Diablo

I saw this tonight, and I have to say, I was not expecting it to be as good as it was. It's totally unnecessary and misses some of the magic of the original, but it was a surprisingly respectful retread of the original. Will Smith was surprisingly one of the best things about this. In retrospect, there really isn't a single other actor in Hollywood right now who could have taken on the Genie after Robin, and matched his larger-than-life, frenetic exuberance. I mean, who else is there, really? Smith was the only logical choice, and his performance here is proof positive of that. His Genie feels like it occupies the same stratosphere as Williams's, but is neither an imitation of nor disrespectful of Williams. Mena Massoud captured Aladdin's winsome charm perfectly. He had the outward confidence combined with just the right amount of humility down. In the Prince Ali getup, with a huge smile on his face, he looked almost exactly like the animated version. My biggest critique of this version, however, is that Aladdin felt somewhat sidelined by the new emphases on Jasmine and Jafar. At times, Aladdin felt almost like a secondary character in his own movie. Expanding Jasmine's character mostly paid off, but did not in the case of Jafar (whose motives, for all the added screentime, still basically amounted to his animated counterpart's: be evil and power-hungry). This was not helped by Marwan Kenzari's total lack of menace and gravitas, especially in comparison to Jonathan Freeman's over-the-top performance in the original (and on Broadway). I can understand if they thought they simply couldn't compete with Freeman's version and felt it safer to go in a totally different direction, but bland and one-note is not a good direction. Naomi Scott was great as Jasmine, as was Nasim Pedrad as her handmaid. The latter could easily have become a totally pointless and unfunny character, but Pedrad managed to sell it. I hated Jasmine's new song. It sounded like Pasek and Paul's other interchangeable, generic, angsty pop-ballads, but was especially jarring amidst the original Alan Menken material. Couldn't they at least have TRIED to match the musical feel of the original score? The song also felt very oddly placed and cringey in a particularly dramatic moment that stopped the plot cold for a few minutes. Did Jasmine deserve a song? Maybe? Naomi Scott sure can sing, though. More on the music: I did appreciate their modifications to the original lyrics in "Arabian Nights." "A Whole New World" was a bit flat, and lacked the romantic aura of the original. I can't quite place my finger on what was missing there, but the original had something special. I think part of it was the soft, sweeping movements of the animation and the romantic color palette. The backbeats on the "remixed" versions of "One Jump" and "Friend Like Me" were a bit jarring, but the latter worked better for Smith's vocals and was among the best part of the movie. "Prince Ali" was excellent, and somehow captured the larger-than-life feel of the original.

Thanks. For some reason, I have no recollection of this scene in the novel at all. I guess I'll have to reread it at some point.

I think the musical really skewed people's perception of the love triangle between Marius, Cosette, and Eponine. Eponine and Marius are just not a fit at all.

Re: Valjean wounding himself: in reality, the poker would probably have resulted in a cauterized, closed wound, like branding cattle or like they used to do for amputees to seal the wound. That said, Hugo is often criticized for his sometimes melodramatic characterization and for relying on deus ex machina and unlikely coincidences all over the place. Re: Cosette, she's much more resigned in the novel than in this series. I guess they tried to give her a bit more personality here. The scene where he takes her to see the convicts is not in the book at all, and neither is her petulant/spoiled reaction. He also doesn't tell her about Fantine like in the series, to my memory. You might take issue with book Cosette as well, for being unrealistically chaste and lacking any sense of impetus, understandably. I believe she's afraid of Marius at first. I don't remember Javert being this fixated, year after year, on Valjean, but haunted by his slipping through his fingers. His obsession only gets activated when coincidences cause them to cross paths. It's like being happy going about your life after a breakup, and then having all your old hurts and resentments stirred up when you happen to bump into your ex.

