This saturday was The Murphy Family 17th Anniversary, so we celebrated in style at Bristols. We had planned to go see a movie afterwards, but there wasn’t much out we both wanted to see. Yes, I’d like to see Kingdom of Heaven, but my wife doesn’t go for sword epics. I’d like to see Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but my wife doesn’t go for screwball British comedies set in outer space. She had already seen The Interpreter with my daughter, so I nixed that one. So we settled on Fever Pitch, despite my reservations that Jimmy Fallon could ever be in a movie that was worth seeing.
But after such a fine meal, we decided to skip spending 17 bucks to see a movie we weren’t really interested in and rent one we did want to see instead. So we picked out Phantom of the Opera as we both enjoy musicals. I have to say that it makes a better musical than a movie (as soon as I saw Minnie Driver, I knew it wasn’t going to be as good as I hoped), but I still enjoyed it. The thing about musicals is that they rely on great music and singing, and the characters and plot are just incidental. With a movie version, the characters and plot can be explored in greater depth, but so what? A movie version of Chicago makes sense because it’s really a dansical, and so while again the plot and characterization is incidental at best, you can see the dance moves so much better at the movies than on the stage. And Moulin Rouge, which either you loved or hated (I’m in the love camp), was a creature all it’s own.
