Operagasm: The Art of Disguise

Opera is an inherently ridiculous art form.

I mean this in the best way possible, of course: I have an undeniable affinity for ridiculous things, and hope to be doing this particular ridiculous thing for the rest of my life, but when you stop and think about it—and believe me, it doesn't take too much thinking—you start to realize how batshit insane the entire concept is. Opera is like the Voltron or even the Captain Planet of the performing arts: all of these individual art forms come together to create something entirely unique. Theater, orchestral music, singing, even ballet—YOUR POWERS COMBINE.

You get the idea.

So, yes. If opera were a superhero, it would be Captain Planet—except with fewer heavy-handed environmental messages and more sex, murder, and tuberculosis. Lots more tuberculosis, in fact. You've gotta wonder what the hell all these sopranos are doing; they're all dying of debilitating lung disease (yes, all of them—if Tosca hadn't thrown herself from the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo, I'm sure she would have been coughing up blood by Act IV) but they're still singing beautifully even as their respiratory systems spontaneously combust. Not exactly realistic, I'll admit—but neither is Rodrigo from Don Carlo, who gets shot in the back and still sings an entire aria before he dies. And this is Verdi we're talking about, so of course it's not easy music. In fact, it's pretty fucking balls-to-the-wall for a guy who's already leaked several pints of O-negative on the prison floor.

This is where willing suspension of disbelief comes in. Like I said, opera is inherently ridiculous—and when you've seen enough operas, there are certain things that you learn to take in stride. The last thing the composer wants you to do is start being logical, because A) most composers of standard operatic repertoire are long dead and so they don't actually want anything anymore, and B) logic has no place in the world of opera. Seriously, don't even attempt to use critical thinking. It's useless here.

Take Don Giovanni, for example. At the beginning of the second act, the eponymous libertine switches clothes with his manservant Leporello with the intention of banging a hot chambermaid. Keep in mind that by “switching clothes,” I really just mean “they exchange cloaks and hats.” However, from the way the rest of the cast reacts, you'd think that the two of them were Nic Cage and John Travolta from Face/Off and had literally turned into each other. NOBODY can tell the difference, which becomes especially hilarious if you've seen a production where Giovanni and Leporello have drastically different physical characteristics. Donna Elvira's inability to recognize the only man she's ever had carnal relations with is even funnier if he's suddenly a different race. No, jackass, it's not the glow of moonlight that's making him look pale—he a cracka.

Even when we put the quirks of casting aside (because that can affect any opera at any time), the in-story implications are still pretty ridiculous. Yes, it's dark out. Yes, they're wearing different hats and cloaks. But come on. Elvira doesn't notice that Giovanni, the notorious seducer, is suddenly awkward as fuck and has a completely different voice than he did two minutes ago. Masetto, despite being the only character in the opera who's sharp enough to instantly and consistently recognize Don Giovanni as a threat, doesn't think it's suspicious that the Don's trusted servant is being uncharacteristically cooperative, or that said servant just sent the armed search party off in all different directions. And then Masetto gives this guy his weapons and promptly gets the shit beaten out of him. And he still thinks the cloaked figure was Leporello.

Jesus, Masetto. This scene right here is why no one takes you seriously.

But even though he's the only good guy who suffers intense physical repercussions for his idiocy, we have to remember that everyone else is being just as stupid:

Zerlina: Look, there's someone dressed in the Don's cloak and hat!
Don Ottavio: Despite the fact that he's not acting anything like Don Giovanni, I'm pretty sure it's him.
Donna Anna: How sure?
Don Ottavio: Like... ninety-eight percent.
Masetto: Good enough for me. Time to get my murder on.
Everyone: [curbstomps Leporello]
Leporello: Jesus! What the hell, guys? I'm totally not the man you're looking for.
Everyone: No, we're pretty sure you are. Like... ninety-eight percent.
Leporello: [takes his hat off]
Everyone: HOLY SHIT WHERE DID LEPORELLO COME FROM
Leporello: It's been me this whole time. Are you people retarded or something? This barely even qualifies as a disguise.
Everyone: WHAT NEW DEVILRY IS THIS
Leporello: [facepalm]

