Don Giovanni versus Speed Racer

On Friday night I went with a friend to see the movie Speed Racer. On Saturday night, I went with a friend to see Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. What really struck me as odd is how similar they are . . . from a certain point of view.

As soon as I heard that the Wachowski brothers were going to do a movie adaptation of the cartoon Speed Racer, I was intrigued. The trailers showed a brilliantly colorful world with creative cinematography. I was excited to see what they had done with it. Then, the week leading up to the opening, I started reading reviews for it. The general tenor of the reviews was that the movie, while innovative, artistic, and colorful seemed light on the plot and almost too much of that prismatic racing world. They also said that the film was much too long at 2 hours 15 minutes.

Fast forward to Don Giovanni. I didn't know much about the story until I read the synopsis. The music was brilliant; the costumes were amazing; and the singing was extraordinary. The story was . . . simple. Don Giovanni was embroiled in the consequences of his relentless womanizing and it finally caught up with him. The drama played out in song was playful and amusing. However, the opera, even without the intermission, was 3 hours long. It didn't help that I was continually concentrating to understand the Italian being sung, but in my opinion 3 hours is quite long for the amount of story being told.

I think the parallels are obvious - a longer than expected running time, a light plot, but a beautiful presentation.

It was just fascinating to me to see how expectation can have an effect on the experience. It reminds me of the times that I've drunk 7-Up expecting water or vice versa - with misaligned expectations, the whole experience can be unpleasant. If, for example, reviewers expected Speed Racer to be a simply written wildly artistic rendition of the old television show, maybe the reviews would have read differently. If I had expected Don Giovanni to have a story line as complex as The Matrix or The Bourne Identity, then I may have been disappointed.

In any case, comparing Don Giovanni to Speed Racer was just too funny a thing to pass up :-).