Norman, Coordinate!

I get that the folks at Madison Opera in their production of Rusalka were trying to imply that the heroine was dangerous from the get-go by showing her during the prelude as a jilted woman drowning herself, but all that seems to do is make a plot-hole.  Why does she suddenly want to become human again?  She is described the Water Gnome's daughter.  There was nothing in the libretto that suggested that she was originally a suicide.  Can someone please give an explanation?  

Also, why does Ježibaba take the shoes?  I get that the knife is mentioned later, but does she just take the shoes as trophies?  It makes no sense. 

THE LEGO MOVIE 2 Outshines The First One

Oh man, where to begin with this movie!  this film was just superb.  This review does contain spoilers, so watch out.  

When I heard that the film featured characters inspired by the mini-figures from the girly LEGO Friends and "Elves" toylines, I was so sure that they were going to blow it and go down one of those lame, overdone, phony-baloney  "Ideal Beauty vs. Regular People" plot lines.  But they didn't and for that I am thankful. 

At the end of the first film, creatures from Duplo appear and with them some girly UFOs.  Emmet offers the heart of friendship and the Duplo creature eats it, sparking a conflict that lasts five years destroying Bricksburg and creating a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Emmet is still as upbeat and perky as always, but is troubled by visions of a cataclysm called "Armomageddon". 
       In the real world Finn's younger sister Bianca has been taking some of his toys out of the basement into her own room (hence the post apocalyptic setting).  In the LEGO world a general from the Systar System comes in and kidnaps Emmet's friends Lucy, Batman, and Unikitty and also takes the pirate Metalbeard and a spaceman named Benny.  Once inside the Systar System, the five are greeted by the shape-shifting Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi who's a subtle as a brick and no one can tell if she is evil or not.  She wants to marry Batman.
     Emmet builds a ship and goes to rescue his friends but gets stuck in an asteroid field on the other side of a dimensional gate.  He is nearly smashed when he is saved by the tough-as-nails Rex Dangervest.  He agrees to help Emmet get to the Systar System.  And time is running out our heroes as Armamageddon is getting closer.  

The only downside this film has is that it was pretty predictable where the plot was going; something happens that triggers Armamageddon and the inhabitants of Duplo and the rest of the Systarians were never were evil at all, they were just very bad at communication (kids usually are).  Armamageddon is---of course---the mother punishing her squabbling children by confiscating their toys. And of course we can all see the two kids finally putting their differences aside and coming together.  

But the sheer predictability of the plot was outweighed by the good stuff in the film.  The first movie touched on the idea of Following the Instructions vs. Building Whatever You Want.  While it was a good film, the love triangle and the overdone message weighed the movie down.  Here, the story was about siblings learning how to play with each other.  And it pulled it off magnificently.  Finn is a young teenager in this film and his sister Bianca looks like she is in the second grade.  Finn wants to go for more dark and gritty "mature" stuff, Bianca likes pretty stuff.  this is represented by Apocolypseburg and the Systar System respectively.  
       The inhabitants of Apocolysburg are your stereotypical hardened gruff guys with the gruff taken up to eleven, with even the animals acting like over-the-top tough guys from a Bruce Willis movie.  The Systarians are very girly, even the men, much like characters from chick flicks (one guy is a parody of a Twilight vampire with glittery hair and a love of wearing women's jeans).  The Systerians may seem tough and unfriendly at first, but it is later revealed that they didn't fully understand the Apocolyseburgians' tough and brooding attitudes.  Just before the climax, they are finally able to understand each other. 
   
The other big theme is the difference between growing up and growing hardened.  And this is explored through the character of Rex Dangervest.  This guy appears to be an expy of Owen Grady from Jurassic World with a little bit of Dash Rendar from the Star Wars Expanded Universe for good measure.  He encourages Emmet to "toughen up" but an unfortunate side effect is that he becomes a big jerk in the process.  I was taken aback, though, when it was revealed that not only was he the villain, but he is also an evil version of Emmet from the future (and thus has disrupted the time-space continuum something awful*).  He was abandoned under a washing machine and wants to trigger Armamageddon on purpose just to get revenge.  And the climax occurs when Emmet destroys the temple cake (Finn in real life punching down Bianca's LEGO creation).  But Emmet comes to his senses and defeats his wicked alter ego.  
        
The shape-shifting Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi is the most curious character I have ever seen in a film.  She is delightfully unsubtle, with her hammy little song about how she is So-Not-An-Evil-Queen.  The crazy part is that she is absolutely right!  It's just that she really sucks at communication.  Despite the writers throwing in some ambiguity (her evil laughter devolving into real laughter when her talking banana friend keeps tripping on his own peel), her interactions with Batman made it pretty clear that there was some real affection there.  What surprised me, though was that she turns out the VERY SAME HEART THAT EMMET GAVE THE DUPLO ALIENS!  Okay, I knew that she was secretly good all along, but being the very heart that Emmet made in the first place?  That caused my brain to explode. 

The other characters were fun too.  Lucy a.k.a. Wildstyle has the biggest journey, learning the hard way that you may think you'd wish for someone to be tougher, but it may not be what you truly want, or even what is best.  Lucy tries to resist the glittery cheer of Systar, and in particular the demands of the mini-doll Sweet Mayhem.  Mayhem herself is forty seven flavors of delightful in this movie, acting as the right-hand gal of Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi.  Lucy and Mayhem fight before the climax, and it's afterwards that the truth comes out.  And seeing Lucy finally able to show more of her softer side was pure gold. It was also lovely seeing Mayhem bond with Benny the Spaceman (she is a spacegal after all).  Mayhem also has a little spaceship that bears a mild resemblance to the one from 3, 2, 1, Penguins!. 
      Unikitty had less of a role in this film than she did in the first movie.  But that doesn't stop her form owning every scene she's in.  Batman gets to soften up a lot in this movie; seeing the gruff, brooding Gotham superhero enjoying a back massage or even willingly proposing to Watevra was so awesome.  You have the usual array of cameos (Gandalf, Justice League, historical figures, etc.), and it doesn't feel out of place.

Definitely a 10/10 score on this film!  The plot is mildly predictable, but that ends up being insignificant.  It teaches an invaluable lesson about understanding and communicating, and that being tough and being mature are not the same thing.  The characters were likeable, bringing back characters from the previous film along with introducing some brand new ones.  

Highly recommended. 
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*Stolen from the Nodwick adventure It's a Wonderful Afterlife! by Aaron Williams.

Shattered Brain

 

  

My mind has been officially blown. 

In Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) Marie is an orphan girl who was raised from infancy by a French army regiment.  She is what is known as a vivandière, a woman who is attached to the regiment doing such things as taking care of the mess.  Having been raised by soldiers, Marie is pretty rough around the edges.  She falls in love with the Tyrolian peasant Tonio, who joins the regiment in hopes of being with her.  But the Marquise de Berkenfield, claiming to be the girl's long-lost aunt, takes Maire away.  Of course everything is resolved with a comical plot twist worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan.  

 Why do I have two different sopranos pictured here?  Well, because Pretty Yende, the lady sang Marie in today's performance, is really giving Natalie Dessay a run for her money.  I don't know why, but Yende's Marie came off a bit more on the sassy side than Dessay did, though I can't quite put my finger on why.  Now there really is no comparing these two formidable women.  But I'm just going to say that Yende is probably the only woman who match Dessay in the role of Marie. 

REBECCA: A Surreal Story Of High Society And Dark Secrets

Someone gave me a copy of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic novel Rebecca many years ago, but I only just got around to reading it last week.  I finished it yesterday and boy, is it ever an intense read!  

The heroine is an unnamed woman in her early twenties who is working as a lady's companion for an overbearing woman when she meets the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter.  They marry after knowing each other only two weeks, but their marriage gets off to a very rough start to say the least.  Even before they get started, the second Mrs. de Winter finds herself in the shadow of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who was reported to have died the previous year in a boating accident.  Making things worse is the fact that the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, has turned the whole of Manderley into a shrine to Rebecca.  The young bride becomes determined to find out who her late predecessor was and what  secrets were kept from the public. The tension comes to a head at the annual ball and on the beach.

Rebecca can be described as a ghost story without the paranormal.  There may not be anything supernatural going on, but the lingering presence of the dead Rebecca qualifies Manderley as a haunted house.  This adds a level of surrealism to the story, with memories of Rebecca popping out of every nook and cranny.  The morning room and her bedroom have been kept the way she left them.  Mrs. Danvers not shuts up about Rebecca.  People make comments to the bride about how she is not like Rebecca, leading the shy and naive woman to think that she is being judged and can never live up to their expectations.  The very memory of Rebecca interferes with the bride's relationship with Maxim, causing the new Mrs. de Winter thinks her husband does not love her at all.  

