The Glums - Making me Glum

So yesterday, Les Miserables having finally arrived in Orkney, we went off to see it. I was sooooo looking forward to it. I've never managed to see it on stage, although I had a friend in Leeds who went to London every year for a performance she  loved it so much. Son No 2 had the CD of the original cast and I've heard that of course, but it's not the same as seeing  a performance. I've been anxiously checking the cinema listings for what seems like months now, and had even got to the stage where I thought I must have missed it. [Although how I could have done that was a mystery].

 

OH being a bit of a cynic, and having heard tales of people snuffling and crying, and knowing how music can make me cry at the best of times, I had tried to drum up some enthusiasm amongst my female friends for going, as an excuse for not going with Mr Sarcasm Personified. No luck. I got a 'Not my thing', and an 'I want to see it but with my husband'. I said I might go alone. OH gave me his wounded puppy look. So we went together.

 

I bridled a bit at the price of the big bag of Revels we bought for during the performance. Later on I was glad we had them. OH offered me two of the larger smoother ones and suggested I use one in each ear, and really I was so appalled by the singing that I was tempted to try it.

 

This is a film of a musical. It therefore follows, in my mind, that one of the first things you must cast on is singing ability. I mean, why shoot yourself in the foot in advance by using people who can't sing? I genuinely don't understand why anyone would do that.

 

Of the three principals, Hathaway, Crowe and Jackman, none were good. Crowe cannot sing at all. You can tell me until you're blue in the face that he used to have a rock band and all I'll do is ask whether he played the drums. He cannot sing. Nor can he act while trying to sing. I mean, I don't rate Crowe as an actor at the best of times, but lots of people do, and in deference to them I can only say that in this instance he must have been concentrating so hard on the  [truly awful ] singing that he forgot to act. There is a character there in Javert to be found; not an attractive one but a fairly common one, the one who is driven by obedience, duty, a belief that if the law is not followed to the letter then chaos will reign. That's in the words of the songs Javert sings, there's nothing wrong from that point of view. It's all there, but I'm afraid Mr Woodentop couldn't make me believe in it.

Hathaway has about five notes in her mid voice that she can hit and she was fine with those. Sadly her songs meant she was taken well out of that particular range. I will forgive her to a degree because she did manage to channel some really raw emotions through what she did, but a good singer could have conveyed the emotions without making me wince at the ugliness of the sounds coming out of the mouth.

Jackman was a puzzle because I know he has done at least one musical in the West End and I expected that he would be good. But he lacked support and his phrasing was - well, it was all short. There were some nice notes and he was better than Crowe, but that's not really saying very much.

The younger smaller parts were generally much better sung, apart from Amanda Seyfried as Cosette who sounded like a demented flute. And the obligatory urchin, Gavroche, was totally incomprehensible.  Overall I felt if they had transposed quite a lot of the music down many of the actors would have been happier and performed better.

The thing is that duff notes and poor singing act on me in the same way as nails on a blackboard and after twenty minutes I was totally tense and wound up. So it was difficult to keep perspective on the rest of the film. Looking back there were enjoyable things about it. The music is lovely and the end was quite moving. The costumes and make up were excellent and Baren Cohen and Bonham Carter as the Thenadiers were wonderful. There are some holes in the plot you could drive a tank division through of course, but that's down to Hugo and the source material, not the writers of the musical.

I know if I hadn't been looking forward to it quite so much then I wouldn't have felt so let down. So perhaps I ought to limit my expectations. Although to be honest finding people who can sing in a musical film shouldn't, surely, be too much to ask?

Tearing out my Hair

I'm trying to work my way through the list of people we need to let know our new email address. No matter how long I stick at it the list seems to get longer rather than shorter. And I am fast losing my rag.

The problem is with passwords. Now I know that passwords are a good thing and keep our data secure and everything. And I like that. What I don't like is the very many different formats that passwords have to take. Some sites just specify a minimum length. Others insist on at least one numerical character. I've just done one where the specifics were 'at least 8 characters long, at least one upper case character, at least one number'. And then they tell you not to write them down anywhere!

