Review of "The Phantom of the Opera"

"You, you are the worst thing to happen to musical theatre since Andrew Lloyd Webber! And you, well I just plain don't like you!"

But seriously, I enjoyed this adaptation a lot. Having said that I have some gripes. There is one part during the song "Music of the Night" that the Phantom hits a very, very high note. I wanted to say, "Testicle-check! They still there?" This may be one of the reasons why critics have said the the male roles were played by how Arnold Schwartzenegger would put it best, "girlie men." I didn't really notice except for the fact that Raoul sometimes had hair neater than Christine's.

Also, the phrase "Angel of Music" came up many times that one could invent a drinking game to that phrase. Also Christine is very dumb. We've got a classic Batman mask problem with the fact that Christine and the rest of the show can barely recognize the Phantom in a different mask. On his mask, the disfiguration of his face seemed to grow or shrink depending on the mask he chose to wear.

Now I know this was a musical, but did they have to sing every little bit of dialogue for no reason? It became distracting and hard to follow.

Beyond those, this was a fantastic movie even considering it came from Joel Schumacher who brought us classics such as "Batman and Robin."

My rating: 8 out of 10
DVD-worthy: Yeah, I'd probably buy it