Evita

This is a great movie...
I just purchased this DVD and I remembered instantly why I enjoyed this film so much when it came out. I would just like to answer some of the critiques listed here.

1) The character of Ché was always meant to be a nemesis to Evita, but not the real character as such . In the stage production that I saw, it was a man with the typical beret and machine gun singing to the side of the action. It would have been ridiculous and historically inaccurate to portray Ché as such in the movie version. Ché Guevara was still a medical student when Eva died. I think it is very effective to blend Ché into various characters because it represents the silent and not so silent opposition to the Perón Revolution. The only time the two characters meet for real interaction is when Evita is having delusions. The song argued in that moment perfectly clashes Ché's "idealism" with Evita's "realism." Ché is always there in some form, yet Evita...

EXCELLENT Adaption of the broadway show - have an open mind.
Boy do people miss the point on this movie. You can't present a movie like a broadway show. Everytime this has been attemped, historically, the results are bad, most adaptions of famous shows are only OK at best, some are awful. The medium is totally different, the demands are different, the singing is different, the acting style is different. Yes, the shows usually are "better", in a sense, that's how it was originally written, as a stage play. You have got to really change things to make a successful movie.

So how good an ADAPTION is this? Very good indeed. The story was changed to very effectively fit the medium. Madonna stretched herself unbelievably to do this role, and I think she did very well. You may quite validly prefer the stage version of Evita (I like both), but its almost like apples and oranges. As good as Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin were, they would, if they played it the same way anyway, come off mannered and absurd in a movie context...

certainties disappear
Worth noting that Evita is wall-to-wall music with virtually no spoken lines: not an opera so much as an extended music video, so the pop-music motifs need not be an anachronism.

I'm not a fan of Madonna, I find Andrew Lloyd Webber's music a bit obvious .. and yet -- and yet. Here everything seems to come together. It's a visually gorgeous film, the added songs (The Lady's Got Potential, You Must Love Me) are strong enhancements. The Che character's change from Che Guevara in the stage version to an Argentine Everyman here (desk clerk, bartender, cabinet minister, union activist) is an improvement over the stage musical and Antonio Banderas is a smoldering presence who carries the movie. Jimmy Nail is perfect as the oily tango singer; Jonathan Pryce capable in an equally slick role. The montage songs are splendid, like Goodnight and Thank You, that bucket-brigade sequence of Eva's lovers that she uses (and the film uses) to get her from the street to the Casa Rosada, or...

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