The best part is, I'm not even exaggerating that much. The lynch mob reacts with massive shock and disbelief when they discover Leporello, as if they were all laboring under the impression that clothing bonds with its owner for life (like the Venom symbiote from Spider-Man) and NO ONE BUT GIOVANNI could possibly be wearing that cloak. Really, the only explanation I can come up with for the confusion is that Don Giovanni is part faerie and he can cast glamours on himself and Leporello—and you know something’s wrong with your story when the inclusion of faeries actually makes it more believable. (I'm warning you, True Blood. Stop with that Queen Mab shit or I will cut you.)

The shenanigans don't stop with this opera, either. Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, Don Giovanni's librettist, collaborated on two other operas, as well—Le Nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte—both of which also involve disguises and mistaken identities. Since I haven't bothered to do any research as to why that might be the case, I'm just going to say that da Ponte probably had some sort of role-play fetish and pretend that it's an established historical fact. That's how musicology works, right?

The circumstances surrounding the disguising in Le Nozze are a little different—rather than helping someone get laid, the intention is to catch a philanderer. (It's basically your standard honeypot scenario, except it's not actually anything like that at all so shut up.) Count Almaviva has the hots for his wife's servant, Susanna, who just married the titular Figaro. (Honestly, whenever you see a nobleman in a Mozart opera, it's safe to assume that he wants to get his bone on with a peasant or servant—or anything that moves, in Giovanni's case. I guess lower-class women were less sexually frigid or something.) Anyway, the Count wants to get with Susanna and the Countess is understandably upset about this, so the two ladies devise a brilliant plan to catch him in the act: they arrange a meeting between Susanna and the Count that night in the garden, but then they switch cloaks so the Countess can impersonate Susanna and vice versa. In short, their plan is to make the Count unknowingly seduce his own wife. Da Ponte's reasoning here (or possibly Beaumarchais, since he wrote the play this opera was based on) seems to be that “All women look alike in the dark.”

I want this opera to be made into an episode of Divorce Court. It's so delightfully seedy, and there's just about as much singing.

Of course, neither the Countess nor Susanna find it necessary to tell Figaro that any of this is going on because they're bitches. Really. It's Figaro and Susanna's wedding night, and they're perfectly content to let the guy think that his new bride is about to get plowed by their employer. That rates about a 6.8 on the DNCI (Dude, Not Cool index), just below “knocking up your best friend's little sister.” So, Figaro hides in the bushes and gets to watch the Count put the moves on Fake!Susanna and try to get her into one of the pavilions. Fake!Susanna comments that it's too dark, allowing the Count to reply with my favorite line of the opera: “Tu sai che la per leggere io non desio entrar,” which loosely translates to “You know we ain't goin' in there to read, baby. Awwwwwwwww yeeeeeeeaaaahhhhh.”

It's fantastic. Stop judging me.

Anyway, Figaro finally figures out what's going on and helps Susanna complete her plan, proving that there was no reason at all to keep him out of the loop—aside from the previously mentioned “being a bitch” thing. The Count is exposed (not literally; that would be gross) but the Countess forgives him, and everyone lives happily ever after, except that they actually don't. Whoops.

In this case, the whole disguise thing is made more believable by the fact that Figaro can actually recognize the voice of the woman he's in love with. On the flip side, however, the Count fails to recognize the voice of the woman he's been married to for years—but that's somewhat justified by him being a really shitty husband. You win this round, Mozart.

That leaves us with Così fan tutte, which takes the idea of testing your partner's fidelity to all-new sociopathic highs. Or lows, really. Long story short, Ferrando and Guglielmo have a bet with the rich Don Asshole Alfonso that their lovers (Dorabella and Fiordiligi, respectively) will stay faithful to them no matter what. In order to test this theory, Don Alfonso makes the boys A) pretend to go off to war, B) send letters to Dorabella and Fiordiligi indicating that they had both been killed in action, and C) dress up as Albanians so each one can woo the other's bereaved girlfriend.