The elaborate fight scene isn't in the book, but Valjean does berate Thenardier and is gang for thinking they could threaten him and he does take the poker to his own arm. I agree that it undercuts Valjean's saintliness, but I've pretty much given up on that front. Valjean-by-way-of-Dominic West-by-way-of-Davies is not a saint, but a normal man trying to live a good life after being brutalized by the society around him and still hunted by it. West reads too angry and still too psychologically afflicted by the world to come across as saintly. Maybe it's a reflection of our current, increasingly secular times, or just the general taste for grittier, more realistic styling in television/film, but this version seems a more humanistic interpretation of these characters. In the novel, the good characters were the canvas on which Hugo painted his image of God. In this series, it's a bunch of human characters milling about in their mortal imperfection, and that includes Valjean. There's little sense of the divine here, except in the Bishop and the nuns. Was this a misreading on Davies' part, or a conscious choice? I'm not sure.

Episode 4 plays more fast and loose with Hugo, but that’s to be expected. I think Davies did a decent job condensing the plot points into a streamlined action plot. The culminating confrontation between Valjean and Thenardier was suspenseful and I have always loved that badass flex by Valjean searing his own flesh with the poker in that scene. West continues to be pretty damn good as Valjean, making up for lack of physical brutishness with pathos. I thought Erin Kelleyman was great as Eponine. The writing for that character is strong. My initial impression of Josh O’Connor as Marius was that he was nothing like I imagine from the novel, but I warmed up to him as the episode went on. Not feeling Joseph Quinn as Enjolras at all so far. Just nowhere near the charismatic presence Hugo described him as. Ellie Bamber as Cosette is fine, but more annoying than she is in the novel. Still not feeling Oyewolo’s Javert, but that is mostly due to the pedestrian writing. Davies just doesn’t seem to know how to show vs. tell with this character. Valjean suffer from this to some extent as well, but less so. Re: translations: I much prefer the Fahnestock/McAfee translation based on Wilbour to any subsequent translation. It just reads more consistent in its tone and is more faithful, word-for-word to Hugo, compared to the Denny or Rose versions. Donougher is good, though, and worth her version for the endnotes alone. I wish the late Alban Krailsheimer had translated this book. He did the translation of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) for Oxford World’s Classics, and it is simply one of the best translations of any work in any language I have ever read, and includes extremely helpful endnotes and appendices. I’m surprised he Oxford series does not have Les Miserables in their catalogue. That is a huge oversight.

Just broke open my copy of the book. Two points I needed clarification on: 1. Fantine can’t leave the town she is in because she was in debt for her room and furniture. (Hugo even comments that Fantine was bad with money.) 2. Valjean knew nothing about Fantine’s firing. A gossipy widow told the overseer of the women’s factory (into which Valjean/Madeleine almost never went) about the child and this overseer was the one to fire her. Valjean only learns about what happened to Fantine when she confronts him when he intervened upon her arrest. It comes as a complete shock to him that something so horrible would happen under his watch without his knowledge. Valjean would never have allowed such a thing to happen had he known about it. I think the flaws of Davies’ adaptation are emerging as we discuss it. He makes little, tiny changes to streamline the plot, but it ends up distorting the characters’ motivations and arcs. I’m actually surprised how faithful the musical managed to be.

In the novel, Fantine’s fall takes much longer. She takes up odd sewing jobs for as long as she can , but the Thenardiers keep raising their fee, intimating that Cosette is on the brink of death. (With childhood mortality as high as it was back then, it probably wasn’t that far fetched.) It is only when her sewing work dries up that she resorts to selling her hair and eventually her teeth. The latter is meant to be horrific, but was probably not an uncommon way to raise money for the desperately poor. Dental hygiene wasn’t what it is today and people were always in need of replacements. Prostitution was seen as the ultimate and irretrievable fall from respectable society. It says something perverse about 19th century French society that Hugo considered prostitution the last resort rather than selling her teeth. Fantine puts it off until she has no other option. “The poor girl became a prostitute” is the last sentence of a long chapter describing her desperate attempts to get money. France was in such grave straits in the period this takes places that it was apparently believable that she has no other option for work. As for why she wouldn’t just go retrieve Cosette, she probably really believed the Thenardiers about her illness and didn’t want to risk missing a payment and then the added cost and wear of the journey on both her and Cosette plus the cost of medical care. That said, it probably would have been cheaper in the end to bring Cosette even with the medical costs, considering what the Thenardiers were charging her. We’re just left to assume she was naive, and trusting to a fault, which would have been seen as a virtue for a young woman in Hugo’s time, as Tom mentions above. She would have been considered a pure archetype of maternal sacrifice and purity, going as far as selling her teeth before resorting to the utter moral “indecency” of prostitution. We are meant to point our fingers at the society and the men who take advantage of her, rather than ascribe to her the idea that she has any other choice but the course she took. I am sure there have been Feminist critiques of this character written, either in France or abroad, at some point.

