I, too, saw The Phantom of the Opera today, Dear Readers, and must report that I liked it less than I expected I would.
It was several of the technical aspects of the movie that got in the way of my enjoyment of the film:
Sound design--Everyone sounds exactly the same (which is fairly reverberent, especially the Phantom), whether they are speaking or singing in the opera house auditorium, in a small room, in what one might expect to be the echo-filled caverns beneath the opera house or on the grounds of a snow covered cemetery.
Set design and set decoration--A case of belief in the notion that more is more. I never lost sight of the fact that these were built sets on a sound stage. Never once did I think I was seeing a real opera house. And such clutter! At several points I had trouble finding the characters in the shot amongst all the tchotchkes.
Cinematography--This film, like many today, suffers from hyperactive camera, in which stationary shots are anathema. Never is a scene shot directly when the camera can pass through three levels of the flies of the opera house (shades of Orson Welles) and then zoom across a catwalk before arriving at the characters in the shot. The cumulative effect of all the circular shots, spiral shots and tracking shots in the film is a slight case of mal de mer.
Acting--This is subjective, of course, as is all of the above, but I didn't find any of the three leads very persuasive in their roles. Miss Miranda Richardson was quite good, however, and I'm not sure it was acting, but it sure was fun watching Miss Minnie Driver chew up the scenery. I found the singing all around passable. Not bad, but not great, either.
One shameful bit that I don't know how to categorize--Jean Cocteau created an iconic cinematic image in Beauty and the Beast when he ordered up a hall lit by two rows of sconces held by human hands extending from the walls. For Director Joel Schumacher to steal that image and then execute it rather poorly is, to state it plainly, pitiable.
There were things I did like. The flashbacks from 1919 (in black and white) to the time of the story proper (in color) worked quite well. The chandelier descent is rather spectacular. The (brief)interpolation of the Phantom's backstory (for lack of a better term) provides some cohesiveness to the plot.
A question: given the degree to which Mr. Lloyd Weber and his librettists contributed to the content of POTO, is it not a tad pretentious for Mr. Joel Schumacher to use the "A Film By" credit? Wouldn't "Directed By" have sufficed?
