Cowboys and Phantoms

Two questions that arose from our MOJ class were:

• Why are spaghetti westerns so called?
• Was Phantom of the Opera based on a true story?

What Are Spaghetti Westerns and Where Did The Name Come From

By the second half of the twentieth century, spaghetti had become so well known throughout the world as an Italian food, that the word spaghetti itself came to be a sort of metaphor for anything Italian. So it is not surprising that when Italian film companies began to produce western movies in the 1960’s, they quickly came to be referred to as spaghetti westerns.

Source: allaboutspaghetti.com 

 

Vocabulary:

 

a put-down -

 

lone (adj) -

 

alongside -

 

vastly superior -

 

broadly recognised -

 

highly acclaimed -

 

achievement (n) -

 

so much so -

 

a label -

 

endearment -

 

rather than -

 

to tend to -

 

fare (n) -

 

first and foremost -

 

readily available -

 

to blur the lines -

 

to give rise to stg -

 

to starkly contrast -

 

evil to the core -

 

interestingly enough -

 

to eventually begin -

 

to come up (a topic) -

 

to star (in a film) -

 

world-renowned -

 

to evolve -

 

to fall into a broad category -

a spoof -

   

Where the Phantom was born: the Palais Garnier 

The underground lake; the deadly chandelier; the buried corpse...where do myth and reality overlap at the Garnier Opera House? 

It began with the water. In 1861, Parisian workers attempting to lay the concrete foundations for a grand, 2,200-seat opera house in the centre of the city were baffled. The theatre had been commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III as part of his sweeping reconstruction of Paris, and 12,000 square metres of ground had been cleared. Yet a seemingly endless flow of water bubbled up from the swampy, newly cleared ground – and no one could do anything to stem it.

 

Thirteen years later, in 1874, architect Charles Garnier’s neo-baroque masterpiece, Le Palais Garnier, was finally complete. But rumours of a vast, fish-filled lake swirling beneath the building endured.

 

One Parisian who grew up with the rumour was the detective writer Gaston Leroux and in 1910 he would use it as the inspiration for his gothic love story The Phantom of The Opera.

 

Source: Telegraph 

 

  

Vocabulary:

deadly (adj) -

to bury (buried) -

to overlap -

a corpse -

to lay (laid, laid) -

concrete -

foundations -

baffled -

to commission -

sweeping -

seemingly -

a flow -

to bubble up -

swampy -

to stem sth -

a masterpiece -

to swirl -

to endure -

to blur -

a claim -

shrouded in mystery -

a lair -

rather -

to rise -

a grate - 

makeshift -

to recall -

an alcove -

to bother to do sth -

to be bound to -

to stretch out -

to join up with -

to have the run of a place -

eeriness -

horrid (adj) -

gloom (n) -

netherworld -

to weave (wove, woven) -

to kidnap -

to drag -

to release -

to blame sb -

to bear witness to sth -

to feed (fed, fed) -

to spot -

from time to time -