Operagasm: Don Giovanni

So, some of you may be wondering why I haven't posted anything here in over two weeks. Or maybe not. Maybe you're wondering why men have nipples, or why Adam Sandler hasn't yet been put to death for his crimes against humanity. I can't say I blame you--I've wondered about both of those things myself, and for quite some time. But whatever the case, I have been remiss in my duties as a purveyor of fine snark, and I feel that you loyal readers deserve some actual content after my unannounced hiatus.

In any case, the past week and a half has seen me move from Silver Spring to Binghamton, learn an entire opera role, and scamper off to Astoria to stay with my sister for six weeks while I do an opera program that will culminate in my New York City debut as Masetto in Don Giovanni. So yeah, it's been pretty damn busy--hence the cobwebs you might see appearing in the corners of the blog.

But no more! Now that I've more or less settled in, I thought it seemed like the perfect time to provide some commentary on my actual profession, as opposed to just blathering on about movies and comics and time travel like I usually do. I've still got two movies to review (X-Men: First Class is great and full of MANLY TEARS), but fuck it. I'd rather do this right now.

So! Let's talk about Don Giovanni.

If you don't know the story, you can familiarize yourself here. If you're too lazy to read the whole synopsis, however, it goes something like this: Don Giovanni is the mack-daddy to end all mack-daddies (that's the hip slang that all of today's youngsters are using, right?), and he spends pretty much every waking moment looking for places to stick his junk. The first scene has him raping a woman (Donna Anna) and killing her father (the Commendatore), and he pretty much spends the rest of the opera trying to get laid, getting cock-blocked by a vengeful ex (Donna Elvira), and avoiding the large numbers of people who want to kill his bitch ass dead (i.e. everyone except his servant Leporello) because he's a rapist and a murderer and whatnot. Eventually, he meets a living statue of the man he murdered and invites it to dinner at his house because why the fuck not. The statue shows up and literally drags him to hell, and then the other characters show up and sing a final sextet giving the moral of the story: "Thus ends the life of he who does evil."

Okay. That's a noble sentiment and all, but I'm afraid it's a tad misleading. Think of it this way:

Don Giovanni was extremely good at two things: getting laid and evading capture. His list of conquests adds up to over two thousand women from all over Europe (hell, he even boned ninety-one in Turkey), so it's pretty reasonable to assume that the lynch mobs he faces over the course of the opera aren't the first he's ever had to deal with. It's not clear if he had actually killed anyone before shanking the Commendatore, but he has two instances of attempted (possibly successful?) rape within the first act alone, so it's pretty clear that that's his standard course of action when regular seduction fails. Now, rape is the sort of thing that attracts attention--in fact, it's the sort of thing that makes people want to hunt you down and cut off your junk--so it's almost certain that people have tried to kill him on numerous occasions. And yet, he's still going strong after 2,065 catalogued conquests--with every indication that he'll keep boning his way around Europe until he keels over from a heart attack at age 70 while he's balls-deep in a buxom tavern wench. This is a man who is absurdly good at escaping justice.

So really, the moral of the opera isn't "don't be a murderous sociopath with a taste for rape," because that's not what gets him killed. The moral should be "DON'T BE A FUCKING MORON."

Don Giovanni is an idiot who invites his own death. Literally. He's walking through a graveyard and hears a disembodied voice predicting his doom, and then runs smack into a statue of the Commendatore--a statue which A) has a foreboding inscription swearing vengeance upon the man's murderer, and B) may or may not be alive. So he invites the statue to dinner. AND THEN IT NODS. AND SAYS "YES." Now, the normal reaction to that would be something like "Holy SHIT it's time to get the fuck out of here," but Don Giovanni's reaction is more along the lines of "Whoa, it said yes! This is going to be the coolest dinner EVER. " And then he goes home, even though everyone in Seville is looking for him and wants him dead.

Seriously, it's like he's lost all will to live by the second half of Act Two. Elvira finds him at home and basically tells him that he needs to repent for his crimes, and he just laughs at her until she leaves. He doesn't seem to care that she could tell everyone else where he's hiding. Aaaaaand then the statue of the Commendatore shows up, and Don Giovanni is all like "Hey, Leporello, bring some food for our guest!" instead of shitting himself like anyone with half a brain would. Then the statue invites Don Giovanni to come have dinner at its place, and the jackass says yes. And then, even as the statue has him by the hand and is about to drag him down to hell for an eternity of suffering, it gives him one last chance to repent and possibly save his soul.

Guess what Don Giovanni's response is.

The guy's like a troll on an internet message board who just won't stop being a dick even as the moderator is about to ban him. In fact, I'm pretty sure that some newer English translations of the opera have him shouting "I DID IT FOR THE LUUUUUUULZ" as he's being dragged down to hell.

In fact, that internet stuff makes me wonder: if someone were to take Don Giovanni and adapt it for modern audiences, what sort of wacky hijinks would ensue?

Durden Giovanni: Leporello is an unhappy, unsuccessful young man with a boring life and a terrible job--but one day, everything changes. He gets fired, he loses his house, and he meets an enigmatic young nobleman named Don Giovanni, who hires him as a servant. Giovanni is everything Leporello wishes he could be: charming, handsome, rich, and knee-deep in bitches. For the first time ever, things are looking up for Leporello--until the Don's sexcapades finally piss off the wrong people, and Leporello wakes up in his master's clothes. Suddenly, everyone wants Don Giovanni dead--and everyone seems to agree that Leporello looks exactly like the man they're looking for. Leporello has to figure out what's going on, and discover Don Giovanni's dark secret before it's too late.
Notable Quotes: "You broke our agreement, Leporello. You talked to Elvira about the List."
Rated R for language, drug use, and graphic sexual content.

D. N. Jovanimasu: Sousuke is a normal high school student with a big problem: whenever he gets aroused, he transforms into Donu Jovanimasu, the Phantom Pervert! He tries to keep a low profile, but Eruvira-senpai (the school's resident nymphomaniac) knows his secret, and wants to turn him into her own personal sex slave! To make matters worse, Sousuke is being pursued by the mysterious Komenu-Datore, a killer robot who has a score to settle with Donu Jovanimasu! Oh, and there's some tentacle rape, too. Will Sousuke ever be able to confess his true feelings for the beautiful Anna-kun, or will his alter-ego's numerous enemies and admirers get to him first??
Notable Quotes: "WATASHI WA DONU JOVANIMASUUUUUUUUU"
For mature viewers only.
This series will never air in the United States. Ever.

"Don Juan," from Old Spice: "Hello, ladies. Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back to your man. Now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me--but he could smell like me, if he stopped being cuckolded long enough to buy Old Spice's Don Juan deodorant. Look down. Look up. You're now pregnant with my child. I'm on a horse! And it's riding out of your life forever. Peace out."
Available now!

This blog post IS NOW DIAMONDS.

Cinema Snark: Super

The "do-it-yourself superhero" sub-genre has gained a fair amount of popularity in recent years as a way to deconstruct and subvert expectations from mainstream superhero movies. If there's a danger with these stories, it's the possibility to become too rooted in the mundane and lose the sense of over-the-top fun that makes superhero movies watchable in the first place.

That's what seems to have happened with Super. Like most DIY superhero films, it has a pretty bleak world-view and is punctuated with bursts of extreme graphic violence, though the inherent black comedy aspect is never really that funny. Rainn Wilson's main character is humorless and clearly mentally unstable, and Ellen Page's foul-mouthed sidekick is a shrill, whiny sociopath with a dash of sexual predator thrown in for good measure.

God, I hated her character.

Super is... odd, to say the least. There's nothing glamorous about this movie (even Liv Tyler, arguably the most attractive person in the film--though your mileage may vary on that--is drug-addict-chic most of the time), but that seems to be the point. Even the title is filled with hipster-worthy irony (and let's be honest, hipsters make up a good eighty percent of the viewer demographic for any film that isn't given wide release), because there's nothing "super" about anyone in the movie--least of all the main characters. The whole world of the film is mundane (or at least as mundane as you can get when you're dealing with people who dress up in home-made superhero costumes). To be blunt, I didn't really like Super--but I'm pretty sure most of the things which I disliked were done intentionally. It's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch. It's supposed to be the antithesis of most modern superhero movies, with witty bombastic escapism replaced by blood, futility, and grit.

This presents something of a reviewer's dilemma. If the whole movie is designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable, is it really a bad thing when it achieves its desired result so spectacularly?

I had a similar problem when I read The Great Gatsby: I found Fitzgerald's prose to be practically orgasmic, but I hated all the characters because they were all horrifically vain, shallow human beings (yes, even the narrator). To this day, I still can't decide whether or not I actually liked the book. That being said, however, The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece of American literature and Super is a mid-budget indie which will probably fade into relative obscurity within a few months, so there's really no comparison. When you get right down to it, though, Gatsby is famous because it's exceptionally well-written, and there's nothing particularly exceptional about Super. I can enjoy movies that make you feel dead on the inside if they have beautiful cinematography and/or excellent scripts (e.g. Pan's Labyrinth and In Bruges, two of my favorite films of all time), but nothing about Super stands out enough to really excite me.

I suppose the problem with Super wasn't the fact that it made me uncomfortable so much as the fact that it never made me feel anything else. My main response to the movie can be summed up with a mildly perplexed, generally turned-off "....huh." I didn't really care about any of the characters, the violence tended toward the pointlessly gory, and it wasn't as darkly amusing as I had hoped. (PROTIP: Comedic sociopathy isn't funny unless it's so over-the-top that the only possible response is laughter. PROTIP #2: If the audience doesn't like said comedic sociopath, it defeats the entire purpose of having one to begin with. In other words, don't make her a shrill, obnoxious harpy.)

Of course, this isn't to say that the movie has no redeeming characteristics. There are a number of much-needed subversions of superhero/action movie tropes (the most notable being "Why doesn't anyone wearing a bulletproof vest ever get shot in the head?") and some clever ideas, but I don't feel like they're ever fully developed. It's established early-on that Rainn Wilson's character suffers from occasional hallucinations (sometimes involving divine tentacle rape), and I feel like the movie could have made more of the whole "he thinks the bad guys are actually demons" thing, but it only appears once or twice for the rest of the movie. It feels like a missed opportunity, especially given that his first inspiration to become a costumed vigilante comes from a Bible-themed TV superhero named the Holy Avenger (played with typical charm by Nathan Fillion). Similarly, the climactic action sequence features some Adam-West-ish BLAMs and POWs popping up onscreen, but the gimmick appears so suddenly and disappears so soon after that it really only made me scratch my head and wonder what the fuck the point was. If the comic book effects had been used through most of the movie (say, as a symptom of the main character's previously established hallucinations) then it could have come across as a fun stylistic choice (much like Scott Pilgrim's video game bits) instead of being jarring.

Long story short: if you're looking for a fun DIY superhero movie, skip Super and (re)watch Kick-Ass. It's nowhere near perfect (the title character's story is by far the least interesting part of the movie), but it does have Nicolas Cage doing his best Adam West impression while he brutally murders mafia goons and shoots his 12-year-old daughter in the chest. Now that's comedic sociopathy I can believe in.