Why Albanians, you might ask? Why the fuck not.

The premise of this opera is so batshit insane that I can't even bring myself to care about the believability of the disguises. Ferrando, Guglielmo, and Don Asshole are waging such intense psychological warfare against these poor women that they probably could have just put on Clark Kent glasses and the ladies would have been none the wiser. Why don't they recognize their lovers? A better question would be, “Why the fuck would they?” Ferrando and Guglielmo are supposed to be dead. Best-case scenario, they received proper burials and possibly even last rites. Worst-case scenario, they're rotting on a battlefield somewhere with their entrails being chewed out by vultures and wild dogs. And then the girls have to deal with these crazy fucking foreigners who are trying to get into their pants for no apparent reason aside from just being horny. Aaaaand then the Albanians threaten suicide if Dorabella and Fiordiligi don't give in to their advances. Oh, and I forgot to mention: this is supposed to be a comedy.

What is this I don't even.

Seriously, that shit is fucked up. That's the sort of thing that you could probably get thrown in prison for nowadays, but there really aren't any huge consequences here for the people involved in the systematic psychological destabilization of two innocent young women. The opera pretty much ends with Don Alfonso winning his bet and being all like, “Bitches, man. I told you; they're all sluts!” Because that makes sense.

So, yeah. Remember what I said about critical thinking? This is the point where you make like an opera character and just turn off your brain. Trust me; it's easier that way.

Cinema Snark: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II

When I reviewed the first half of this two-part cinematic extravaganza, I said that most of the things that bothered me about the movie were also things that had bothered me about the first half of the book: namely, the massive amounts of angst and aimless wandering. So congratulations are due to Deathly Hallows Part II: This Time It's Personal, because I dislike it entirely on its own merits. Huzzah!

Okay, that's not entirely accurate. I didn't hate the movie—not by a long shot—but it rarely ever felt like it was rising above the level of “good enough.” The action scenes were entertaining, the special effects were at their usual level, and there were several legitimately awesome moments with some of the supporting characters (McGonagall and Snape, I'm looking at you), but it really wasn't the game-changing motion-picture event of a lifetime that it was hyped to be.

It was fun, sure, but the book was better (that damned epilogue notwithstanding)—and Deathly Hallows wasn't even my favorite book of the series. (That would be Prisoner of Azkaban because TIME TRAVEL. And because Sirius Black is awesome. And because it's wonderfully dark but the series hadn't yet started to take itself too seriously.)

But I digress.

Regardless of how good it is, Deathly Hallows is a Harry Potter movie—the last Harry Potter movie, to be precise—so the film is still going to make more money than a slender male prostitute on a six-week yacht cruise with a bunch of Republican legislators. There is literally nothing I can say that will change that, so I'm just going to spend the rest of my time nitpicking (shocking, I know). There are some spoilers, but honestly, it's a young-adult story about good versus evil—so everyone pretty much knows how it's going to end.

But yeah, you've been warned.

Here's the way I choose to remember the end of the book: Molly Weasley has her Crowning Moment of Awesome against Bellatrix, which she follows up by killing Voldemort and then also killing Harry for being such a giant douche for the last several books. Then she blows up Hogwarts (because why the hell not) and starts her own school of magic, where she teaches young witches and wizards to knit awesome sweaters and just generally not give a fuck. The school's coat of arms is a picture of Molly Weasley beating the living hell out of the Juggernaut, and its motto is “Shit just got REAL."

In short, Mrs. Weasley is made of pure, unadulterated badassery.

