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Indiana Jones and the Awesomeness of Marion Ravenwood

August 16, 2009 at 12:45 am | In Fandom, Gender, Indiana Jones, Movies, Odes, Pop Culture, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | Leave a Comment

Last week I finally saw the first Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark). I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss that one all these years, but I’d actually never seen it before. I’ve watched my older brother play the Indiana Jones computer game on his Amiga 500 in the early 90s, I’ve seen Temple of Doom numerous times during my childhood (somehow it was always on TV when I was a kid), I’ve seen The Last Crusade once (and it scared me half to death), and I even saw the fourth one in the theatres last year (and holy Christ, what was the deal with that one? Aliens? What the hell??), but I’ve never seen the one that started it all.

And what a shame that is, because it’s such an awesome movie! There is hardly one dull moment, and the movie had such a great energy that I couldn’t help being sucked completely into it, despite not generally being into the whole action-adventure genre. Harrison Ford does a great job at establishing himself in the part of Indy, particularly because he’s got a knack for the self-irony that’s needed if the character wasn’t going to turn into a total Mary Sue. The opening sequence, with Indy retrieving the golden idol from the cave, is a classic moment of cinema, as is Indy’s nonchelant shooting of the scimitar guy in the bazaar, and the opening of the Ark. People are always saying that the special effects of the latter scene are laughable by today’s standards, but I don’t agree at all. Or, well, yes, I suppose I do, to a certain extent, but like I mentioned in my Scaries Movie Scenes entry I don’t think it matters. Special effects aren’t everything and the scene is so perfectly directed and composed that it hardly matters that you can tell that the melting Nazis are merely wax figures. It’s still completely bone-chilling.

But I think my favourite part of the movie is Marion. She’s just so completely awesome. Karen Allen plays the part with as much self-irony as Ford, so she never turns into a Mary Sue either. She also has a great sexual chemistry with Ford that’s established right from their first scene together, and you easily believe that the two have a history together even if it is never made clear exactly what happened between them – we only know that Marion was the daughter of Indy’s mentor Abner Ravenwood, that she loved Indy, and that he let her down somehow. And she’s gorgeous to boot: Not too skinny, slightly buxom actually, but still fit, and a bit of a hammerhead, which is always cute. Just look at her!:

Marion Ravenwood

And then she’s got that perfect combo of being tough, resourceful, and brave and squeamish and scared. See, this is what went awry in The Temple of Doom.

Okay, to be fair, a lot of things went awry in Temple of Doom: it is my personal conviction that Spielberg failed as a director with this sequel because he was determined to suck up to his audience of pre-teen boys (by creating the character of Short Round as an object of identification for them, and by stuffing the movie with gory scenes like the Monkey Brain/Eye Soup one that they could talk about in the schoolyard).

But the female lead in Temple of Doom was a major problem, too. The character of Willie is just way to squeamish. She does nothing but scream and fret throughout the movie, and it does nothing for the dynamics of the movie, and, I might add, nothing for the female Indiana Jones audience. Indy is still cool in Temple of Doom, but it seems rather too easy to be cool when you’re constantly contrasted by a screaming woman. Indy is much more interesting with a competent woman by his side who’s woman enough to challenge him, and to make him look stupid every once in a while, without him liking her any the less for it.

Sure, Marion does get kidnapped, she does scream a little every now and then, and needs to be saved by Indy in shining armour a couple of times, and I don’t really understand why we need to see Marion squeeze into not one, but two different uncomfortable and inconveniently tight dresses during the movie (first the one she’s forced into by Belloq, then the silky one she’s miraculously given as a present aboard the ship). But she also stands erect by Indy’s side, hits a villain over the head with a frying pan when needed, or uses her feminine charm (and impressive ability to hold her liquor!) to pull evil Belloq’s leg. “I’m your goddamn partner!” as she tells Indy early on, and she truly is. It makes Indy seem all the more manly, which, in turn makes him sexier to a female audience and more appealing to the male audience, while Marion makes a likeable character for the female audience to relate to. Everyone’s a winner!

In fact, Marion is so awesome that to me her mere presence was an extenuating circumstance in the trainwreck that was The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, too. I simply have to admire Spielberg for having had the sense to make up for the mistake of leaving Marion out of both Indiana Jones # 2 and 3 in his last Indiana Jones movie. I love it that in Crystal Skull Ford wasn’t paired up with, say, Megan Fox, or some other eye-candy starlet decades younger than him, I love it that Karen Allen looked middle-aged and fabulous, I love it that they provided us with a story that explained why Indy and Marion split up between the first and the third movie (Temple of Doom was a prequel to the first movie, so that does to some extend excuse Marion’s absence in that one), and I love it that they got to get married in the end, and that they’d managed to produce Shia LaBeouf together before Indy left Marion in the 1930s.

I found a great video on youtube by The Movie Critic which lists the ten most f’n awesome Indiana Jones Moments:

I agree with the list for the most part and think it’s a great tribute to Indiana Jones altogether, but I still feel that Marion deserves a list of her own. So here it is – below. If you notice any errors in my summeries of the scenes in question, please let me know. I don’t own the DVDs, so I had to do the list from memory. And with a little help from Wikiquote here and there.

The 10 Most Awesome Marion Ravenwood Moments

10. Drinking Match
I agree with The Movie Critic that Indiana Jones’s character is wonderfully established in the opening sequence of Raiders. But so is Marion Ravenwood’s character in her first scene where we see her kicking a big man’s ass in a drinking contest, to the point where the guy is literally unconscious, while Marion just gets up and leaves triumphantly with not as much as a reeling in her walk. We know at that moment that Indy will meet his match in this woman.

9. “Indiana Jones. Always knew someday you’d come walkin’ back through my door.”
And if there had been any doubt left about whether or not Marion would turn out to be Indy’s match, it’s all cleared up during their first scene together in Raiders: Marion seems pretty cool and calm while first greeting Indy as he enters the bar where she’s a bartender, so Indy’s caught completely off-guard when Marion punches him in the face. “I was a child! I was in love!” she goes on to chastise him, destroying any hope Indy might have had that their failed relationship was long forgiven and forgotten, and that Marion would make things easy for him.

8. Still feisty, twenty years later
In Crystal Skull Indy finds Marion in Peru where she’s been captured by Russians, and it’s been 20 years since he’s seen her. When he first sees her, Indy walks up to her incredulous, and he does this wonderfully goofy grin, obviously expecting to have a warm, tearful reunion with Marion. He really ought to have known better. Because the last time Marion saw Indy, he practically left her standing at the altar, and she’s not about to let him forget about that. The goofy grin is quickly wiped off of Indy’s face as Marion brushes past him unimpressed. Shortly after the following conversation ensues:

“Indy (confused, to Mutt): Marion Ravenwood is your mother?!
Marion: Oh, for God’s sake, Indy, it’s not that hard!
Indy: Well, I know, I just thought-
Marion: That I would never have a life after you left!
Indy: Well, that’s fine…
Marion: A damn good, really good life!
Indy: Well, so have I!
Marion: Really? Still leaving a trail of human wreckage behind you, or have you retired?
Indy: Why, you looking for a date?
Marion: With anyone but you!”

Awesome.

7. Drinking Belloq under the table
Belloq, the chief villain in Raiders, is such a smug bastard. Constantly outmatching Indy using foul play and teaming up with Nazis while wearing a flimsy straw hat that doesn’t hold a candle to Indy’s rugged, brown fedora, he also manages to kidnap Marion and sneaks a very un-gentleman-like peek at her as she slips into a fancy dress that he’s forcing her to wear. Sleazeball. But as has been established early on in Raiders, Marion has a knack for drinking people under the table, and she puts this ability (plus her ability to sex men up) to good use in the scene…

A fellow Marion fan has put up the scene on youtube:

6. Marion and the frying pan
While being chased at the Cairo bazaar in Raiders, Marion manages to outsmart a villain by running into a house, hiding behind the doorframe, and then hitting the guy over the head as he tries to follow her into the house. We don’t actually see her hitting him, we just see her going in, the guy following her, the sound of a frying pan hitting a human head, and then, promptly, the guy falling out of the doorframe, unconscious. It’s a wonderfully slap-stick moment that has even earned the action figure!Marion Ravenwood a frying pan as her attribute:

Marion_1

5. Whac-a-Mole Marion
A little earlier in the bazaar scene, we see Marion and Indy fighting the villains together. While Indy’s doing some heavy fist-fighting, you can see Marion in the background, hitting some of the bad guys over the head with some boxes found in the bazaar. The scene goes on for quite some time, and Marion just keeps at it as if she were a kid at a Whac-A-Mole, going in for the big prize.

4. “Mutt… I mean, his name is Henry… He’s your son.”
See, this is what’s so nice about Marion. She’s feisty, but she still has a big heart, and obviously loves Indy more than she’d care to admit. In Crystal Skull when she believes that she and Indy are seconds away from perishing in drysand, she’s not about to let Indy die without letting him know the truth about her son Mutt, who’s served as Indy’s young partner during the first half of the film: Indy is his father – he fathered the kid unwittingly before he left Marion in 1937. A warm and fuzzy, and also funny moment, nicely played by both Allen and Ford.

3. “We can never seem to get a break, can we, Indy?”
It’s only natural that in the real love scene between Indy and Marion in Raiders, it’s Marion who initiates things, feisty girl that she is. Indy is in bed, and Marion’s next to him, and you can tell that things are heating up between them. Except Indy’s all bruised and battered from having performed a series of impressive stunts in the previous scene, and he whimpers every time Marion tries to touch him. She loses patience with him, and in a scene slightly reminiscent of the scene between Zerlina and Masetto in Don Giovanni ( “Ahi, ahi! La testa mia!” ) Marion asks him to just point out to her the places where he’s not hurting. He starts off innocently, by pointing to his forehead and such, which she kisses, but he keeps getting bolder, and eventually Marion leans down to kiss Indy deeply on the lips. It’s Marion, too, who wants things to go further after this kiss – only to find that the exhausted Indy has fallen a sleep while kissing her and is unable to deliver. Too bad! But then she got her chance later on, as Mutt is living proof to.

2. The Well of Souls
See, this is the difference between Marion and Willie: Marion only screams when she has just cause for it. And she certainly does in the Well of Souls scene. Snakes everywhere, and dried-up dead bodies falling down on her all over the place! So she does a fair amount of screaming in this scene, but she still has the energy to clutch her stiletto-heel shoe, yell at Indy, and curse at Belloq (“You bastard! I’ll get you for this!”). Classy! And awesome.

You can see the whole scene here:

1. “They weren’t you, honey”
There’s a nice bit of conversation in Crystal Skull where Indy and Marion discuss the time that’s gone by since they last saw each other:

Marion: “I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to go on with my life. There must have been plenty of women for you over the years.”
Indy: “There were a few. But they all had the same problem.”
Marion: “Yeah, what’s that?”
Indy: “They weren’t you, honey.”

I swear, half the audience when “Awww!” at this line when I saw the movie in the theatre. Arguably it’s mostly Indy being awesome in this little bit of dialogue, but I like to see the line as a nod to Indy fans – an apology for having replaced Marion’s character with tedious “Indy” girls in Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade.

Top 5 Favourite Early Beatles Songs with Lead Vocals by John Lennon

July 6, 2009 at 3:00 pm | In Fandom, Music, Pop Culture, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 3 Comments

youngjohnlennon

I know, I know. Writing a blog entry about The Beatles. I might as well put up an entry that reads “You know what’s really cute? Kittens and bunnies. Kittens and bunnies are really cute.” or titled ”Why Racism is Wrong”. Even so, I’m writing this entry.

I went through this whole big Beatles-phase in the eighth grade, where my best friend and myself would sit around in each other’s rooms after school and listen our way through every Beatles album ever released. It got really freaky for a while, the way fandom usually does when you’re 13 years old. I remember wearing black and mourning all day on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, and realizing at some point that I knew the lyrics of every single Beatles song ever written. I also think that thanks to this adolescent Beatles phase of mine, Help! is still the movie I’ve seen the most times.

My friend and I neatly divided the fandom between us so that she liked Paul McCartney the best, and I was all about John Lennon and thought he was the most divine man ever to have lived. I like to think that I’m over that by now, but the truth is I’m really not. I think “Imagine” is an awful song and actually pretty much dislike the entire oeuvre of his solo career, but I still think he was incredibly awesome when co-working with McCartney, and he was undeniably a genius songwriter.

And then he had a singing voice that can still make me all school girl-ishly weak in the knees whenever I hear it. Which is what I really wanted to write about in this entry, my Top 5 Favourite Early Beatles Songs with Lead Vocals by John Lennon, or, more idiomatically, my T5FEBSLVJL. Because John Lennon had such a good singing voice for rock ‘n roll music. And I think people sometimes tend to forget this, focusing mostly on his songwriting abilities, or even his heavy-handed fight for world peace, so I thought I’d bring attention to it in this entry. His voice simply sounded sexy, I think, like leather jackets and five-o-clock-shadows and sweet nothings whispered into your ear at a scruffy bar late at night. It’s especially prominent in the high notes when his voice sounds like it’s almost about to break, allowing a kind of passionate desperation to creep into his clarinet-like barytone that brings a certain edge to the songs. And while I love the later Beatles songs, I think the earlier songs tended to set off this particular edge the best – perhaps because the early songs otherwise sound relatively innocent to the modern ear. Here are my five favourite examples of this phenomenon:

5. “Mr. Moonlight”
This is not a Beatles song in as much as it’s not written by The Beatles; rather it’s written by Roy Lee Johnson. All in all it’s a pretty forgettable song, but John Lennon’s voice in the intro is so awesome.

4. “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”
Another song that isn’t actually a Beatles song. It was written by The Miracles, but I think that the Beatles’ recording of it is actually the best there is. John’s vocals seem to be balancing on the upper edge of his high range, truly adding to the desolate ambience of the lyrics. George Harrison delivers the harmony, but it’s John’s voice that stands out.

3. “You Can’t Do That”
One of John Lennon’s more macho songs, thematically related to “Run for Your Life” , and this makes the aforementioned raunchy sound of his voice even more apt.

