Last Tuesday night Jess and I went to see the Phantom of the Opera at the Pantages theater in Hollywood. My parents also went, along with my brother and his roommate Chad, and Jess' friend from work, Erica. We also found out that the Master's College had happened to buy a number of tickets for students to attend that same night. Weird.
If you know me well, you know I don't generally like what is stereotypically considered a "musical." All kinds of exaggerated choreography; insincere, half-witty dialogue; and vibratos so big you could drive a truck through them. Some musicals however, can cut through my cynicism, and Phantom of the Opera is one of them. The themes of Phantom are so dark and tragic, and the characters are rife with conflict, both internal and external. The musical themes are simple and memorable, and pop up with what seems like annoying frequency, but the end result is that they are seared in your memory for all time.
The other cool thing we saw was the stop-animation movie "Coraline" in 3-D. It's billed as a kid's movie, but there are some really dark plot elements. Overall, it's just a visually stunning movie, and the 3-D technology has really come a long way. Apparently though, the story of Coraline (the book that inspired the movie), is a hybrid rip-off of two stories: Grimbold's Other World, and The Button Boy (from some sort of gothic-horror story anthology).
In the movie, they refer to the villain as the "beldam" which is an old word meaning specifically an old or ugly woman, and can generally refer to a witch. As we were driving home, I asked Jess what it was they were calling her, and she proceeded to explain the literary examples of beldams, such as in Shakespeare and what not. After she finished, she said (half to herself) "I know a lot about literature." Apparently she just realized that she cross references everything she encounters in life back to literature. Funny.
Here's the trailer for Coraline
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