The movie seems to disagree, however. Rather than a Crowning Moment of Awesome, her fight with Bellatrix feels more like an Obligatory Moment of Above-Average Coolness. Mrs. Weasley gets the one-liner everyone was waiting for, but she seems more mildly annoyed than furious to the point of murder. The fight which follows is brief and not particularly spectacular, and ends with an extended death shot which leaves me with a couple questions—namely, how is a quick, instant-kill spell like Avada Kedavra on the list of Unforgivable Curses when another spell that makes you literally shrivel up and peel apart somehow isn't? That's kinda like saying “We can't execute this prisoner with a guillotine because it's too inhumane, so we're gonna flay him alive instead!"

Wizards, man. They're messed up.

Similarly, Neville Longbottom's display of gigantic brass balls in the face of insurmountable odds is greatly toned down for the movie (it's a Grudging Moment of Competence at best) so that the run-time can be padded with an extended Harry/Voldemort showdown and more shots of Ron and Hermione trying to kill the giant snake. I mean, I know that the filmmakers don't want the main characters to be overshadowed, but let's face it—Harry just isn't that interesting, and he's also not a great wizard. The only reason he's survived this long is because he's got friends and mentors who keep saving his dumb ass. He can cast a couple spells really well, but he's also gotten special treatment his entire time at Hogwarts because he's the magical Chosen One. Neville, on the other hand, started off as a laughably incompetent bumbler and has grown in confidence and skill to the point where he leads the resistance at school while Harry is busy wandering through the wilderness and being a dick to his best friends. Neville is the freaking Michael Collins of Hogwarts, and he has the stones to stand up to Voldemort himself when no one else will—and not only does he survive, he also pulls off one of the most awesome (and vital) kills of the entire book. The boy deserves his moment in the spotlight, dammit.

Or he could just get knocked out like a little bitch. That's cool too.

That being said, the confrontation with Snape in the Great Hall might be my favorite moment of the film series so far. I wish that the scene could have been a bit longer—not because it diminishes anything from the book, but because it was so damn cool that I wanted more time to enjoy it. Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith are just plain awesome, and it's nice to see such great actors step front and center for once. The whole scene pretty much screams “Sit back and take some notes, child actors: this is how we do it in the 'hood.” Furthermore, I really liked most of the flashback scenes which flesh out Snape's motivations; that sequence is probably as close to heartbreaking as anything in the movies can get (Dobby be damned). However, I'm sure that much of my reaction to those scenes is due to my previously-mentioned love of Alan Rickman.

Seriously. If he propositioned me, I would say yes in a heartbeat. That man's voice is like sex wrapped in velvet.

Ahem. Moving on.

There were a few other problems, like the fact that Harry's trusty wand never gets fixed—I guess that means he just keeps using Draco's wand from Deathly Hallows Part I for the rest of his life. No more “the wand chooses the wizard,” I guess. Does that count as magical-polyamory?

The one thing that I really remembered having a problem with in the book as well as the movie is the treatment of Slytherin students. Under normal circumstances, the administration at Hogwarts is apparently fine with having an entire house populated by sociopaths, douchebags, and pureblood supremacists at their school—but as soon as the shit hits the fan, they get sent off to the internment camp in the dungeons! And nobody seems to have a problem with this. In fact, everyone cheers. So here's the thing: if that's how it's going to be, why the fuck would the administration bother to keep Slytherin house around at all? Maybe instead of accepting students with violent antisocial tendencies, they should train the Sorting Hat to say “GET THE FUCK OUT” instead of “SLYTHERIN!”

But then at the end, one of the characters also tells his son that it's okay to be a Slytherin because OH HEY there can be brave and noble people in Slytherin too. But apparently you can be brave and noble and still get thrown in the dungeon for no reason other than your magically assigned house. Because that's justice.

Seriously, J. K. Rowling. What the hell.

Long story short, the movie is good but not great. It looks cool, the writing and acting are on par with the last several installments, and none of my problems with it were large enough to make me actively dislike it. Honestly, if you're a Harry Potter fan, you should see it at some point: it's the last part of an eight-film series which kept the same central cast (almost) through the whole damn run. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it.

Oh, yeah, and there was an audible groan from the audience when the “19 Years Later” title appeared onscreen at the end. Don't worry, though; it's more tolerable on film than it was in the book.