I don't really have a quibble with the book, but it's not for the faint of heart.  The climactic scenes at the ball and the beach and are very shocking to say the least, and the suspense can be too much at times, especially if you're a sensitive type.  But I would still say give it a read.  In fact, I would highly recommend Rebecca to anyone who loves romance and suspense. 



   
      
 

THE MEG Can't Tell A Story Worth Beans

This film cannot make up its mind what it wants to be.  Is it a black comedy, is it a thriller, is it a horror movie, what in blazes is it? 

The plot is as follows: Scientists working at a remote research facility off the coast of China discover an unknown region below a gas cloud at a depth below that of the Mariana Trench, and soon get attacked by a mysterious creature Miocene and Pliocene Epochs.  Disgraced diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) comes out of hiding and goes down to rescue the team and finds out that the creature is Megalodon, a giant predatory shark that lived between 23 to 2.6 million years ago and died out before the last Ice Age.  Spoiler Alert, the shark begins attacking and eating people and racks up a fairly sizable body count before it is finally defeated.  

Now I have to give credit where it is due, the shark is shown at closer to its natural size than other films have done in the past (see here for more on that topic).  Even when one appears that's seventy five feet long rather than sixty, it still looks more natural and less like a photo-shopped Great White. The So-Bad-It's-Good movie Shark Attack 3: Megalodon had it so huge that it could swallow a good-sized life raft in one go.  Here, it's just large enough to tangle with a giant squid. 
   The fights with the shark itself are pretty thrilling and awesome--in a stupid kind of way.  The climatic scene, for example, features Taylor chasing the shark through through rocky tunnels before stabbing it in the eye.  That was very well done.  And it was unnerving seeing a diver in a shark cage get stuck in the animal's maw (yeesh!).  The humor is also good at times, with the best moments being references to Shark Week. 
        
However, that's where my praise for this movie ends.  The movie's problems are as follows: The humor may be good, but the shark kills unintentionally fall into this category, being treated as a punchline rather than horrifying.  This is not helped by the fact that the film glosses the deaths over for the most part. 
        Making things worse is the surprising lack of gore.  This may seem strange coming from  someone who doesn't like gratuitous amounts of blood and guts in a movie, but I found that to be a disappointment.   I enjoyed Jaws despite all the blood and guts, but then again there's bound to be blood whenever a shark attacks someone.  Apparently it was originally planned to be an R-rated bloodbath of a movie, but there was some major executive meddling and it got demoted to PG-13.  If they had stuck with the original idea, I think they would have had something truly terrifying.  
       The Meg's biggest problem is the characters.  They are a huge part of the reason the movie seems to be unable to make up its mind about what it is.  With the possible exception of Statham, most of the actors don't seem to know what they're supposed to be doing exactly, and just walk around with wide-eyed expressions of confused nervousness.  But the worst offenders are Jonas ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) and his girlfriend Suyin (Li Binging)  Lori has little to no facial expressions beyond Stone-Faced Zombie and Stepford Wife Smiling even when she takes a screwdriver to midriff; and Suyin goes around looking like she's scared of everything.
       And Neither Lori nor Suyin had any depth at all.  This movie is based off of a novel, and in the novel Jonas' ex-wife is a power-mad woman seeking publicity.  In the film, she's blandly amiable.  There's mention that Jonas and Lori were bad couple, but hwy is never explained.  The writers wasted a perfectly good opportunity for some good drama.  
       I saw this film with my boyfriend and he wanted Suyin to just die, for which I do not blame him.  Suyin is the worst love interest I have ever seen in a story.  There's no chemistry between her or Jonas; their love scenes are little more than shy glances with no real emotion behind them.  She's a terrible mother as well.  She lets her daughter Meiying (Sophie Cai) have free run of the research station, and doesn't seem to discipline her when she should (do you really want your eight-year-old to be saying the word "a-hole"?).  And she's just plain dumb, trying to shark dive with the Megalodon, in a cylindrical cage.  Sorry, but Nigel Marven's design was better. 

Overall rating: 4 1/2 out 10.  Fun action, bad characters.  Goofy humor, sloppy story. 

