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Monday, December 27, 2004
Still Recovering From The Holidays
And I find that, this morning anyway, I don't have much to say. Pete and I took my mother to see Phantom of the Opera and it was surprisingly good, given the middling to bad reviews I'd seen of it. Pete, who has 9/10ths of a degree in music, took opera lessons, is the director of a gospel choir and sings in a classical choir, agreed with me that all of the actors did have good, strong voices, and that much of the complaints you've heard about the singing are due to people being annoyed that it's not Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the film. Personally, I could have done with fewer shots of the actress playing Christine in form-fitting lingerie, but that may just be me. Most importantly, my mother really liked it, even if she thinks Gerard Butler was too young to be cast as the Phantom.
I've also been entertaining myself by going through the Golden Age Sandman Archive which I bought as a gift for myself with my Christmas bonus. The stories have that typical Golden-Age flaw of occasional rough art (and that's fully knowing that not everyone can be Lou Fine) and repetitive stories, exacerbated in this case by the fact that all the stories are very short. There's only so many "The Sandman foils a convoluted burglary plot" stories you can read in one sitting, so I've had to limit myself to no more than two or three at a time. But, of course, what I was really interested in was the weird, pulpish nature of the character. Strange ideas are just thrown into the ether in this title...the sand calling card, the "crime intuition", the leaving of a small Wesley Dodds doll in his bed when he goes out as the Sandman. It reads less like a super-hero book and more as a pulp adventure. And the relationship with Dian is very interesting as well. She's one of the few female characters I've come across who doesn't fall into the perennial hostage role. Her relationship with Wesley is more of a partnership, and she's shown as being proactive and independent on her own, without needing to be constantly rescued by Wesley. Heck, it's even established that she's a better safe-cracker than Wesley at one point.
In any case, here's the most disturbing thing I've come across in a comic-book lately, the newly redesigned metrosexual Riddler, from Legends of the Dark Knight #186:
