The Phantom Of The Opera

At IMDB.com!
For once, I am not including a plot summary from IMDB. This is because there are only two posted - one written like bad advertising copy, and the other telling the entire story of the movie in one paragraph.
Bah.
Well, before we get started: Buy this DVD. But only if you can find it in widescreen.

To expand on this, for those who don't know why they should care: TVs are becoming widescreen. All of the HDTVs are widescreen, and widescreen standard TVs are becoming more and more common, because the movie industry is pushing - hard - to make widescreen the standard. For once, I don't disagree with what they're doing. Anyone who reads my main blog knows that I typically loathe the decisions and actions of the movie industry, but this is not one of those times.
The reason for this is exemplified perfectly by the fullscreen DVD of Phantom of the Opera. In the movie, the set design is incredibly lavish, and goes from edge to edge of the movie screen, in amazing panoramas of lush detail. The fullscreen DVD chops all the set design away completely, focusing only on the actors / singers. The singing and acting are still great, but this detracts enormously from the impact of the movie as a whole.
It's great to avoid the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen (called letterboxing,) but if you do so at the expense of later having even more intrusive bars at either SIDE of the screen when you upgrade to a widescreen, you're not improving your DVD collection, not to mention that you are missing huge chunks of the director's vision. While this is not always necessarily a bad thing, in a movie with such powerful set design, like Phantom or Vanity Fair, it hurts the movie immensely.
However, let me talk about the movie. (Lest I forget, in my orgy of distaste for fullscreen DVDs.) This is one instance of the ad copy being right - Phantom is one of the best movies I've seen in years. The screenwriter took Andrew Lloyd Webber's already incredible story and music and added his own touches - usually a kiss of death, I know, but in this case wonderful - and produced a movie script of really impressive depth, and the director carried it out to the peak of its promise.
An example of the kind of "touches" the screenwriter added: in Webber's original stage production, there's never any significant explanation of where the Phantom himself came from and why he's at the opera house. The film not only explains this, but in fact gives a complete backstory for it, which has the effect of humanizing the Phantom to a much greater degree, making him a much more sympathetic character than in the original, and greatly increasing the impact of some of the later scenes and songs.
This movie should have won Best Picture this year at the Oscars. Million Dollar Baby might be a good movie, but Phantom absolutely topped it at every level. (Never think I don't respect Clint Eastwood as an actor and director, but MDB just plain wasn't as good as Phantom.)
As I said when I first got started, if you can find this in widescreen - preferably, the theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio (super widescreen,) buy it. Immediately. If you can only get it in fullscreen, buy it anyway - but bear in mind that you're missing the true impact until you see it in widescreen. The music is fantastic - even worth buying a home theater in-a-box kit to really enjoy it - and this is one of the not too many movies I can think of that leaves not a dry eye in the house, without coming across as maudlin.