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shoppermark
Reviews
Tosca (2001)
Oh, vomit!
Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna, and Ruggero Raimondi are fabulous singers doing fabulous work here. The London Royal Opera House orchestra is great too. Unfortunately, the the movie is just repulsive! Repellent! It's so bad it's not even bad-funny. The camera swoops around inappropriately. The sets are tableaux floating in space. The action abruptly cuts away to the orchestra and singers actually doing the recording, shot in black and white in some basement somewhere. And then we're back to live action again as soon as the good part is finished.
Actors sort of magically float out of the gloom that would be the wings in a theater, and then drift back into it when they go offstage. The singers, good as they are, are no movie actors. Angela spends most of the two hours with a weird grin on her face. Ruggiero is so oily-evil that I worried he might slide out of the frame at any moment--but it's oily-evil in some kind of Star Trek foreign planet kind of way, not the evil of palaces and politics.
If you rent it, super-glue your eyes shut as you hit Play.