EVITA
A film review by Michael John Legeros
Copyright 1997 Michael John Legeros
(Hollywood) Directed by Alan Parker Written by Alan Parker and Oliver Stone Music by Andrew Lloyd Weber Lyrics by Tim Rice Cast Madonna, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce, Jimmy Nail MPAA Rating "PG" Running Time 136 minutes Reviewed at Mission Valley Cinemas, Raleigh, NC (11JAN97)
==
More music video than musical, EVITA is a rock opera that doesn't rock. Three, maybe four songs crackle with the kind of energy that threatens to send the audience into the aisles dancing. The rest of the songs-- all of which sound canned, another problem-- are slower, softer, and often sleep-inducing. Lady Madonna is picture-perfect and, at times, vocally impressive as the died-young-after-sleeping-her-way-to- the-top Argentinean First Lady. Rarely does she sing with the gusto, though, that wandering narrator Antonio Banderas does; he has a set of pipes that you won't believe! The other singer/star is Jonathan Pryce (CARRINGTON) and he barely registers as Juan Peron, partially due to his having the least-interesting singing voice. (And where are the profound basses? Andrew Lloyd Weber's score sorely lacks a bruising bottom-end.) EVITA isn't exactly a fun movie to watch, nor is it particularly power- ful. Director Alan Parker (THE COMMITTMENTS, MISSISSIPPI BURNING), who also co-wrote the script with Oliver Stone, provides, at best, bombastic sketches of a certain someone's life. Little to nothing is revealed about Eva Peron's character, but, oh, doesn't she look pretty and sing well?
Grade: B-
--
Mike Legeros - Raleigh, NC, USA, Earth legeros@pagesz.net (h) - legeros@unx.sas.com (w) MOVIE HELL home page: http://www.n-vision.com/hell/
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews