170th post! Huzzah! (Isn't it a pretty number?) Made smashed potatoes, steak and lebanese beans for my Lee-babies this evening (should go and make my own dinner sometime soon... if I can find any food!); I was singing 'Bring Him Home' in the kitchen whilst I cooked (with big operatic hand flourishes), and Joshy, the second youngest (he's 2), started echoing me on the last note of every line. "Let him beeeeee" - "Beeeeee" "Bring him hoooooome" - "Hooooome"! A-dorable.
Dang. Just missed QI. And tonight's theme was 'Gothic'! The literal exact word for what I'm studying right at this very moment! Argh! Just got my books for this study period. I love getting parcels. And the book I'm supposed to be finishing this week from last week is only 100 pages long! Score. I should have it down soon - it's a gothic novel of the 1700s, called The Castle of Otranto. Really looking forward to getting into this unit. :)
Why do I have nothing interesting to say? This is really quite depressing. My MP3 is frozen? That's not interesting. Just also depressing.
Borrowed the Les Miserable soundtrack from Marickville library; would so so much love to see it live! The movie with Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush is amazing. (Although it's the only movie in which I've ever really hated a character played by Claire Danes.)
Really do recommend it, though I half wish I had read the book first. There seems to be some sort of jinx on me finishing Les Miz - the first time I ordered it at Angus and Robertson the bookshop's computers had a meltdown and I had to wait four weeks instead of two for my copy. Then, when I was halfway through it (and, no joke, it's a seriously hefty volume!) it mysteriously went missing and hasn't been seen since. The second time I decided to order with QBD instead of A&R - my order went missing. I had to re-order. And then, when I was two-thirds through the book, I left it in the backyard and it got rained on! I have another copy now, ages later, but this, unlike the others, is not my usual 'Penguin Classics' edition, so maybe I'll get to read the ending someday... it's an amazing, redemptive story, that much I know. You feel so much for the convict turned philanthropist turned fugitive hero... and also so much for the legalistic, police-inspector anti-hero. Not to mention all the sympathy that 'les miserable' - the miserable people of France themselves - inspire!
Speaking of Victor Hugo. (Yes, we were speaking of him; he wrote the above book.) He also wrote the muchly famous novel: The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Although the original French is Notre Dame de Paris. Hugo hated the English title because he meant the book to be about the cathedral and its surroundings: it isn't Quasimodo-central) I actually managed to finish this one; long, depressing but fascinating look at depraved human nature. Seriously, I can't in any way see how any person affiliated with Disney could ever have looked at this story and gone 'Hey, what a great idea for a kids' movie!' I only watched it for the first time a few days ago. (With Jayden :D)
Hard as it may be to believe, Frollo is actually more sympathetic in the original. All that stuff he tells Quasimodo is true - about the mother abandoning him and all. In the original book Frollo starts off as a loving older brother/guardian to a juvenile delinquent uni student - a man who takes on the deformed baby foundling out of the goodness of his own heart. It's the gypsy girl, of course, who sets off his long descent into utter depraved craaaaziness. (She is, by the by, a vacuous, shallow airhead, who - spoilers - actually does die at the end.) The plot is tons more complicated than the Disney adaptation. Weird as it sounds, Quasimodo is the changeling child that the gypsies swapped Esmeralda for... so she isn't even really a gypsy. Her own birth mother is the one who betrays her to Frollo at the end - what's worse is that they realise, as the soldiers ride to arrest her, that they're mother and daughter. It's absolutely horrible. Oh, and Phoebus is a totally horrible person who uses Esmeralda and doesn't even remember her name.
The whole Hellfire sequence, (which I shall address shortly), from the Disney one, (in which Frollo struggles with his lust for Esmeralda and decides she shall 'be mine or burn' or words to that effect) happens in monologue/conversation several times: here's a little direct quote for you.
"Then, running, and drawing her after him, for he still kept hold of her, he went straight to the gibbet, and pointing to it: 'Choose between us,' said he, coolly."
Now, as to why anybody would want to make a kids' movie about a mixed up, physically deformed man, a depraved priest, a playboy soldier and an idiot gypsy... I have no idea. Despite cutting out most of the story and quite a bit of the eeeeeevilness, our beloved animating company certainly stepped straight into the deep end with this production. Have you listened to Hellfire? Talk about adult content! Images; words that will trouble children for decades. Basically, no. I won't post it here, profaning my blog with such disturbia. And the rest of it! Seriously depressing stuff! The ugly guy is beaten up in public, the gypsy mother dies in the first five minutes, people are burned alive, nearly hanged, dodgily molested... what the heck? There's even poledancing! Why, Disney, why?
I must go to sleep now. Busy day tomorrow.
Kisses and hugs.
Kisses and hugs.
My soul belongs to God I know/I made that bargain long ago/He gave me hope when hope was gone/He gave me strength to carry on!
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