2. “Twist and Shout”
It almost seems redundant to mention this one, because it’s so famous, but I’m doing it anyway, because John does that almost-breaking-voice thing constantly in this live cover version of a Top Notes song:

1. “This Boy”
“This Boy” is my favourite example when it comes to John’s voice. Which is funny because I actually find most of the song to be slightly dull and monotonous – but it’s saved by the bridge where John gets to display the full potential of his voice, as he takes the lead and breaks free from the morose harmonies of the song. The result is incredible. And then he is just so impossibly cute in the video when he raises his eyebrows while reaching the high note! Eeeee, look at him! I don’t know what all those girls were on about, screaming their lungs out over Paul McCartney with his puppy dog eyes and awkwardly bopping head.

Top 5: Favourite Opera Dagger Scenes

June 16, 2009 at 1:13 pm | In Gender, Music, Opera, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 2 Comments

Ok, so this Top 5 may seem way far-fetched, but bear with me here. I wanted to do an entry on the subject of opera, because I haven’t done one of those in ages, and I wanted to do another top 5, but I’m studying for an exam, and this was the first thing that popped into my head.

And when you think about it, it’s not really that far-fetched. There are a lot of daggers in operas. I’d say it’s what kills about 60% of all opera characters. In fact, if I were to make a graph of opera deaths, I imagine that it would look something like this:

operagraph

And it’s no wonder that librettists are so fond of daggers, really. A dagger is an easy prop to carry around stage, it may be aesthetically pleasing with its blade flashing in the stage light, and one might say that the dagger is the opera version of Chekhov’s Gun: You just know that someone’s going to be bleeding to death from a stab wound later on if a dagger is shown or mentioned at some point in an opera.

And thus I would say that it’s justifiable to make a top 5 of my five favourite dagger moments in operas:

5. The Foreshadowing Dagger – Macbeth: “Mi si affacia un pugnal?”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” - probably one of the most famous literary mentions of a dagger, featured here in Verdi’s opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth is still debating whether or not to take his wife’s advice and kill King Duncan in the name of ambition, as he suddenly seems to see a dagger floating before him, urging him on. The ghostly dagger is a foreshadowing both of the murder that Macbeth will later commit and of the hauntings that he will experience subsequently (by the ghost of Banquo and by his own conscience both). Macbeth is not my favourite opera, but the music here is very appropriately dramatic and hectic:

4. The Jealousy Dagger -Wozzeck: “Dort links geht’s in die Stadt”
The dagger scene in Wozzeck is related to other opera jealosy dagger scenes, such as the final scene in Carmen, where (SPOILER!!1!!) Don José stabs Carmen to death. But I chose this one because it’s a got such a singularly eerie atmosphere. The entire opera is eerie, just as the original play by Georg Büchner is, and in every scene you get that feeling that there is something dreadful and horrible lurking just around the corner. In this scene, it’s the dagger, and you kind of know that it’s coming: Wozzeck is a poor soldier who has only one thing to live for: His beloved wife Marie and their little son. But alas, Marie has been fooling around with the flashy donjuan the Drum Major, who even has the nerve to ridicule Wozzeck as the two share a scene together. “Better a knife in my body than your hands on me” Marie says spitefully, as Wozzeck confronts her with his suspicion. Famous last words…

3. The Suicide Dagger – Otello: “Niun mi tema”
Another jealous husband, yet a completely different use of the dagger. I’ve included this one because it always manages to come as a bit of a surprise for me. We’re at the ending of Otello where the title character has just strangled his wife Desdemona to death in the belief that she has been unfaithful to him with the handsome Cassio. Only too late is he informed that the whole thing was a scheme orchestrated by Otello’s vicious ensign Iago, and that Desdemona was innocent. Otello is crushed as he finds out about this, and the music turns solemn like a funeral march as he bids the pale, tired, mute, and beautiful Desdemona goodbye. It’s easy to get the impression that the opera is over now, and that there’ll be no more drama. That is, until suddenly there’s a crescendo, and Otello draws a dagger…

2. The Who-Will-It-Be? Dagger – Rigoletto: “Ah! Piu non ragiono!”
This is probably the most suspenseful opera dagger scene I can think of. In the scene, the hitman Sparafucile is preparing to kill the Duke, whom he’s been hired to kill by Rigoletto, who wants to avenge his daughter Gilda’s loss of virtue to the womanizing nobleman. However, things start to go amiss as Sparafucile’s wanton sister Maddalena has developed an elaborate crush on the Duke and tries to talk Sparafucile into sparing his life and killing Rigoletto instead. To make things worse, Gilda, who’s still madly in love with the Duke, shows up at Sparafucile’s door and overhears Sparafucile saying that if someone were to knock on their door before midnight, he’d agree to kill that person instead of the Duke. As midnight approaches and a thunder storm rages, a terrible plan forms in Gilda’s head…

What’s so great about the scene is that even if you’ve never seen the opera before you just know that by the end of the scene someone will be stabbed with a dagger and killed, and the suspense rises along with the crescendo of the storm depicting the music: Will Sparafucile kill the Duke? Or will Rigoletto be the victim? Or will Gilda sacrifise herself for her heartless seducer? The explosive auditory effects of the thunder storm makes for a horrifying on-scene stabbing; you can almost feel the sensation of blood mixing with rainwater as the dagger penetrates the victim’s drenched skin at the end of the scene… Gruelling, wonderfully so!

1. The Penetration Dagger – Tosca: “Questo è il bacio di Tosca!”
In Catherine Clement’s book Opera or the Undoing of Women, Clement recounts the anecdote of a young woman, an opera newbie, who went to see Tosca and returned saying that the ending was wonderfully feminist – that it was so great that Tosca got away with the murder of Scarpia. The explanation was, of course, that the woman had mistaken the second act for the last one, which is an easy mistake to make, really. The outcome of the second act with the death of Scarpia seems like such an appropriate ending, not least because of the dagger. Most of the second act has been like a foreplay from Hell, with Scarpia terrorizing Tosca by making her listen to her boyfriend Mario’s screams of agony from the adjacent torture chamber, and finally Scarpia forcing Tosca to have sex with him in exchange for Mario’s life. So you could say that the entire act is embued with the anticipation of a penetration, climaxing as Scarpia, having obtained Tosca’s reluctant consent, rushes to embrace her. What he doesn’t realize at this point is that Tosca has fetched a dagger from his dinner table and is preparing for an entirely different kind of penetration…
This would have been a feminist ending to the story, indeed! But then we would have missed out on the entire third act.

Here is the scene in the 1976 movie version with Kabaivanska, Milnes, and Domingo, which was the first Tosca I ever saw:

Top 5 Favourite Snowy Movie Scenes

February 11, 2009 at 9:33 pm | In Movies, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 2 Comments

It’s been snowing in Copenhagen for two days now, and I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying it. January was a very dull month this year, nothing but grey skies and clammy weather, and I’m finding all the whiteness and the low temperatures refreshing.

And while we’re on the subject of chills: A couple of weeks ago I went to see an amazing movie, the Swedish horror Let the Right One In. I hear it’s been sold to the US and I’d like to give it my warmest recommendations. Telling the story of Oscar, a bullied 12-year-old in a dull little Swedish town who makes a strange friend as the raven-haired girl Eli moves in next to him, the movie is a very atmospheric and atypical horror, focusing less on horror effects and more on character development. Nerd Girl did a review of the movie.

Anyway, a perpetually snowy, bleak suburbian landscape was the setting for the movie. And it got me thinking about snow in movies and what a powerful effect it can be. And so I decided to make one of my beloved Top Five charts, listing my favourite snowy movie moments.