Episode 2 was excellent. I think they portrayed the horror of Fantine’s descent perfectly, probably better than any adaptation prior (I’ve seen pretty much all of them; the 1934 Raymond Bernard version is the gold standard, but in this particular piece of the story, I think the 2018 version shines). The hair cutting and tooth pulling scenes were heartbreaking and disturbing, as was the scene in which she was humiliated before her arrest. I also thought they did a good job with the Thenardiers, and how they could easily pull a naive and desperate person in. I might quibble a bit about how they had Valjean/Madeleine himself Fire Fantine, but I think it made sense of Valjean’s sense of personal investment in Fantine’s case. I will need time to think about how this night skew the sense of Valjean’s motivations, though. They had him gawking st Fantine during her time at the factory and it gave the impression that he isn’t interested solely in being a good person, but only because he had a personal interest in Fantine. This adds a subtext to their relationship that was not existent in Hugo’s novel, and I’m not sure I like it. The initial Javert/Madeleine interaction was clumsy and heavy handed in terms of dialogue. The writing for Javert is just bad, honestly.

Pretty much everything in the first episode was also in the book, but introduced in a different order in the book. Fantine's romance with Felix is handled after Valjean meets the Bishop, I believe. It was an important part of the book that the musical didn't have time to portray. Some of the prison scenes are only made reference to in the book, but fleshed out in the series.

I really think it's a difficult novel to translate to screen because so much of the story is internal. It's 1,000 pages long, but 500 of those pages happen inside people's minds: their emotions, doubts, thoughts, motivations, etc. That's part of what makes the musical kind of work: the songs allow you inside people's heads. But the musical to me has always felt like a pageant: a series of symbolic, representational tableaus of major scenes from the book, without a sense of things happening in "real time." I think this series gets closer to feeling like the events are playing out in real time, but I agree that the dialogue is a bit... pedestrian. It also feels too British. That can't really be helped, and I guess they tried to map the British regional accents roughly onto the classes/regions of France, but it's still a bit jarring for some reason. I didn't feel this way about the War and Peace miniseries, but I think that's because that story is mostly confined to one social class.

Just watched the first episode. Huge fan of the original novel, and have ambivalent feelings about the musical and the film version thereof. I love this so far. I was initially caught off guard by the fact that Andrew Davies’ script is taking it strictly chronologically, but it makes perfect sense. The novel goes back and forth between the characters and different time periods. Seeing the events play out chronologically makes it much clearer which storylines happen concurrently, which is hard to keep track of in the book. So far, loving Dominic West, Derek Jacobi (they gave Bishop Muriel much more personality here than other versions, which I like) and Lily Collins as Fantine. Oyewolo is just kind of there at the moment, but I hope he gets more to work with later.

I hope they don't take it as a sign to start turning her into The Chosen One. Catie is enjoyable in small doses. I think they'd do well to keep the focus on her low key.

FWIW, if Youtube views are any indication (I remember them being roughly accurate gauges in past seasons and on SYTYCD), Catie seems to be head and shoulders above everyone else in this competition this year. Her views are in the millions, while everyone else's are in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

I'm confused. Why would Jonah have "no options?" If he got into business school, he would already have had at least a Bachelor's and some relevant work experience. He isn't in the same position as Amy or the others, even without the possibility of going back for his (I assume) MBA. He would have a considerable leg up over them. Also, I agree that it's ridiculous that they all reacted with shock that he wouldn't want to stay at Cloud 9. Does anyone stay at any retail job that long nowadays? Even if you stay in retail, you're likely going from one place to another within a couple of years. All that said, everything with Dina, Sandra, and Cheyenne was great this episode.