LA TRAVIATA Production

Yes, this is a few weeks late, but I must say this anyway because I have let this blog just sit forever and three days.  I won't do a usual review, but say whether or not the production works. 

The Met's new production of La Traviata uses the Four Seasons set up to tell the story.  Act 1 takes place in spring, Act 2 in summer, Act 3 in autumn, and Act 4 in winter.  Using musical cues in the prelude, Micheal Meyers decided to start with Violetta's death bed and have the action be a whirl of memories flashing before her very eyes.  

Does this work?  Yes, it does.  It has a slightly surreal quality to it.  There is a moment at the beginning of Act 4 when Alfredo's sister walks across the stage clad as a happy bride.  That little bit of action feels like a flash in Violetta's mind.  And it gives the feeling that this takes place over quite a long period of time.  
       The ballet sequence on Act 3 was the biggest highlight of the production.  The pary Violetta's friend Flora throws has a Spanish theme to it, and the ballet outfits have a Day of the Dead vibe to them.  Granted there needed to be a bit more Torero with the second half of it, but it's still awesome.

So yes, it works.  

DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE: When Incomprehensible Plot Meets Wonderful Music

Yes, I should have written about this when I went to encore last year with my boyfriend, but my parents went to another encore of it last night, and we had a decent conversation about it.  This isn't a review of the performance but an commentary on it. 

The Hero is a prince named Tamino who when we meet him is being chased by a giant serpent and is saved by Three Ladies of the Queen of the Night.  When Tamino comes to he meets a bird catcher, Papageno, who tells him that he killed the snake himself.  At this the three Ladies padlock Papageno's mouth to punish him for telling lies.  They then tell Tamino that they saved his life.
      Then the Queen of the Night herself enters, and she tells Tamino to rescue her daughter, Pamina, who has kidnapped by Sarastro.  Tamino agrees upon seeing a portrait of the princess and sets off to find her.  The Three ladies then give him a magic flute to protect himself on his journey, and to Papageno they give a set of magic bells.  But when the two men reach the Temple where Pamina is held, Tamino finds out that the queen is the one in the wrong and Sarastro is the good guy.  And before the prince and princess can be united he must first be initiated.  Confused yet?  
       It doesn't stop there.  While Tamino passes the trials with no trouble, poor Papageno can't seem to do anything right.  Wisdom and Enlightenment do not interest him in the least, especially since the priests insist that he must first pass the trials before he can get them.  Papageno wants the simple things in life; food, drink, and a family.  Of course he's told there's a pretty Papagena waiting for him, but he can't have her until he's past the trials.  This of course causes much stress for Papageno.  
      Then you have the Queen of the Night telling Pamina to kill Sarastro or be disowned, and everything becomes more and more convoluted until the final scene. 

Here's the main problem with the opera: Tamino isn't given much of a character at all beyond his wanting Pamina and Enlightenment.  He passes the trials no issue and doesn't face that much adversity.  Pamina is characterized as strong in our day, but she still has nothing beyond being in love with Tamino, though she does try to escape the Temple.  The Queen of the Night has two amazing arias (which I love to death), but her total stage time is less than twelve minutes.  She also suffers from rather stilted characterization.  Sarastro is probably the flattest character of the bunch, being nothing more than a blandly benevolent platitude-spewer who doesn't do much.  And then there's Monostatos, Sarastro's slave who is Always Chaotic Evil and wants nothing more than to rape Pamina.  He does have a few comic moments, such as when he and Papageno scare each other, but he's not interesting at all.
        Papageno is probably the only character in the opera with anything resembling characterization.  He is a simple man who wants a quiet life.  He is also a very good joker to Tamino's straight man.  In fact, both Tamino and Pamina's best scenes are with Papageno.  He has a harder time than Tamino because he cannot handle the trials, even when he'll be rewarded with Papagena.  It doesn't help that she gets getting taken away from him.  So we're all happy when he gets his Papagena in the end. 

So why is this complicated mish-mash of a story so popular?  Because Mozart was so good at composing music, he could make even the weirdest of plots riveting.  No one goes to the see Die Zauberflöte for the story, they go to hear the Queen of the Night sing about Hell's vengeance and watch Papageno and Papagena making out before the grand finale.  If anyone else had tried to write this opera it would have faded into oblivion.  But Mozart was a musical genius and that is why The Magic Flute still survives.