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BY A.S. HAMRAH
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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical has been seen by 80 million people, according to a press booklet that also tells us Joel Schumacher, the director of this screen adaptation, is a visionary. Although derivative of mid-’90s Schumacher hooey like Batman Forever, this film Phantom is more like a Meat Loaf music video from the same period, extended to 143 minutes; it’s only as a cockeyed tribute to the most outré and lowbrow of mid-’90s cinema æsthetics that it works at all. Emmy Rossum is an impossibly slim Christine to Gerard Butler’s bland Phantom in this sub–Tim Burton gothic, where the present is shot in black-and-white and the past is rendered in a palette more appropriate to the sale of Valentine’s Day items in supermarkets. The film is harsh to women who are not 17 years old: Miranda Richardson is forced to play Madame Giry as Isabelle Huppert doing an impression of Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein; Minnie Driver, the opera’s diva and the only member of the cast showing any verve, is compared to a poodle and a transvestite. It’s a testament to this dated movie’s fear of aging that when the Phantom’s face is revealed, he is only as tragic as a middle-aged man with male-pattern baldness and rosacea. (143 minutes) At the Providence Place 16 and Showcase cinemas.
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