Butler and from the lovely Emmy Rossum, who plays his protégée, Christine Daae. Nonetheless, the music is technically demanding - just try to hum a few bars - and calls forth some impressive singing, especially from Mr. The songs fill your ears, but you are unlikely to find yourself humming any of them after the movie is over (which may, come to think of it, be the only merciful thing about this "Phantom.") Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets. Somewhere in this movie is the story of a striving young singer, a tormented musical genius and the volatile mixture of artistic ambition and obsessive longing that binds them together, but it is buried in orchestral sludge and chaotic storytelling. These failings are not the fault of the cast, which works hard to capture the grand, delicate feelings of this venerable, much-adapted story. This kind of spectacle might work onstage, where numb enervation can sometimes be mistaken for exhilaration, but this screen version, for all its wailing emotionalism and elaborate production design, lacks both authentic romance and the thrill of memorable spectacle. He succeeds admirably, drawing on his long-ago experience designing department-store window displays to produce nearly two and a half hours' worth of overstuffed tableaux, the cumulative effect of which is likely to be a state of headachy nervous exhaustion. Of course, Lord Lloyd Webber's music is the whole point of the film, and Joel Schumacher, the director, does his best to find a visual style to match the vulgarity and pretentiousness of the soundtrack. He is talking about the threatening messages that the control-freak phantom (Gerard Butler) is sending to various members of the company, but his complaint applies perfectly to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose relentless bombast afflicts this movie like a bad case of swollen lymph nodes. "Far too many notes for my taste," sniffs one of the proprietors of the Opéra Populaire in "The Phantom of the Opera." I quite agree.
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