5. It’s a Wonderful Life – George Bailey on the bridge
This is a snowy movie scene that I like a lot, mainly because there’s something so surprising – startling, even – about the way the snow is used. It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas movie, and while there’s almost always snow to be found in Christmas movies, it’s usually pretty, romantic, sparkly snow. But that’s not the case in the scene in which we find George Bailey on the bridge where he contemplates taking his own life. The dark waters below the bridge swirl ominously and the bitter, harsh snow falling into the water creates a mesmerising, vertigo-inducing image that harks back to the romantic idea of The Sublime. I always loved that moment, that brief moment where George Bailey glances down into those waters, right before the angel Clarence comes to his aid.

(scene starts at 8:07)

My dad and I watch this movie almost every year at Christmas. It is of course a terribly sentimental movie, but James Stewart just nails that part. And the ending gets me every single time.

4. Pelle the Conqueror – Pelle’s goodbye
This movie seems to have made a great impression on me – this is the second time that I’m referring to it in a Top 5/Top 10. Indeed it is a really good movie, and the best part of it is without doubt its depiction of the father/son relationship between Pelle and his father Lasse. In this scene, the last one in the movie, Pelle and Lasse have realized that Pelle needs to leave his father and go out into the world to seek his fortune. They say their goodbyes (*SOB*), and the camera pans out as Pelle makes his way through the snow-covered landscape towards the sea.

The piano melody played during the scene is one of my favourite movie pieces. Wonderfully melancholy. In this scene the ice and snow underline the sense of hardship that Pelle still has to face, a sense that culminates, I think, with the image of the vast, steely, uninviting sea that meets Pelle at the very end. But I’ve heard many people argue that they think the sea symbolizes hope and possibility, so maybe I’m just a pessimist by nature.

3. Let the Right One In – “Scream! Scream like a pig!”
I could pick a number of scenes from this movie. As mentioned earlier, snow plays a quintessential part of the art direction for Let the Right One In. But one particularly memorable snowy scene is the one where Oskar and Eli meet for the first time. Oskar, a victim of bullying at school, is in the yard outside on a snowy night. The snow works so well in this scene, it gives the scene an atmosphere of uncanny sterility, as if Oskar’s whole world has been frozen into a permanent state of below-zero degrees, with no warmth for Oskar to find anywhere. Believing himself to be alone in the yard, Oskar takes his frustrations out on a tree, repeating to the tree the things that the bullies at school say to him: “Scream! Scream like a pig!” he demands while he stabs at the tree with a knife. Only to discover that Eli, the mysterious new girl next door is watching him…
The scene becomes crucial later on as Oskar’s and Eli’s relationship develops and he finds out who and what Eli really is.

The scene isn’t available online, but here’s the trailer for the movie:

2. The Shining – Danny in the Maze
Like Pelle the Conqueror, this is another snowy movie scene between a father and a son. Except this one isn’t exactly ambiguous. And the goodbye between father and son isn’t exactly heart-wrenching either…

I’m talking of course of Stanley Kurbrick The Shining. Here’s an example of how snow can be used as a horrifying effect. In The Shining the snow shows itself as the power of nature that it is, causing the Torrance family to be snowed in at the Hotel Overlook where they’re employed as caretakers. This might be scary in and of itself – but it becomes particularly so as the father, Jack Torrance (unforgettable Jack Nicholson) starts going on a rampage, terrorizing his wife and five-year-old son Danny and strange things start happening.

In a memorable scene near the ending of the movie, Danny escapes the hotel and attempts to hide from his father in the maze outside. The massive snow in the scene emphasizes the isolation of the doomed family from the rest of the world and it helps to make little Danny seem even smaller and more helpless. And then, of course, it ultimatively becomes the shrewd little boy’s rescue as he obscures his own footsteps in the snow and confuses his murderous father.

1. The Dead – “Faintly falling, falling faintly”
This is another movie that I’ve mentioned numerous times here on the blog, but it’s an absolute favourite of mine. This is the scene where Gabriel Conroy is comtemplating the snow falling “all over Ireland”, with Death on his mind. I could go on and on about this scene, but I think it’s better to just let the movie speak for itself. This is the most beautiful, most moving use of snow as a motif in any movie I’ve ever seen, and the voice-over with James Joyce’s prose juxtaposited with the images of snow falling on Irish landscapes never fails to move me.

Top 10 Best Opera Moments in Movies/Television

January 15, 2009 at 3:35 pm | In Movies, Music, Opera, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 5 Comments

I promised that I’d make this list about two months ago, so it’s about time I get around to it. Back then I said it was going to be a Top 10 of the best opera or classical music moments in television/movies, but as it’s turned out, it’s all opera.

I got the idea from the Danish ungopera discussion board, where a poster once started a thread on the subject of opera in movies and television; the idea being to celebrate the fact that when television and movies make references to opera or makes use of opera music, because it helps to shed light on the dramatic potential that I see in opera, and thus it may help to rid opera somewhat of that its reputation; opera as an old-fashioned, boring art form. A great idea, and several posters contributed with their favourite moments.

Below is ten movie/television references to opera, that I like a lot:

10. La Grande Vadrouille: La Damnation du Faust Rehearsal

The Boyfriend introduced me to this movie last year, and the scene where the orchestra rehearses the ouverture of Berlioz La Damnation du Faust earns a place on this list for Louis de Funès’ performance as conductor Stanislas LeFort alone.

9. Atonement (2006): Robbie Turner listens to “O Suave Fanciulla”
Ah, young love. In this scene Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis each in their own room get ready for a dinner party, more or less aware of their changed feelings for each other. I loved the scene in Ian McEwan’s brilliant novel, especially for its depiction of Cecilia’s frustration while she’s getting dressed, but movie director Joe Wright did the scene great justice in his movie. Robbie takes out a recording of La Bohème and starts playing it. Mimi and Rodolpho’s ardent love duet lends voices and a temporary release to Robbie or Cecilia’s still unspoken love. A great opera moment in a truly great movie!

I couldn’t find a clip with that particular scene, but here’s a video a youtube poster made set to the duet:

8. The House of Mirth: Lily Bart and the Così fan tutte ouverture
Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth is a favourite of mine. I love Terence Davies’ adaptation of the novel from 2000, and Davies uses opera music at a crucial point in the story of Lily’s downfall. In the scene Lily is at the opera with Gus Trenor, a married male aquaintance from whom she has accepted money, naïvely believing that he’s made the money for her through investments. In reality Gus has been giving Lily money from his own pocket, because he felt that this would buy him his right to Lily’s, erm, kindness, and at this point in the story, he’s starting to get impatient with Lily who isn’t delivering the commodity he feels that he has a legitimate claim to.

There’s no indication in Wharton’s novel that Lily ever attends Mozart’s Così fan tutte, but that’s the ouverture we hear in Davies’ adaptation as Lily incredulously lingers in Gus’ opera box while her surroundings regard her with a mixture of amusement, anger and offense. The music is as beautiful as Lily’s radiant’s smile, and the theme of Mozart’s opera foreshadows the fatal reputation that this night at the opera ultimately earns Lily.

The scene starts at 4:15 in the video below:

7. Skønheden og Udyret (“Beauty and the Beast”): Dido and Aneas by Purcell
Danish director Nils Malmros whom I’ve previously praised made this movie, and it’s probably my favourite among his works. The movie introduces us to a middle-aged man, Jørgen, and his 16-year-old daughter Mette who are alone during the holidays as Jørgen’s wife (Mette’s mother) is hospitalized because of a difficult pregnancy. Mette has a new boyfriend, an older, sophtisticated guy named Jønne, and the relationship between Mette and her father tenses as Jørgen disapproves of the womanizing Jønne and grows more and more overprotective towards Mette.
The story is seen from Jørgen’s point of view and the pain he feels as he slowly comes to terms with Mette’s budding sexuality is beautifully underlined by Malmros’ use of Purcell’s Dido and Aneas in the soundtrack. The story of Aneas who leaves his loving Dido behind doesn’t relate to Jørgen’s and Mette’s story, but the melancholy mood of the music fits the movie well.

You can see the opening sequence from the movie below: Here, the ouverture from Purcell’s work plays as we are shown pictures of Mette growing up from infancy to young adulthood:

6. Krystle Carrington namedrops Leitmotifs in Dynasty episode ”The Cabin”
I’ve mentioned my deep love for Dynasty before, and the following scene from the series beautifully puts the opera in soap opera.

Ok, so there’s no actual inclusion of opera music in the scene, but the way Krystle (the ex-stenographer and Blake’s current wife) tries to out-do Alexis (the cultivated former Mrs. Carrington) by using clumsily using the word “leitmotif” really warms my heart. And it’s followed by a very dramatic fire, worthy of the most competent of Loges!

5. Apocalypse Now: Ride of the Valkyries
Of course I have to include this one in my list. Not exactly a flattering context for Wagner’s music, but a classic movie moment, which needs no further introduction, I’m sure:

4. 3rd Rock from the Sun. John Cleese sings Das Rheingold at a karaoke bar.
I *heart* 3rd Rock from the Sun. This sit-com about four extraterrestrials who asume human form and come to earth in order to study human life is very underrated in my opinion, and the following moment of comedy gold only proves my point. It’s from episode “Dick and the Other Guy” in which Dick (the High Commander of the four aliens) feels interlectually threatened by an unnaturally brilliant guest professor awesomely named Liam Neesam who visits the university where Dick teaches physics. The extreme intelligence of Liam Neesam (played by none other than the always wonderful John Cleese) eventually turns out to be yet another alien who’s come to earth from a different planet.

Before leaving earth again at the end of the episode, Neesam stops by a karaoke bar and treats himself to a night of karaoke. His song of choice? Das Rheingold. Heee!! His audience is less than thrilled and try to walk out on him, but Neesam wil have none of this: “Sit down! Nobody leaves until Wotan has stolen the ring from Alberich!” he screams. Awesome! You may see the clip in the below video – it starts at 1:18, where we’re treated to his interpretation of Donner’s part:

3. È la Nave Va: Engine Room Sing-Out
There are several great opera moments in this Fellini movie about a ship that’s set off to sea with the ashes of a celebrated, deceased opera diva. The best one is arguably this one, where two tenors try to outdo each other by singing highlights from the tenor repertoire in the engine room:

2. L’Age d’Or: The Swooning Conductor and Isolde’s “Liebestod”
In this bizarre yet atmospheric scene from surrealist genius Bunuel, we see a conductor who entertains a garden party by playing an orchestration-only version of Isolde’s “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, but he is overwhelmed and swoons. At the same time, a young man and woman try to sneak off and get themselves some action, but strange obstactles keep coming in the way of their advances towards each other. Impossible love indeed!

1. The Dead: Julia “Arrayed for the Bridal”
Like Wright’s adaptation of Atonement this is a near-perfect adaptation of a literary piece. John Huston’s The Dead based on James Joyce’s short story is one of my favourite movies. In one of my favourite scenes, Julia Morkan sings “Arrayed for the Bridal” from I Puritani. The sound of old maiden Julia singing this bridal aria with her shaky voice is a haunting one and like everything else in the movie, it works as great foreshadowing for Gretta’s soliloquy about Michael Furey and his untimely death later on in the movie.

Unfortunately, the clip was unavailable anywhere online, but if you’ve yet to see The Dead I definitely recommend it! If you’re interested in further reading on the subject, a very interesting online article by Lindsey Warren discusses the use of the aria in Joyce’s short story (as well as Joyce’s use of musical allusions in general).

Number One Least Favourite Case of Classical Music Used in Movies/Television or How Tori Spelling Sexually Abused Chopin

November 18, 2008 at 3:40 pm | In Movies, Music, Pop Culture, Television, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 3 Comments

I’ve been preparing an entry on my Five Favourite Examples of Opera/Classical Music Used in the Context of Television or Movies. I’m hoping to post the list soonish, but I’m somewhat preoccupied at the moment: I’ve got an exam, then I’ve got another exam, and then I’m also moving in with The Boyfriend, so there’s a lot to look into.

In the meantime, however, I thought I’d present you with one case of classical music being downright abused by the motion picture media: The use of Chopin in Co-Ed Call Girl.

For some strange reason I have actually seen this movie in its entirety once, about seven years ago. It was so ridiculously bad that it was almost entertaining. The director, obviously disagreeing with me that Tori Spelling is completely devoid of acting talent and should not have been let on 90210 to begin with, has cast Tori as the main character Joanna in this made-for-TV movie from 1996 about a young college girl who’s lured into the call girl business and ends up being in way over her head. An all-American, wholesome college guy, played by Barry Watson from that god-forsaken show 7th Heaven, helps her see the error of her ways, and the movie ends with our co-ed Traviata getting her life back on track, IIRC.

Every single scene of the movie is cheesy and lame and predictable, but the most gruelling scene, and the one that has truly stuck with me, is without doubt the scene in which a paying customer, who happens to be a classical musician of some kind (possibly a conductor), gets Joanna to strip for him while he’s playing Chopin’s Prelude in A Major on the piano.

Now, Tori Spelling stripping is never good news to me. And it seriously does not help things that what we have here may very well be Tori Spelling’s worst look to date: The bizarre platinum hair-dye and extreme make-up only serve to highlight Spelling’s, erm, unique looks, and holy Moses what is going on with that hairstyle? It looks as if all her hair has scampered to the top of her head in an attempt to avoid the Second Flood, and it does nothing for her longish face.

But what really bothers me about this scene is of course the fact that she strips to a Chopin piece. I’ve had that wonderfully sensuous prelude on CD (the excellent recording by Christina Bjørkøe) since my teens and always loved it, but ever since I saw that movie, the piece has been marred by the image of a near-naked Tori Spelling trying to convincingly convey the emotions ”Shame” and “Insecurity”.

And now I’m passing it on to all of you, because I’m evil like that.

/marie

Top 5 Scariest Movie Scenes from Non-Horror Movies

September 23, 2008 at 9:13 pm | In From the Blogroll, Indiana Jones, Internet Findings, Movies, Pop Culture, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 1 Comment

One of my favourite sites is the Retro Crush Top 100 Scariest Movie scenes. Granted, I usually have a hard time falling asleep at night after I’ve visited the site, but masochist that I am I enjoy it anyway. The site is a fun read and a great inspiration if you’re ever going to host a horror flick slumber party or a Halloween party or the like.

Also, as a blogger, I’m in awe at the thought of all the work Robert Berry, the author of the list, must have gone through…! Not just watching the horror movies, but also finding an individual place for each scary scene on a scale of 1 to 100. And I have to admire his short descriptions, efficiently coupled with excellent movie stills. There are a lot of the movies that he mentions that I’ve never seen, but his great eye for horror has helped him pick out some gruelling stills that I find truly haunting, even without knowing the context of the movie. Very well done.

I’ve been wanting for some time to do a list of Scariest Movie Scenes of my own. But as I sat down to brainstorm for the list, I discovered something peculiar: None of the movie scenes that had scared me the most were from actual horror movies! Retrocrush lists a few non-horror movie scenes as well, but they don’t take up his entire Top 5 the way they do for me.

I thought that was interesting. Does it mean that I haven’t watched enough horror flicks in my time? Or is it simply that it is easier to be scared by scary scenes in a non-horror movie, because the horror comes unexpectedly? I don’t know, but after I was consoled by this fine youtube video with the knowledge that it’s normal to be scared of non-horror movie scenes, I thought I’d present you with my list nevertheless. So here goes:

5. The Dead Baby Crawls Across the Ceiling During Renton’s Trip-Out in Trainspotting
I regret that my memory is somewhat foggy when it comes to Trainspotting on the whole; I watched it in English class in high school ten years ago and I haven’t seen it since. But still, this one scene stands out to me very vividly as one of the scariest movie scenes I’ve ever seen.

It’s the scene where the main character, Renton (Ewan McGregor) is in bed after having gone off drugs cold turkey and is having a series of terrifying hallucinations as the drugs leave his system. His terror culminates as he stares up at the ceiling to find that Dawn, his friend Allison’s baby girl who has died in an earlier scene, is crawling towards him across the ceiling, upside down. As the baby is just above him it stops and spins its head around to look at him.

You can see the scene here:

I don’t think it’s as scary out of context as it was when I watched the movie in its entirety, though. Most of the horror does not stem from the images of the scene in themselves, but from the scene earlier on when Renton and his friends find that the baby has died (supposedly from neglect) while they’ve been out of their minds on drugs.

I was sleepless for a night after my teacher showed us the movie at school. I remember my teacher looking very pale and white the next day and apologizing to us that she didn’t know that the movie was going to be that intense, and I wondered if she’d been insomniac, too.

4. Bringing in the Frozen Fishermen: Pelle the Conqueror
When I was a kid in the 80s, Pelle the Conqueror was all the rage in Denmark. Made by Danish director Bille August, it won both the ”Golden Palms” award at Cannes and the Academy Award in the category “Best Foreign Language Movie” in 1989, and the whole thing really tickled the Danish pride and Pelle the Conqueror became a Danish must-see. Indeed, Pelle the Conqueror is a great movie, depicting brutally and heart-wrenchingly the early life of young boy Swedish Pelle and his old father Lasse (ever amazing Max von Sydow) who immegrate to the Danish island Bornholm after the death of Pelle’s mother.

Despite its young protagonist the film is not, however, a kids’ movie, and I still think it was a really bad idea of my parents to let me watch the movie with them when I was about six years old. The drama holds several incredibly scary scenes, including children being whipped, infanticide, and a man screaming in agony after having been castrated by his wife (!).

However, the scene that stands out to me as the most scary is the scene where Pelle witnesses three dead fishermen being recovered from the icy sea after having supposedly frozen to death in their boats.

(the scene starts at 7:28 in the below video)

The cameo of the three frozen bodies is actually pretty easy to miss: The main focus of the scene is Pelle who is being bullied by his school mates, and the bodies are not even mentioned by anyone. But as it often goes with horror in movies, the suggestion of something terrible is far mor startling than explicit gore, and the discrete image of the frozen bodies scared the living daylights out of me when I first watched this movie and had my imagination working overtime: Who were those fishermen? What were they even doing out there on sea? Were they really in a position where they had to go fishing, even when the sea was frozen?

It’s a brilliant move on director August’s part, in that it subtly hints at the hardships of the poor people that are Pelle the Conqueror’s main characters and the brutality of Nature which is an ungoing theme in the movie. Furthermore, the frozen bodies present the icy sea to us as a freezing killer, thus setting the scene perfectly for the shock when Pelle jumps into the water, eager to prove his worth to the bullying boys. And take care to note the excellent effect of the soundtrack: As soon as we catch the first glimpse of the bodies, a shrill note from a string starts up, at the same time creating an icy, bone-chilling atmosphere around the macabre recovery and building up the tension between Pelle and the boys, releasing it only after Pelle’s near-fatal jump.

Still, I’m not sure I’ll ever completely forgive Bille August for the chilling scare he gave my six-year-old self.

3. “Guess again!”: The Nazi Guy Picks the Wrong Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
When I was a kid I liked Indiana Jones a lot. I watched Temple of Doom several times during my childhood and while I was grossed out by some elements (like the eye-soup/monkey brain thing), I mostly found the adventure movie entertaining and enjoyable. I guess that was probably why my parents figured it would be OK for me to watch the third movie, The Last Crusade when it came on when I was about nine or ten.

That proved to be a mistake, though. Not that I didn’t like it; I loved it, especially the depiction of Indy’s relationship to his father. But there was one scene that simply proved too much for my young self to take: the Wrong Grail scene.

Indiana Jones has made it to the temple that is supposed to house the Holy Grail, and Indy is desperate to find the grail because his father Henry (the one and only Sean Connery. *Le sigh*.) has been fatally wounded and only the holiness of the Grail may cure him. Unfortunately, Indy’s followed by evil Nazis Donovan and Elsa who want to get their greedy hands on the grail, too, and when the knight that guards the grail asks them to identify the true grail among a selection of false cups, Elsa picks the most flashy-looking cup and offers it to Donovan. Donovan drinks from it, despite the knight’s warning that the false cup may take his life, and this is when things get scary: Immediately after drinking from the grail, Donovan starts aging rapidly! He grabs a screaming Elsa’s shoulder and stammeringly asks her what’s happening, all the while his cheeks hollow, his hair grows, he skin wrinkles and cracks, his eyes pop out, and finally his skeleton falls to the ground.

Watching this as a child, I was horrified. I duck down under a plaid I had wrapped around me, and didn’t come out until the movie had ended. And even so, I couldn’t sleep that night, and I was deeply traumatized and I have never really gotten over it. My brother still enjoys grabbing my shoulder and grunting “What’s… happening… to me…??!!” just to freak me out.

And it still does freak me out. People keep telling me that if I just watch the scene again, I would realize how poorly the scene was done, that the whole thing looks like clamation, and then I wouldn’t be scared of it anymore. But again; horror is often less about great and gory special effects and more about suggestion. The suggestion of a situation where a man ages a decade and dies in a matter of seconds is gruesome to me, and the fact that he is conscious during the process and (at least vaguely) aware of what is happening just tops it. Brrrr.

Brutally scary, and I’ll never, ever watch the scene again. I may re-watch the movie, but I’ll cover my eyes and ears during that scene. In fact I didn’t even re-watch it while writing this post. So if I didn’t recount the scene correctly I apologize, but I’m not going to set myself straight.

2. “What do I look like, a jack-ass??” The Donkey Metamorphosis Scene in Pinocchio

Surprisingly, this one is not a scene that freaked me out as a kid. You see, when I was a little girl I had a weird fixation on metamorphoses, and I loved the idea of being turned into an animal. I’m not sure why, but I did. And so I actually thought it was pretty cool when the little boys in Pinocchio were turned into donkeys, and even rather envied them.

Much has changed since then, however, and when I re-watched Pinocchio a couple of years ago, I couldn’t believe that I’d ever enjoyed that particular scene. Truly this is the most inappropriate and disturbing scene ever to be found in a Disney movie. Retrocrush’s list includes the Pink Elephant Trip-out Scene in Dumbo, but to me that one is not even close to be as scary as the horrors that are found in Pinnochio.

The scene takes place as Pinocchio, along with dozens of other pre-adolescent boys, has been lured off to Pleasure Island where they get to drink beer, smoke cigars, ride merry-go-rounds, play billiards and do nothing useful all day. What they don’t know, however, is that this pleasance bears a terrible price…

Gaah! Dude! The dramaturgy of the scene where Lampwick slowly but surely realizes that he’s turning into a donkey and pleads Pinocchio for help is ridiculously scary. I’m especially freaked out by the shot of Lampwick lifting up his hands helplessly, only to see them turned into donkey’s hooves. And of course the juxtaposition of Jiminy’s witnessing the poor donkeys getting shipped off in boxes like merchandise (supposedly to be used for hard labour) only adds to the horror as it shows us Pinnochio’s and Lampwick’s prospects after their transformation. Not to mention: What exactly happened to poor kids like little Alexander who were still human enough to be able to speak??

Truly a scarred-for-life moment. And regardless of my fascination with this scene as a kid, I don’t think I’ll ever let any kid of my own watch this movie.

1. Cardboard Ted Danson Stands by the Window in Three Men and a Baby
Yes, yes, go ahead and mock me. The scariest scene I’ve ever seen is from 1987 comedy Three Men and a Baby. I really, really wish I were kidding about this, but I’m not. It’s true.

But how did an innocent comedy about three men who are charged with the responsibility of taking care of an infant scare me? Well, the thing is that I believed the urban legend that surfaced in 1990, according to which a ghost boy makes an appearance in one of the movie’s scenes. In the scene where Ted Danson has invited his mother over and is trying to convince her to take care of baby Mary (whom he unwittingly fathered), a strange figure, looking rather like a boy of about 10 years, may be seen in the background, standing by the window, contemplating the two thespians and the baby.

The eerie apparation wasn’t noticed until the movie was released on video tape, but then it got a lot of attention. It was even made subject of a Danish prime-time talk show which was how I found out about it. I refused to sleep in my own bed for two nights afterwards, convinced that if I looked towards the window, I’d find the ghost boy standing there, staring back at me. I never really got over it, and I found it hard to shrug off my fears the way I’d usually do if I’d been scared by a movie. Because what made this scene so scary was that if the rumours were true, the scare factor had nothing to do with a director wanting to scare his audience by making a effectively constructing a scary scene (as the scene was clearly directed as a humourous one) and everything to do with the miserable, restless soul of a dead boy. And even worse, if the rumours were true, then the scene was possibly proof that unhappy dead people like that boy were all around us, sadly contemplating us.

Of course it turned out that it was simply a cardboard cut-out of Ted Danson’s likeness, a prop that had been left in the scene by mistake. I know this now. And yet – when I tried to watch this scene again recently, I found that I was pretty much every bit I freaked out as I was as a seven-year-old. I guess there’ll always be that small part of me that wonders if that wasn’t really a ghost.

Or possibly I just have an irrational fear of cardboard representations of Ted Danson that I don’t know about. Could be.

/marie

What I Talk About When I Talk About Opera – My Top-5 Chart of Opera Moments

December 18, 2007 at 5:26 pm | In Fandom, Music, Opera, Reviews, Theatre, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 6 Comments

Last night I took The Boyfriend to the Opera for the first time, to see Don Carlos. The Boyfriend is not an operafan, he had only ever seen one opera prior to the one last night, and it hadn’t been much of a success. So I was of course a tad nervous about what he’d think of his second go at the genre, and maybe that’s why I found myself talking non-stop during the break about why the King Philip’s aria in the third act is the best operatic music ever written, what other scenes in other operas were my favourites, and why, in general, opera is a great, great art form, complete with my arms flailing wildly and me mimicking like a crazy person, eager to get the message through.

After the fact I realized, of course, that I could have spared myself a lot of that flailing and mimicking, had I only waited to give him this lengthy lecture ’till we were in the vicinity of a computer. Because, seriously, after youtube.com has been invented there is really no need for trying to describe anyone anything any more: You just click on that youtube icon on your Favourites link, do a search, and show them what the hell you’re talking about. It’s all there.

And so, I’ve decided to do a top-5 chart of my favourite opera moments, here on this blog, so that I may show my boyfriend, and anyone else interested, exactly what the hell I’m talking about when I talk about opera. Each opera moment will be illustrated with the courtesy of youtube, and described by me.

5. “Deh vieni, non tardar” – Le Nozze di Figaro

This aria from the fourth act of The Marriage of Figaro is lovely. There is no other word for it. Seductive, smooth and flexible, the sound of it flows like a cool breeze through a garden on a warm summer night.

After her marriage to her beloved Figaro, a valet, chamber maid Susanna has snuck into the castle’s garden where she’s conspiring with her lady, the Countess, to play a trick on The Count, who’s been neglecting his loving wife and pursuing Susanna, who wants nothing to do with him. However, as Susanna realizes that Figaro is in the garden, too, furiously and wrongly believing Susanna to be about to, well, ”perform her feudal duties” with their master, Susanna decides to get back at her jealous spouse by showing herself from her most seductive side, thus enraging him further.

And well she succeeds! To me, Susanna is easily the sexiest among operatic heroines, with her shrewd mind, tough will, witty tongue and attractive appearance, and all of these virtues shine through in this aria, where she lets her soprano slides like sweet caresses from one note to the other, all the while never loosing sight of the tricks she’s playing on the two men in her life; the Count and Figaro. The woodwinds in the orchestration are deliciously ambiguous, harking both of the enchanting scene that Susanna is describing in her aria (murmering streams, laughing flowers and fresh turf), and of Susanna’s surpressed giggles at her own scheme.

I’m not crazy about Susanna’s heavy-looking costume in the above clip, but the scenery and the dark-blue light are very nice!

4. “Tutte le feste al tempio” – Rigoletto

If I were to make up the most humiliating and morfifying scenario possible, I think it would be having to live through a very unpleasant sexual encounter, only to be faced immediately afterwards with my father, who, as I would learn only in that same instant, was actually a court jester, complete with a hat with little bells on it.

These, exactly, are the circumstances in this very moving scene from Verdi’s Rigoletto. Gilda, who’s been overly protected by her father to the point where she hasn’t even known what his name was or what he did for a living, has just learned about the birds and the bee the hard way: She has been abducted to the castle of the Duke of Mantova, and the Duke (whom she believed to be a poor student who was madly in love with her) has date-raped her, and when she finally escapes she finds her father there, - dressed up ridiculously in a court jester’s outfit! And he’s asking her to tell her what just happened to her! “Heaven, lend me courage!” exclaims Gilda before starting her recount of her sufferings, and one certainly can’t blame her.

