Anthony: The game: take classical operas and make HBO-type pop revamps of them....
1. "Fat Farm": John Goodman plays the snarky, overweight PR agent to an obnoxious, LA-Perfect Fat Bigot Producer, who, unknown to JG, is having it off with JG's private-school educated daughter Gilda. When he discovers this, he hires a bunch of cheap, Quentin Tarantino like hitmen to off the Producer. During an earthquake, the daughter gets killed in the confusion and the Producer goes on to an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer.
2. "Menage au Trois": a wealthy bored Manhattan woman who is having a
hyperdecadent affair with her transvestite male friend comes to world-weary recognition when she stops the pending engagement of a much younger, innocent girl to a society boor and arranges for her transvestite friend to marry her instead.
3. "He Loves/She Loves": a sleazy New York millionaire, who looks a lot like Donald Trump, has the hots for his personal assistant’s wife. Meanwhile, the Donald’s wife is flirting with a young soldier about to go off to Afghanistan. She sets about reclaiming her husband's affections with the help of the personal assistant and his wife. They set her up as a thrill-seeking out-of-towner on the internet, and arrange for the Donald to fall for her and try to lure her to NY.
4. “A Boy’s Best Friend”: A young man (played by Johnny Depp) is controlled by his seductive, grasping mother (Angelica Houston). They are sleazy record producers. She is desperate to keep him from pursuing a relationship with the daughter of a business rival. So she seduces Johnny's best friend (oh, let's say ... Toby McGuire), and pays him to take him out to the bars, get him drunk and laid, and convince him to dump the girlfriend. Hearing a lot of stories about how all women are ho's, Johnny ultimately shuns his girlfriend and returns to the family business, heartbroken and bitter.
5. "The Pop Singer": An executive from Spanish language TV suspects his beautiful wife is having an affair with a Telemundo pop singer, who is in reality his half-brother from a disastrous mix-up years ago at an orphanage. The singer's foster mother, a Basque separatist activist and performance artist, is not entirely sure of his parentage either, since her mother, merely a Basque separatist, was condemned to death by the executive's father, a powerful and corrupt judge. She thinks she saved the right baby at the orphanage fire but isn't quite sure anymore since she suffers from ADD. It doesn't end happily.
1. Rigoletto
2. Der Rosenkavalier
3. Marriage of Figaro
4. Tales of Hoffman
5. Il Trovatore (Since the story makes no sense in the original Spanish play that Verdi adapted, it figures that it makes no sense in transliterating it to modern vernacular.)
THis is my favorite kind of twisted.
Posted by: BB | February 14, 2005 at 07:42 PM
I just bought a mini-scubscription to the Tel Aviv Opera for the coming season: Traviata, Rosenkavelier, and Magic Flute. I will now have to think about those operas in a new way. Thank you!
Posted by: savtadotty | October 01, 2005 at 12:24 AM