets. Another small thing that makes the movie feel like a dream is that it’s the middle of the night and the streets are almost completely empty, yet all the restaurants he walks into are packed. I know New York is the city that never sleeps, but it’s still very unrealistic even for midtown Manhattan. It’s not logical at all but completely works for this film and adds to the eeriness. Speaking of eeriness, the creepy piano music that plays throughout the film is spot on. That’s all I have to say about that.
This is yet another film that’s been on my watch list for quite a while that I finally decided to watch so I could use it for my midterm. It’s no doubt a low budget film, but the directing and cinematography pull it up to another level. This film is very much an artifact of its time… it is by no regard special or especially captivating by today’s standards. But if you’re into to character studies and 1970s New York like me, you’re going to find it enjoyable. Throughout the film I was surprised by the use of many film techniques that seem to be modern inventions, such as the use of the Snorricam, a pop music soundtrack, and harsh colored lighting. The story is very average… it wasn’t too boring but it wasn’t anything special. The movie seemed kinda like a ‘day in the life’ of low level criminals. I really, really enjoyed the soundtrack. It was a mix of 60s pop music and Italian opera music. Apparently this film normalized the use of pop music in cinema, so that’s pretty cool I guess. I would say half of the movie takes place in this club that’s lit by completely red lights, and as someone who’s favorite color is red, made the film very aesthetically pleasing. I’ve heard people say the acting in this film is one of its highlights. Maybe I’m overly skeptical but this acting wasn’t anything special. It didn’t bother me too much though because I wasn’t taking this film too seriously. I don’t think it takes itself too seriously either. That ‘fight’ scene towards the end was hilarious. Clearly nobody taught these guys how to throw a fake punch. And the dialogue is also just a bunch of ad libbed cuss words. Also there’s a ton of religious imagery and themes in this film, but I don’t feel like getting into that again as I discussed those themes in both my Raging Bull and Goodfellas posts. Anyways, these early Scorsese movies have a certain charm to them. I don’t know if I’ll ever be rewatching Mean Streets, but I’m glad I did.
This was the worst movie I’ve seen in a while. I’ve avoided watching it because I knew I was going to hate it but I finally did because I wanted to add some more variety to my midterm project. This is a completely pointless three hour movie. I watched it over three days because I could only bear one hour a day. The absolute worst part about this movie was the visuals. They’re not only uninteresting, they’re hideous. I mean, it’s the mid 90s trying to recreate the mid 70s so I didn’t have high expectations, but it just seems as though this movie was intentionally ugly. As someone who hates casinos, they were the prettiest of the scenes in the film. Every scene outside of the casino looked so desaturated and bland yet were also filled with the ugliest color combinations imaginable.
I’m not even sure if this movie had a real plot. There just seemed to be a new sub plot every 15 minutes that they tried to stitch together with a voiceover. As someone who appreciates voiceovers, I was getting really annoyed with the use of it in this film. Voiceover had to be at least 30% of the total dialogue— way too much. And it did nothing for me at least in terms of keeping up with the plot. It was pretty simple the first half of the film and went completely off the rails the second half. The only plot that continued throughout the story was the main characters relationship with his wife (I literally finished this movie 5 minutes ago and don’t remember their names… so I think that says something in itself). But I found her character to be intolerable. She makes unfathomable decisions throughout the film that make you actively root against her. And that raises the question of who are you rooting for in this film? For me, it was no one. I made no connection to any character and no characters presented any likable traits at all. This felt like a Scorsese movie but it also felt like a low budget amateur film. This movie was heavier on the graphic violence than the average Scorsese flick. It also had a pretty good soundtrack… probably the only thing that kept me from falling asleep. Too bad the visuals and story couldn’t keep up. And of course it had mob stuff. Boring. But an obvious difference in this film was the setting. I hate Vegas. I’ve been to Vegas a couple times and I’ll be happy if I never go there again even after I’m 21. It’s just gross and depressing, no matter how fancy of a hotel casino you’re in. And it’s pretty fake, kinda how this movie felt fake. Anyway, I’ve heard this movie is somewhat of a classic so now I’ve seen another classic I guess. |
May Featured Movie QuoteBarry B. Benson: Yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black... Oh, black and yellow. Yeah, let's shake it up a little.
Yeah, I have letterboxd now
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