We
sat down and watched “Tommy” yesterday.
I’d gotten lured into a game of Clue at lunch with my little one and we
were listening again to the soundtrack. We’d listened to it the previous day as
regular readers already know and I was all ready to move on to introducing them
to, say “Quadraphenia.” But as my
wife has more than once wisely intoned, kids don’t learn that way. They need to experience something over
and over before they can grasp it.
My little one said she wanted to see the movie and I went to Youtube to
see if I could find it there.
We wound up with one that had Spanish subtitles (me ven!, me
siento!, me toca!, me cure!) and
sat down to take it on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBNagysBeXE
Produced a full seven years after the original album it is
nothing if not over the top. I
seem to remember it had somehow been a complete mess, but many compromises not
withstanding it was, in fact, good fun, if a bit challenging to explain. But stick a little blond boy in at the
outset with mean parents and mean extended family and kids sympathies are
locked from the start. I looked in vain at the old reviews from
1975 to find people panning it mercilessly. Rather Vincent Canby seems to have had fun and taken it all
with a grain of salt: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C01E6D8163BE133A25753C2A9659C946490D6CF
A few quick remembrances; Daltrey did better than I
expected. And by the time he can
finally have his voice, it is rather welcoming to finally hear him singing, on
say “I’m Free” as opposed to all the other people singing the original score which involves many, many compromises. The special effects though, as Roger runs around
liberated were so cheesy that all of us had to laugh when we were supposed to be
inspired. Oliver Reed oozes ‘bad news’ and effortlessly secured the ire of my
daughters. (Alas, I’ve just taken
a 30 minute segue of looking at clips of him and Keith on line. Poor Oliver. There are many, many, unflattering, drunken
interviews with the man.)
Keith in the movie is however, forever entertaining. I particularly enjoyed his organ
playing with his feet as he welcomed the disciples to the camp. I spared my daughters the Uncle Ernie
scene though, of rubber gloves and fiddling about. Pete and John suffer from having to put up with backing
rolls during two musical numbers and don’t really get to shine at all. They, like Clapton seem buried beneath
their beards. Elton John does a
reasonable job of looking frustrated and it is certainly hard to imagine how,
with a face like that he ever launched a career to stardom. Ann Margret does a good job of looking
very lovely, very ugly and very plain during the course of Tommys’s arc. We all seemed captivated by the spewing
television scene. Main compromise
was not simply watching it on a computer scene but listening to it on one, as
anything involving The Who should have been 振聋发聩[1]. Guilty
pleasures, for sure. But I was
very, very, happy to get to talk about The Who with my kids for a while, leave
the mountain of work at bay in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.
I’m not sure what The Who would have thought of Micachu and
the Shapes. This is a contemporary
version of over the top.
“Experimental” would be one adjective one could use, “confrontational”,
“enchanting”, might be others.
Born in Surrey when I was in my Junior year of college in 1987, Mica
Levi, whose stage name is Micachu was classically trained, and commissioned to
write a piece for the London Philharmonic. I’m listening to the 2012 album
“Never” which a friend emphatically recommended. And this song "OK" is consistently unpredictable, sounding
significantly better with a good head set than it does on my tinny laptop
speakers. I found something
called “Golden Phone” on Youtube that has “The Shapes” looking rather young and
innocent indeed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TRkZpFgJcI This other one “Lips” is a bit more
edgy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoEA_xYaLBw I’ll see what the reaction is to
contemporary music by 24 year-old ladies as opposed to bearded rockers from
forty years prior.
Quickly now gazing across the Times this morning to be
sure the world was still spinning, we see that the U.S. high command is down in
Vietnam trying to make nice. The
Pope is over in South Korea trying to be pleasant as well and apparently Buddhists and
Animists are all fine with this, North Korea even provided a sixteen gun
salute, and it is, like some anachronistic scene from Northern Ireland or the
Thirty Years War a distinctly unwelcoming tone from the nation’s Protestant
churches who claim the Whore of Rome has arrived. And across the way, Abe has decided this year not, to visit
the Yasakune Shrine. All of these,
in their own way, gestures that concern or are meant to signal things to China,
who miraculously seems to have managed to stay out of the news this
morning.
In the other room, the ladies are listening to a French
tape, practicing their ordinal numbers.
I think I’ll go join them.
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