Posts filed under 'Les Miserables'

i did not watch the oscars

This will be somewhat disorganized.

First of all, Alexis, over at Bunny Ears & Bat Wings has put up two very interesting posts:

  1. "Killing my internal perfectionist," which is about that but also a whole lot more.
  2. "Takin’ back the unicorn," because, yes, if there were really unicorns, they would not be all cute and cuddly.


So, yes, I did not watch the Oscars. Which is not a big statement – and certainly not a comment on the Oscars as a whole – but most of the films I was rooting for didn't get nominated or were sure not to win. I'm glad that Hathaway and Tarantino won.

I saw Les Miserables again a few days ago, and my feelings about it were pretty much the same (I might even see it again). I did appreciate Hugh Jackman even more this time around, and I do wonder if the song "Suddenly" was added just so that it could get a "Best Original Song" nomination. There's no other reason for is to be there (Jackman does fine singing it, but it adds nothing to the story). As I was watching it, I was imagining Alice in Resident Evil Retribution singing it to her newly-acquired daughter, Becky, and that was kind of amusing ("Trusting me the way you do, I’m so afraid of failing you. Just a child who cannot know, that danger follows where I go. There are shadows everywhere, and memories I cannot share"). But still, the movie would have been better without it.

Before the Oscars, I discovered the Slate Spoiler Special podcasts. They're designed to be listened to after you've seen the film, and I've listened to a few of them. All for movies that I've actually seen, of course (well, except for one...).

The one about Les Miserables posed an interesting idea, that Jean Valjean is a superhero. He has superhuman strength (the strength of four men, according to Victor Hugo), he has a secret identity, he helps others even when it puts his own life at risk, and he has an archenemy. His ultimate victory over his adversary comes about not because of his strength but because he is right (I love Jackman's delivery of the line, "You are wrong, and you always have been wrong").

The part about his strength made me think of Pippi Longstocking. Steig Larsson said that Lisbeth Salander was based on Pippi Longstocking, but I had forgotten (until Wikipedia reminded me) that Pippi was extraordinarily strong. Now that I'm reminded, I do recall the part about her carrying her horse around when he got old. So, I wonder is she was an influence on Vicki, who is also very strong. Maybe, though I think Vicki is more based on Popeye, as I've said before.

It occurred to me that when writers describe characters, they often describe them pretty much entirely from the neck up. I'm reading one book where the protagonist's hair (in all of its aspects), eyes, complexion etc. are described (rather awkwardly) in the first couple of paragraphs, but the rest of her is never described at all. Is she short or tall, thin or muscular, strong or weak, slow or fast? We have no idea.

I don't often think about eye color, for example, probably because I seldom notice it in life (though I can't resist commenting that if you do watch Resident Evil Retribution, keep track of Alice's eye color...). But I think things like body size and type have a much stronger effect on how your personality develops, because they can have a big effect on how you're treated growing up.

I imagine it was a factor in how Jan Sleet's personality developed that she was abnormally tall and abnormally skinny, and that her strength and coordination were (to put it diplomatically) unexceptional. It certainly had more of an effect than her hair (brown, rather limp, shoulder-length) and her eye color (no idea).

Well, I did say this would be disorganized. Coming Friday: another Jan Sleet mystery story. Or maybe two...

3 comments February 25th, 2013

songs, and poetry

Two things today:

First, I saw a couple of good comments on Les Miz.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground.

I had exactly that thought, at pretty much the same moment (during "What Have I Done?" – I think that would be about twenty minutes in).

From the New York Daily News:

It’s worth seeing the movie for Hathaway alone.

True (though there are other reasons to see it as well).

Oh, and has been pointed out in a few places, every possible piece of religious symbolism is heavily underlined (in that "Do you get it? Are you getting the point here?" way that's always so enjoyable).


Second, Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing posted a very interesting post called "Poetry and Popular Music." Her basic premises were 1) people who want to write poetry should read poetry, and 2) people who want to write poetry should limit how much popular music they listen to.

I had so many thoughts about this that I decided to post them here, rather than write a comment that was three times as long as her post.

Short story is that I agree with #1 (with comments) and somewhat agree with #2, though for different reasons (I disagree with her reasons, but I have different ones).

First of all, I do appreciate the idea that poets (or aspiring poets) should read poetry. This sounds obvious, but I've known some who didn't. Poetry (and I saw quite a bit of this at college) gets saddled with a lot of nonsense ("I'm just expressing my feelings, man."). Frankly, some people take it up because, as you say, poems are mostly short and can appear easier than, for example, novels.

Which is, by the way, not true at all. As my father used to say, the two most difficult types of writing are poetry and humor, because they are the only two where every word has to be perfect or the whole thing fails.

So, yes, poets should read poetry, and if it turns out that they can't hack it as poets, there's no shame in moving on to something easier. Like novels.

As for song lyrics I think it's a really interesting and provocative idea that poets can be too much (and too easily) influenced by song lyrics.

I do disagree with one of Maggie's premises: "Songs are poems, but they’re not necessarily good poems. In popular music, there are few deep meanings to be found. The lyrics aren’t all that great."

Song lyrics are not poems (though they can look like poems if you write them out), and what makes great song lyrics is completely different from what makes good poems. Song lyrics are an adjunct (and a secondary one) to a piece of music. Opera and rock & roll are forms of music, not forms of literature – immediately recognizable even if the words are removed or sung in an unfamiliar language.

As I say, song lyrics can resemble poems, but that's similar to how movie scripts can resemble plays. You can read a movie script, but that won't tell you if the movie is any good, because you're missing the visual element, which is more important. (The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it's pretty good.)

For example, if you just read the dialog from Avatar, you'd think it was written for twelve-year-olds. In context, it's fine. If you just read the dialog for The Searchers there are major plot elements that you would miss completely, because they are never spoken out loud. And you certainly wouldn't have any idea of what kind of picture it is.

This is not uniform, of course. You could probably learn more about a Leonard Cohen song by just reading the lyrics than a Kurt Cobain song.

I'll give an example: the song "How Soon Is Now." I like the overall sound of it, the melody, Morrissey's voice. The lyrics are whiny, self-centered and annoying, but that doesn't reduce my enjoyment of the song, mostly because the way he's singing it, with florid emotionalism but with a lot of ironic distance (he learned that from Bryan Ferry 🙂 ) means that you can enjoy the lyrics if you agree with them, or ignore them if you don't. The same lyrics, done as a quiet, sincere folk song, would be unbearable (I want to yell, "You know why you're not getting laid? You're too whiny!").

Lyrics exist in a context (and in the live context that includes how Morrisey dresses and moves) and they're not meant to function outside of that context.

(Plus there's that clever bit at the beginning, which wouldn't come across on paper, where he sings "I am the sun and the air..." [long pause] and then you realize he actually said "son and heir.")

The song also works just fine when performed by t.A.T.u, who are as far as I know singing phonetically (they're Russian and I don't think they spoke English).

Another example would be Richie Furay, from the band Poco, who in the early days of the band wrote several excellent song with very negative lyrics (sad or angry) coupled with very up-tempo and cheerful music. Unfortunately, somebody pointed out that he was doing this (he hadn't realized it), and then he stopped.

There are even some great songs where the lyrics don't mean anything at all. David Bowie has produced lyrics using cut-ups, and I'm fairly certain some lyrics by Patti Smith, Yes, and Tori Amos are completely devoid of actual meaning, In their proper context, they're fine.

Let alone the singers where you can't tell what they're saying. I had a friend, a songwriter, who liked REM's first couple of albums (more than I did), though because Michael Stipe mumbled he could never make out most of the lyrics. Then, around the third album (as I recall) Stipe started enunciating better, and my friend said he wished Stipe would go back to mumbling.