Cinema Snark: X-Men First Class

I'm really shirking my duties here. This movie came out over a month ago, for God's sake. Of course, I've been a bit busy since then, but still. No excuse.

On the plus side, however, it means that most of you have probably seen X-Men by now, assuming you had the intention of seeing it at all. Unless you were waiting for it to come out on DVD or get put on Netflix or something, but nobody does that because everyone loves paying fourteen bucks for movie tickets and another eight for popcorn. It's the American way.

In any case, this review will contain some spoilers because a lot of you have seen this movie already. Possibly multiple times, if you're like me. But if you haven't seen the movie, fear not! This isn't the most mind-blowing spoiler in the world because you can kinda figure it out by watching the trailer. (Oh hey, I don't see that one black guy in any of the shots of the final battle! I WONDER WHY.)

Okay! Onward.

Make no mistake: this isn't a movie about the X-Men. Not really. Oh, there's a team of costumed mutants flying around fighting evil in their iconic SR-71 Blackbird, but they take a backseat to the movie's real story, which chronicles the rise and fall of the best bromance ever.

No, I'm not kidding.

Here's the thing. To properly discuss this movie, I have to break it down into two categories: James McAvoy/Michael Fassbender, and everything else. The first category is awesome, and makes the entire movie worth watching because it's so damn good. The latter, on the other hand, ranges from good to competent to wince-inducingly clumsy. In the interest of ending on a high note (because I really did like this movie, despite what I'm about to say), I'm going to start with "everything else".

This movie carries some pretty strong messages about racism, almost all of which work better in theory than the way they're actually carried out on film. Yes, mutants are a minority. Yes, people fear and hate them and keep antagonizing them despite the fact that that's a really dumb idea because mutants have fucking superpowers. Hell, one of the main reasons the X-Men exist is so they can gain societal acceptance by saving the world and protecting ordinary humans. That's all well and good, but there are subtler ways of showing that humans are assholes than "HEY I DIDN'T KNOW THE CIRCUS WAS IN TOWN" and "THE MUTANTS ARE OVER THERE! JUST TAKE THEM AND LET US NORMAL PEOPLE GO!" Like I said, there are two movies at work here--one of them is really good, and the other one has good ideas but doesn't always know how to implement them. There's an effective way of portraying bigotry onscreen, but this isn't it.

And while we're on the topic of bigotry, can I just say that holy shit there are some racial undertones to this movie that make me extremely uncomfortable. I don't know how intentional this was, but maybe when you're making a superhero movie about the evils of racism, you shouldn't make your team of good guys exclusively white. Xavier and Magneto enlist two black mutants in their recruitment montage--and within thirty minutes or so, one of them has turned evil and the other is dead. But fear not, audiences! X-Men: First Class doesn't need them, because BLUE IS THE NEW BLACK. Out of the six good mutants that suit up for the final confrontation, two of them are cerulean-hued. That's like having minorities, right? Except that Mystique spends most of the movie looking like this, and Beast used to look like this.

Whoops.

Also, Darwin's death pisses me off on a non-racial level, because his mutant power is pretty much that HE CAN'T DIE. And then he's the first mutant to get killed. Seriously, I'm calling bullshit on this. The phrase "adapt to survive" is thrown around a lot, and then Kevin Bacon says "adapt to this" and puts a ball of energy into Darwin's mouth, and then Darwin looks like he's gonna puke and then he looks sad and then he starts crumbling and everything fades to white. What the hell, guys. It's not like Darwin couldn't think of a way to adapt, because the process is automatic. He's transformed into pure energy in the comics before, why couldn't he do it here? Honestly, they need to bring him back in the next movie. He's an interesting character with a really cool power and it would be really easy for the screenwriters to say "Oh, he didn't actually die from that after all."

On a more positive note, I loved Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw. He seemed to be having a whole lot of fun doing his villain schtick, and his powers were pretty great. The only downside was that they made him speak German and Russian and oh my GOD the man is awful at foreign languages. Seriously, there needs to be an agreement among all filmmakers that they will never again allow that man to speak German, and especially not when he's in the same movie as Michael Fassbender.

