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Mr_Wentworth-Brewster
My obsession is Stephen Sondheim's music, plus Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hart.
Favourite Broadway divas: Patti LuPone, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, Madeline Kahn, Joanna Gleason and Maureen Moore, Audra McDonald. Ute Lemper isn't Broadway, but she's great as well!
Favorite classic film actresses include: Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, Celeste Holm, Angela Lansbury and Julie Andrews.
Best CD ever:
The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books (16 CDs)
- yeah, expensive, I know. But it's well worth the money. 16 hours of music and not a mediocre song. Plus it's wonderfully remastered.
I love to read anything by Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie.
I'll be glad if you send me a PM or an email.
You can write in English, French, Czech or very simple German.
Reviews
L'heure zéro (2007)
Surprisingly 'fidèle'
Towards Zero is not one of Agatha Christie's more famous novels, but for a murder mystery lover it is almost an essential read. It has been several years since I read it, but I very distinctly remember how much I enjoyed it as well as the plot and the substantial twist.
This French movie adaptation is set in present day Bretagne, but other than that remains - rather surprisingly - true to the book, more so than, for example, the Diana Rigg version of Evil Under The Sun. All important plot points remain intact. Not that this in itself signifies a great movie. Au contraire, vraiment - while the cinematography, setting, music and pacing are more or less good, many of the actors overact their characters to the point of becoming caricatures instead. The shrewish wife or the maid (vaguely reminiscent of Nancy Walker's Yetta in Murder By Death, nevertheless wholly unsuitable for a serious murder mystery) are best examples of this. Danielle Darrieux is, quite unsurprisingly, not among those, and her much too brief appearance as Aunt Camilla is the only real performance in the picture. François Morel as the detective comes close to one, but not quite close enough.
Final verdict: Entertaining murder mystery with some hammy performances, fast pacing and a great twist by Dame Agatha herself. Also useful as a French listening comprehension practice, especially if you're as lucky as I am and your copy lacks subtitles.
Notre-Dame de Paris (1998)
No one enjoys a good musical more than I do ...
... but the trouble of this production is that it's very far from a good musical.
Granted, one can't always expect the witty masters like Sondheim or Bernstein or Porter; yet the music of this piece makes even Andrew Lloyd Webber look witty. It's deadly dull and uninventive (with one or two exceptions) and just after I watched it I couldn't recall a single significant melody - which is rather tragic coming from someone who learned the whole Another Hundred People from three listenings.
It is also strangely un-theatrical. It takes place on an incredibly large stage (one really has to feel sorry for those people in front rows who broke their necks in order to see something happening 50 meters on the right or 100 meters on the left) and does absolutely nothing with it. When there's supposed to be one person singing on-stage, that's just what you get - and the rest of the enormeous stage is empty. For me as an aspiring theatre director it was almost painful to watch.
The fact remains, Cole Porter seems to have captured the French culture in his works better than these no-talents can ever come close to. And I'm puzzled by the popularity of this would-be-legendary musical.