The recount she delievers is the mournful, minor-key aria found in the first 3:40 minutes of the above youtube file, and I think it’s incredibly beautiful. It contains all the fragility, uncertainty, immense joy, and terrible sadness of the Gilda character, who’s the epitome of all the naive-and-abused, young women this world has ever held.

The remaining four minutes of the youtubed video show Rigoletto’s desperation upon learning of his daughter’s dishonour, and subsequently his very moving attempt at comforting her sorrow. I like both Andrea Rost’s and Paolo Gavanelli’s performance in this seemingly very traditional staging of the opera. (Even if I think that Gilda’s nightgown could have been a little more risqué than it is. She’s very demure-looking for a recent date-rape victim).

3. The Final scene of Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin is a relatively new aquaintance to me.

I first saw the opera last Spring in a Copenhagen cinema, where the staging of the above clip was shown on the big screen. I was there with an opera-loving friend, and neither of us were prepared for the impact the opera had on us. After the first act, we were both very much affected by the rejection that Tatiana lived through, and ended up spending the entire break relating to her pain and discussing painful rejections that we had lived through ourselves. And, familiar the storyline of Eugene Onegin, we were both looking forward to the final scene, where Eugene Onegin re-enters an older, married Tatiana’s life, only to be rejected by her, even though she still loves him. “That ought to show that haughty jerk!”, we agreed, anticipating sweet, by-proxy revenge over the men who had hurt us ”Then he’ll regret his own arrogance!”

But then, when we did reach the final act, what we found was that there was no victory in her rejection – at all. Tatiana was miserable and not triumphant in the least, when she rejected Eugene Onegin. And contemplating their desperate last duet with each other, we fully forgave him, too. Because revenge isn’t sweet at all, and no triumphant haughtiness could ever make up for the pain of lost love. Which is a beautiful message, but a heart-wrenching one, too. My friend and I were both moved to tears and were visibly trembling when the lights in the theatre went up again after Eugene’s “O, lamentable fate!” and the opera’s dramatic final cords. She and I had to take a long walk afterwards to steady ourselves, we were that shaken. I’ll never forget that day.

I think the above staging, with Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky is absolutely brilliant, and I can’t imagine it being done better than this. The scenography and the costumes are simple, but bear impact, Renée Fleming is wonderfully sweet in the part of bold daydreamer Tatiana, Hvorostovsky is every bit as haughty as he should be, and the two of them have magnificient chemistry. Bravi! Also, *sob*.

2. “La povera mia cena fu interrotta” – Tosca

I love that thing they often do in operas, where they pretend to do be casually chit-chatting, all the while they’re totally hating each other or scheming against each other. Eboli and Rodrigo do it in Don Carlos, too, Ieronimus and Leonard do it in Masquerade, and Iago and Cassio do it in Otello.

No one, however does it better or more interestingly than Tosca and Scarpia in Tosca, I think. “My humble dinner was interrupted” says Scarpia, which is just such a wonderful euphemism for what just happened - Scarpia has violently interrogated Tosca’s political rebel boyfriend right in front of her, and, upon his continuous denials, has had his guards dragging him off to be executed! Dramatic Floria Tosca is not a good actress in real life, so of course she can only keep up the chit-chat for so long before she once again interrupts Scarpia’s dinner. “How much [money do you want]!”, she snaps at Scarpia, in the hopes of buying Mario, her boyfriend, free. Ah, but Scarpia doesn’t want her money, he says, he wants something else – namely her; her body. Scarpia is still terrifyingly matter-of-fact when he proposes this gruesome negotiation, but it doesn’t last: Soon his desire for Tosca shines through his slick conversational skills, and he throws himself at Tosca, with a druggingly passionate claim, leaving Tosca to understand that more than negotiating with cold, corrupted chief of police, she’s dealing with a sadistic maniac: “Already in the past I burned with passion for the diva. But the way you’ve been tonight, I have never seen you before. Your tears were lava to my senses, and that fierce hatred that your eyes shot at me only fanned the fire in my blood.”

In other words, the more she hates him, the more she rejects and fights him, the more he wants to get it on with her. Ick! The most claustrophobic moment is reached when Tosca, desperate to escape Scarpia and his devilish suggestion, cries: “I hate you, vile person!”. “All the same to me,” groans Scarpia, ”- spasms of anger, or spasms of passion…!” The scene ends with the eerie sound of the scaffold drums beating for Mario outside the window that Tosca vainly threatens to jump out of, as Scarpia advices Tosca to think over his proposition veeeery carefully…

It doesn’t get much better than this, drama-wise, I think. Tosca is desperate, and Scarpia is so scary, yet grotesquely alluring in his raging passion. The subsequent scene with Tosca’s aria “Vissi d’arte” is very popular, but I’m actually not too fond of it. To me it halts the action in an otherwise perfectly composed, action-packed second act, and brings too much attention to Tosca, whose diva-like psychology I regard as insignificant to the story. To me, Tosca is the story depicting the movements of a society where a conservative reign is giving way under the pressure of a rapidly growing rebellion, and as such, the diva Floria Tosca only represents the goods that each party hope to gain; love, beauty, art, popularity. Floria Tosca is Mario the rebel’s boyfriend because the times they are a-changing in Rome, and the rebels are starting to win. And when the old, losing regime, represented by Scarpia, realizes this, they do what an oppressive regime always does when threatened: They use violence to get what they want. It’s this political movement that we see in the second act of Tosca, brilliantly depicted through the struggle of a woman against the sick passions of a sadistic man.

The staging shown in this clip, featuring Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, is from a very popular recorded staging of Tosca, but I have to say that I’m not all that crazy about it. I prefer the 2002 Jacquot Tosca movie, in which Ruggero Raimondi shines enough in the part of Scarpia to make up for the fact that Angela Georghiu and Roberto Alagna are totally hamming it up. (I do like the way Gobbi grabs his man-boobs upon singing about Tosca’s tears being like lava to his senses, though! )

1. “Ella giammai m’amo” – Don Carlos

This is my bring-to-a-desert-island aria. As I explained to The Boyfriend, arm-flailingly, last night; this aria simply contains all human misery. All the misery of humankind, worked into one, amazing aria. Aging King Philip, realizing that his wife doesn’t love him, finds himself old and unloved, and destined for a lonely death, a death that will offer him the only peace he will ever be able to find. Accordingly the music of the aria moves from anguish at his broken heart, over a lento march of sorrow at the thought of his own royal funeral, and on to an agitato wish to rise above his human form and be a God, who might look into the heart of his wife, of Elisabetta, the heart that will always be closed to him. It doesn’t get any more moving than this, I think. Verdi’s music is brilliant, and I love the lyric’s subtle use of the colour of white as something threatening: The youthful, pale light of dawn that awakens Philip from his reveries, his own white hair that Elisabetta contemplated sadly when she received him as her husband. Absolutely perfect.

I like the staging of the youtubed video, although I think it’s a shame that the editor has left out the first few bars of the prelude to the aria – this is one of those arias where the anticipation of the prelude forms a complete symbiosis with the release of sentiment that the aria delievers. I love the EMI recording of the opera with Ruggero Raimondi sining Philip: Raimondi beautifully climaxes with a powerful forte at the final, desperate outcry “Amor per me non ha!”.

/marie