things to do

Went to see Phantom of the Opera while it was still around. "Local" culture apparently still exists, when appropriate levels of snobbery are enforced ahead of time.

I lack an appropriate level of snobbery to comment and critique greatly the performance itself sadly. I was never a big theatre person as that would have involved doing things instead of thinking them, and singing is among the list of things I know I cannot/should not do.

Still, singing and music/musicals are good things, even if it does seem absurd to communicate everything in song form in the abstract part of the brain. Story's pretty well known. At least, it's well known enough that I see no reason to summarize for the uninitiated. I consider it a good one. Kind of a toned down version of V for Vendetta with more singing instead of more dancing and hangings and mishaps of mayhem instead of knives and bombs and terrorism. And I think less politics to get in the way of the mushy stuff. So really, other than the mask, the romance plot line, and the killing (with elements of vengeance), it's not like V at all. But whatever.

And speaking of culture: movies have clearly gotten worse this year. Why? I don't know. But possibly aging has something to do with it. Some of those comic book movies were good (both of the new Batman films, the first Iron Man and V/Watchmen, and the second X-Men movie), but by and large this has been an overcapitalized demographic for my tastes. All of the Spider Man movies were terrible for example and yet they're rebooting it anyway. Why, well it made hundreds of millions of dollars somehow. I'd have to agree there's no reason to blame Spielberg for that, anymore than there was reason to blame Hitchcock or De Mille or Wells before that. There's always been popular stuff that was genuinely terrible in a critical sense. And movies aren't exceptions to that.

But it does still make sense to blame Spielberg for that War of the Worlds movie though, just as it does to blame Lucas for the second trilogy of Star Wars and the non-existent 4th Indiana Jones movie.