The Phantom of The Opera by Gaston Leroux

I watched two versions of the movie Phantom of The Opera. The endings of the two versions were so different, I was wondering which one was based on the book.

One version of the movie was from the 50s or around then, and the ending was actually supposed to be funny and people were laughing. That is so not the Phantom of the Opera. The ending of the book is really sad.

I read the book and it turns out the book and the modern movie made by Joel Schumacher and Andrew Lloyd Webber was extremely similar. It's amazing that they can fit a whole book, and all it's details in an 141 minute film. That's some sort of an amazing feat.

In some ways, I think that the minor changes the movie made that deviated from the book were good. Sometimes the book was over the top, and unbelievable. The movie took it down a notch, and actually improved upon the plot. Even so, the movie and the book are almost exactly alike.

Two things I didn't like about the book was that the author didn't "show scenes." If that makes any sense. If something happened in the book, Gaston would often explain it through dialogue between two characters. He would use a character to retell the story. It sounded lazy to me. It's easier to just use dialogue to explain drama than to actually take the time to use imagery to actually explain what happened.

What made that method worse is that the dialogue in this book is not too good. It sounded fake, like bad actors talking back and forth at times. The book having so much dialogue to explain the plot did not help it. The author did a bad job putting mental pictures in my mind. I had to rely on the movie sometimes to know what people and places looked like. Not that the author didn't describe things sometimes. But, it just wasn't enough for me.

Overall, the story of the Phantom of the Opera is very sad, and weird. You end up feeling sad for the evil villan. The book wasn't bad at all despite my critisisms. I liked an other book that Gaston Leroux wrote too. The Yellow Room. I read that book awhile ago, so I don't remember it much, other than that I really liked it.