Another high point of the "everything else" portion of the movie was Azazel, Mystique's future baby-daddy (guess who their son is), because it's always nice to see teleportation powers used effectively in combat. People have this tendency to not take Nightcrawler seriously because he's not the strongest guy around, but OH HEY super-agility and teleportation can actually make you unbelievably deadly. And also swords. Swords help with the deadliness.

Banshee and Havok are both fun, as is Beast when he finally fursplodes, but they honestly don't have that much to do. That's the problem with team movies, really: you spend all your time on the main two or three characters, which means that all the colorful side characters don't get utilized to their full potential. (Take note, Avengers: Hawkeye is awesome and so is Jeremy Renner. Give him lots of screen time.) On the villain side, January Jones spends most of her time sitting around in slutty outfits, so she's got the most important aspect of Emma Frost's character down--but I kinda wish someone had told Ms. Jones that Emma transforms into diamond and not into a block of wood. Seriously, I'm not sure whether she can't act at all or just decided not to for some reason. And then there's what's-his-name, the one who makes tornadoes and doesn't say a single word for the entire movie. Turns out his name is "Riptide" and not "Eurotrash" like I originally guessed. You learn something new every day, I suppose.

Also, the movie just straight-up looks good. I really like the idea of a "superhero period piece", and I think First Class does a nice job with the 60's vibe. Here's hoping Captain America pulls of the WWII look, as well--it certainly looks like they're on the right track.

Okay. That brings me to my favorite part of the movie.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are great. They're both very talented actors (Wanted and Centurion notwithstanding) who bring a surprising amount of depth to their roles, and any scene that features either of them becomes better by virtue of their presence. The scenes with both of them are just amazing, and not just because the fangirls want them to start kissing. (It's okay, I kinda do too.) The two of them have great chemistry and an innate understanding of how to play off each other, and it's completely believable that McAvoy's Charles Xavier and Fassbender's Erik Lensherr will go on to become two of the most influential figures in the Marvel Universe.

Honestly, if the movie had just been two hours of Michael Fassbender as Magneto traveling the world to hunt Nazis, I would have been okay with it. More than okay, in fact. I would have seen it six times on the big screen and pre-ordered the special edition DVD. He's badass, resourceful, debonair as fuck, speaks several languages, and has a face that looks like it was chiseled out of fine marble by Michelangelo himself. What's not to love? He's also the most sympathetic character in the movie, due to his traumatic childhood during the Holocaust, and he has pretty damn good reasons for his descent into extremism--namely, he spends the whole movie talking about how humans will try to eradicate mutants and then HE'S COMPLETELY RIGHT.

By comparison, Xavier is pretty much just a dick. He's brilliant and idealistic, yes, but he also uses shitty pick-up lines to seduce women in bars and treats Mystique less like a life-long friend and more like an annoyance. He's pampered and shallow, and for the world's most powerful psychic, he sure doesn't understand how people work. He spends most of the movie trying to convince Erik that mutants and humans will get along just fine, so he looks like a jackass at the end when the American and Russian navies try to kill them with a hail of missiles. All the same, McAvoy brings a surprising amount of depth to the character. It would have been easy to make this version of Xavier into a smug, holier-than-thou douchebag, but there's much more to it than that. Charles really believes that his utopian ideal is possible, and when the shit hits the fan, he doesn't back down. As naive as his beliefs may appear, he is willing to fight and die for them all the same.

The conflict between the two characters is set up wonderfully--Charles and Erik use different methods and eventually develop radically different goals, but they still feel an undeniable connection with each other. Even as they experience their parting of the ways, it's obvious that they both wish they could stay together. It's kinda heartbreaking, really.

And yes, their bromance is epic and adorable. There's even an entire Tumblr devoted to it.

So, yeah. See it, if you haven't. It's not all good, but what's good tends to be great.