I'd read the reviews, so I made a point to avoid the movie rendition of the musical. And I managed to hold out for pretty long, but my curiosity finally got the better of me, and I rented the movie. That was a big mistake. Did it look good? I suppose. But I just kept asking myself, "What's the point?" No characterization, no insight, and no humanity. The musical is a bit of a one trick pony, but it was quite a trick in its day. And I say I enjoyed it. I felt something as Christine returned the ring to the Phantom at the end. But not in the movie. It took a concept, and reiterated it without using the medium. For example, at one point, Christine sings of her father when he passed away. And what do we see? Pictures of her father passing away. As if we were too vapid to understand the concept just through words. Or by showing something less literal. Take Sideways, for example, in the dinner scene where Paul Giametti's character has drank a little too much and recently found out his ex-wife was remarried. We hear the dialogue from the dinner conversation, but what we see is his response. A phone call. Anxiety. Thought. We can feel that he is off kilter, and it lets us understand his feelings towards the conversation that we hear. In other words, by showing something other than the literal imagery of the dinner conversation, we are able to enter his psyche and better understand him. No such insights occur in the Phantom. Instead , it was a slide show in technicolor that said nothing more than the musical on stage. Except that this wasn't on stage, so what worked in one medium didn't work here.

This is a great lesson for wedding video. Many people expect and approach wedding videography as a structural documentation of the day. They count on the photography to capture the emotion and nuance, while the video reproduces the order of the events. But, when done right, this couldn't be further from the truth. Video, like film, is a dynamic medium that compresses time and space in a way that nothing else can. We frequently hear people talk about our couples. "Oh, she's so into it!" or "You can see what he's thinking." People react during weddings, and when done right, a video will be rich with questions, stories, and answers. People will have character, and they will be thinking and feeling as they respond to the tapestry of their wedding day. Might it look good too? Of course. But that's not the real story.