{"id":82466,"date":"2013-01-24T14:43:40","date_gmt":"2013-01-24T09:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=82466"},"modified":"2013-01-24T14:43:40","modified_gmt":"2013-01-24T09:13:40","slug":"a-shriek-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/a-shriek-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Shriek Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure id=\"attachment_82480\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-82480\" style=\"width: 250px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Les.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-82480\" title=\"Les Mis\u00e9rables\" src=\"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Les.jpg\" alt=\"Les Mis\u00e9rables\" width=\"250\" height=\"221\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-82480\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\"><strong>Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/strong><\/span><br \/><strong>Director<\/strong> Tom Hooper<br \/><strong>Starring<\/strong> Hugh Jackman,<br \/>Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe<\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;\">Tom Hooper\u2019s film version of the immensely successful musical has earned itself eight Oscar nominations and reduced entire audiences to tears, but <em>Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em> does raise a crucial question: deprived of its social commentary and vivid descriptions, is Victor Hugo\u2019s novel just not riveting enough? After all, it is reduced in this film to a series of remarkable coincidences, with little or no explanation of the characters\u2019 back stories. Th\u00e9nardier, for instance, one of the most compelling characters in the novel, is reduced to a comic figure. Javert, though played competently by Russell Crowe, often looks ridiculous while braying simple sentences in the form of song. Marius suddenly appears at one point and becomes a central character.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;\">As a musical, the film is brilliant at times, fairly good at others. Anne Hathaway\u2019s performance as Fantine is excellent, as is Jackman\u2019s Jean Valjean. The songs, actually sung by the actors themselves to varying degrees of success, sometimes register those raw emotional moments that musicals specialise in, especially Hathaway\u2019s I Dreamed A Dream. But there is too often a sense that there is something missing, that Hugo\u2019s very human characters have been submerged by the scale of the production.<\/span><br \/>\n<em>Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.<\/em><br \/>\n<a href=\"mailto:ajachi@tehelka.com\">ajachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Les Mis\u00e9rables does raise a crucial question: deprived of its social commentary and vivid descriptions, is Victor Hugo\u2019s novel just not riveting enough?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":82493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,8198,5792,8051,8199,8200,8201,8202,7546],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}