Chick Flicks

Here I am ready to pop a DVD in the old machine and settle back for a nice relaxing evening at home. An opera sounds good, and I really feel like a little La Traviata tonight. It's the one with Teresa Stratas and Placido Domingo and I've seen it, oh, a couple of dozen times. Teresa Stratas is just so good, though, so frail and tragic, and I just want to leap through the screen and give her a big hug.

Some would call La Traviata a "chick flick", but I'm afraid I don't have a clue what that means. I guess it means that guys are only supposed to watch movies with lots of guns and explosions, or something like that. I swear, everything is so polarized now days. You're either right wing or left wing, born-again or devil worshiper, filthy rich or living paycheck to paycheck. Well, sorry world, I'm none of those things. I reserve the right to like action movies and melodramas, comedies and tragedies, and I'll weep for poor Violetta if I feel like it. And for god's sake, Violetta, you really need to take better care of yourself. Take a pill or something, would ya'. No, don't go out partying tonight. Stay home, get some rest...oh, it's useless. It always ends the same.

Misterioso, altero, Croce e delizia al cor. (Excuse me for singing, but it's just so sad.)

You know what I think? I think "guy flick" is really just a euphemism for "dumbed-down". Not that there's anything wrong with that. I like dumb movies as well as the next person, but I hope I can be forgiven if occasionally I aspire to something different. Anyways, it all fits in with my whole, much broader Theory of Devolution. That is, after beginning as lowly primates and achieving our intellectual and spiritual pinnacle, we are now slowly devloving, growing more apish, and soon we'll be nothing more than brainless bacterium. It's gonna happen, you watch.

Ernani

And speaking of Verdi, what was he thinking when he took on this libretto? This may well be the worst surviving opera still in the repertory. I got the Met version with Pavarotti, Milnes, Mitchel and Raimondi, and with a cast like that and a score by Verdi I figured it had to be good. Well....

If ever there was a "guy flick" opera, this is the one. The soprano doesn't really have that much of a role, and the bulk of the dramatic action amounts to nothing more than a lot of silly alpha male posturing between the other 3 leads. I'd call it kind of a cross between Goodfellas and The Sound of Music. In fact, if they would have cast De Niro as Ernani, Pesci as the Duke, and Liotta as the King, they might have had something. Of course the violence level would have to be turned way up, but it would be interesting.