 

All in all I'm having a frustrating time of it. I took a break so that I could relax a bit but even the planes in Airport Mania started sighing heavily and chuntering at me. Given that I'm not in the mood to be grumbled at by cartoon planes I gave up on that as well.

 

Oh well, tomorrow is another day. And one day quite soon it will all be done. I hope.

How Did That Happen?

I like my life to be quiet. Day flows into day, week flows into week, nothing much happens. What we don't do today we can do tomorrow, and  I like not to be tied down to doing stuff at all if possible, and failing that, not pinned down too much in advance.

 

So looking at my schedule for  the coming week, how did this happen?

 

Saturday               out during day

Sunday                 out during day

Monday                empty

Tuesday                out in the afternoon

Wednesday           out in the afternoon

Thursday               lit class via Skype in the morning, out in the afternoon, out again in the evening

Friday                    out during the day

 

Someone please tell me again where I'm going to find time for the doctorate?

 

 

Bother!

We've just switched Broadband provider. It was all going swimmingly [by which I mean it really hadn't intruded on my life at all, OH having done all the necessary] But now I discover that I have to have a new email address, which isn't  a problem, and  my old one no longer works, which is. 

Letting all my personal contacts know will be a chore, but no worse than that. But what about all those other places you give contact details to; websites where you shop, places that send out Newletters, businesses that insist you provide an e-mail address...with the best will in the world, it will be months before I remember them all.

 

And computers were going to make our lives easier!

What I did in February

Sadly this is all going to look a lot more sparse than the equivalent January entry. It's not that I haven't been busy with craft type stuff, but not a lot has got over the finishing line.

 

However I did turn January's single Wallace sock into a pair

 

 

 

Then there was my monthly Literary Theme'd KAL. This month was William Shakespeare so I made a beret  called Star Crossed Lovers

 

 

for March the writer is Agatha Christie and I'm not too sure what I'm going to do for that. I'd better get on and make my mind up though.

 

I made some hats for a prem baby charity that I support but I didn't take a photo of them before I sent them away.

 

And that would have been that, if I hadn't been to a needle felting class yesterday at which I produced this

 

 

Mmh, still learning how to do this and sadly haven't got as far as knowing how to delete extra pictures! Anyway given that I am not at all artistic [outside of being able to draw a stick dog badly] and that we didn't have a picture or anything to go on, I was quite pleased with this.  I was particularly taken with the little black faces on the sheep.

 

With luck a lot of the stuff I worked on in February will get finished in March so that there'll be a bumper crop of stuff to report on in a month's time.



 

 

Falcon Revisited

Well, not exactly, but there's been a strange sense of deja vu hanging round this house on Thursday evenings recently.

Jack Taylor, a new drama on Channel 5, based on a set of good books, beautiful setting in Galway, great star in Iain Glen,  should have been enjoyable viewing.

Sadly not. The episodes last about two hours and each time so far I have given up part way through, recorded the second half and watched it the next day.

I suppose I have at least been interested enough to watch the second half each time, but honestly if the best bit in  a thriller series is a running gag about how, having been thrown out of the Garda months ago, the hero hasn't returned his official Garda coat then something has gone fairly badly wrong with the program somewhere.

A Different Sort of Visitor

 

 

Look what's been hanging round in our garden / on our roof for the past few days.

When I say 'garden' I use the term loosely since a lot of the land we have here wouldn't be recognised as such by Alan Titchmarsh, Monty Don, Pippa Greenwood et al.

We have 2.75 acres which I said when we were thinking of buying the house was far too much as we are not gardeners and never have been. But OH was determined to have the house because he loved it, and assured me that he had ideas about what to do with the land. I wasn't really all that reassured but we bought the house anyway.

We did plant trees in a half paddock right at the top of the land so we have a small wood growing, and there's even a little gap in the middle designed for picnics when the trees are big enough for you to feel that you're having a picnic in a wood.

We've had someone come in and make us a rockery too and that looks really nice, although slightly wind blasted just at present. We hope to get a little bit more done each year, but it has to be designed to be low maintenance because we're no keener on gardening than we ever were. Gardens, yes; I can visit other people's gardens until the cows come home, but actually getting out there and doing it - no thank you. It's a lack I know. And I don't  make my own bread either.