'Les Mis' reigns on film, minus the message

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'Les Mis' reigns on film, minus the message

Published: 9 Feb 2013 at 00.00
Newspaper section: News

The verdict is unanimous: Russell Crowe has crowed himself into semi-embarrassment, veins tense and uvula quivering, in the latest film version of the musical Les Miserables, while Anne, dear Anne Hathaway, dreaming a dream in Napoleonic France, has won and will win every supporting-actress prize around with her tonsured turn as the wretched Fantine.

Eddie Redmayne, as Marius, scores with the number Empty Chairs, a woeful lament for a foiled uprising, and Hugh Jackman is adequately reliable as Jean Valjean, the man who hoists the French flag - another post-revolution burden - like the eternal Sisyphus who goes through hell all for stealing a loaf of bread.

Did Jean Valjean suffer much? "Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat, cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing, the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain!" he told the Bishop early in Victor Hugo's novel. "Dogs, dogs are happier!"

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OldThaiHand
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Discussion 12 : 09 Feb 2013 at 19.0512
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"With appropriate bombast, the marching anthem sung by young French students of the 1832 uprising (Les Mis is not about the French Revolution)"

Condescending remark. We're Farang, not Thai, K. Kong and therefore are educated. We know when the French revolution was, 1789. There were also revolutions in 1830, 1832 (Les Mis) and 1848, when all of Europe was up in arms.

"the sound clip has gone viral in the past week"

One hopes that the UDD don't take up this anthem as their own. That would be plainly cynical, not to mention ignorant of what the 1830 and 1832 revolutions were all about.
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peterd
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Discussion 11 : 09 Feb 2013 at 18.3711
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#7, God, the level of the student was pretty low or they didn't open the book. Difficult to find an opus more anti-communist. It was openly a pamphlet against the bolshevik revolution and Stalin. Orwell himself wrote it in his preface when he was censored by the British Gvt, allied of USSR.
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Eggmeng
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Discussion 10 : 09 Feb 2013 at 17.0210
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Say what you want about it's "message", for me the book is a love story above all else.
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jacksprat
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Discussion 9 : 09 Feb 2013 at 16.549
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@Lek - One year I assigned my university students "Animal Farm" as outside reading. What feed back did I get? Just that the archan "must be a communist" for making them read a "communist book"!
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bennu
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Discussion 8 : 09 Feb 2013 at 16.448
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Les Miserables is a great work of literature, art, that is more about Jean Valjean, the former galley slave who could barely even start to lead a respectable life, haunted by the officer Javert, a metaphor of the surveillance state that was established with the excuse of war on terror. The glossy musical announcements seemed about something else, coinciding with a worsening of the social climate, poverty and discrimination of the exception next to standard snobbery around the corner in the opera house. Big Brother looming large, advertised by the poster girl, Cosette, to bring in more money.
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lek
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Discussion 7 : 09 Feb 2013 at 15.127
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Perhaps the average Thai would benefit more by reading Orwell's "Animal Farm".
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peterd
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Discussion 6 : 09 Feb 2013 at 12.366
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erratum in my post #4,,, not Louis XIII, Louis XVIII.
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OldThaiHand
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Discussion 5 : 09 Feb 2013 at 11.375
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"dreaming a dream in Napoleonic France" is not correct. The story is post Napoleon, under the reign of Louis-Philippe. (after Napoleon came Louis XIII and Charles X as kings of France and Louis-Philippe I as King of the French).

Disc. 4

Sometimes, when K. Kong attempts to show off an extra flexing of his intellect, he stumbles over his Wikipedia research.
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peterd
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Discussion 4 : 09 Feb 2013 at 10.414
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"dreaming a dream in Napoleonic France" is not correct. The story is post Napoleon, under the reign of Louis-Philippe. (after Napoleon came Louis XIII and Charles X as kings of France and Louis-Philippe I as King of the French).
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Eggmeng
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Discussion 3 : 09 Feb 2013 at 10.053
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Years ago the news that Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" had been made into a big budget musical for Broadway made me uneasy.

When teenaged girls from the New Jersey suburbs who had never read the book nor even heard or Hugo started heading into the City because it had become fashionable to go see "Les Mis" at a hundred bucks a pop, it made me want to weep, but not as much as Hugo's masterpiece does, no matter how many times I read it. But the play had a hugely successful run, so this was inevitable.

But who after seeing Charles Laughton's Javert, could watch anyone else play that part?
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