Anyway, I could go on and on (obviously), but that's my point (song lyrics /= poems, and "better" lyrics doesn't mean lyrics that are more like poems). However, as I said, I do think that the general point is correct. When we're writing (any type of writing), we're influenced by everything we're taking in. I can look back on things I've written and see when I was reading Douglas Adams, because I start to write in his cadences. Which is usually not a good thing.

Some writers make a point of not reading when they're writing. This wouldn't work for me, since I'm never not writing, so I just try to be aware of the influence. Trying to wall it off would be like trying not to think about elephants. 🙂

Anyway, you can probably see why I didn't want to post this as a comment.

5 comments January 24th, 2013

the songs of angry men

I got caught up on some movies this weekend.

First I saw Les Misérables. Definitely worth seeing, if you're down with the whole singing thing. I understand that some people aren't.

I loved the way it violated so many of the "rules" for screenwriting. If you gave this script to one of those three-act-screenplay gurus, he'd probably go hide under the couch until you took it away again.

(I guess. technically, spoilers follow.)

After all, this is a story where:

  • The protagonist and the antagonist are mostly missing from the second half of the story, and when they do have their final confrontation, it's resolved by the protagonist being so nice to the antagonist that he goes off and commits suicide.
  • The lead female character dies halfway through the story (see also: Psycho).
  • There's a "love triangle" where there's not a moment's doubt about how it will be resolved, and where our sympathies are entirely with the one who is spurned.
  • There's a big rousing finale, sung by characters who are all dead.

Plus, there are those theater (and Hollywood) staples: "Comic relief" characters who aren't in the least comic, and a completely unsuccessful attempt by a female character to pass for a man (which all the other characters accept, of course – see also: Sullivan's Travels).

I'm sure there are rules about all of this.

My other comments are:

1) Some people were surprised that Tom Hooper wasn't nominated for Best Director. I'm not. Just because you can direct The King's Speech, which was basically a series of conversations in rooms, that doesn't make you the right director for this. Some of the songs are shot very awkwardly, and in the battle scenes it's impossible to figure out what's going on. Directing a movie is more than how you use the camera, but that is an important part of it.

2) I have to start paying more attention to Anne Hathaway. This was the second movie I've seen this week where she was the best thing in it, by a significant margin (and the other one, The Dark Knight Rises, was a somewhat different kind of picture). I enjoyed many things about the second half of Les Miz, but I wasn't really moved by anything after Fantine died (though Samantha Barks as Eponine was really good, other than her inability to look anything like a guy).


I also saw Django Unchained. Tarantino's non-nomination for Best Director must have been because of the controversy, because it's difficult to believe that there were five films in 2012 which were better directed than this one. Fierce, funny, smart, with wonderful dialog and audacious (and perfect) use of music.

One specific comment, in the context of Tarantino's entire career. In my review of Kill Bill, I pointed out how his movies (until then) had been moving steadily from focusing on men to focusing on women. Since then, he's been going back the other way. He has said that he considers Shosanna Dreyfus to be the protagonist of Inglourious Basterds, but I doubt if a lot of people would agree with him.

In this movie, about the only disappointing element was how passive Kerry Washington's character was. Just waiting around to be rescued, and then not even participating in the rescue when it's happening. What would Beatrix Kiddo say? (Heck, what would Princess Leia say? 🙂 )

I read one article about Zero Dark Thirty (which I haven't seen) and it said that the problem is not that the movie depicts torture, but that the movie tries not to indicate any opinion about the subject. If I remember where I read the article I'll link to it, but my point in mentioning it here is that there isn't a moment in Django Unchained when you're not aware of how Tarantino feels about slavery (and everything that's connected with it). Not because characters sit around making speeches about it (the big speech in the movie is in favor of it, actually), but because of his control of the actors, the camera, the music, and all the other elements of a movie.

It is, if I can make the comparison, like reading Henry James – that powerful authorial statement about the morality of what's being depicted.

I could use some examples. but I don't want to give anything away. I'll suggest instead that you go see it.

Add comment January 20th, 2013

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