by Chris Marshall:
Maybe I was just tired of all the musicals I’d seen, or
maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood to watch it at the time, but Oliver! didn’t do anything for me. I can’t
pinpoint exactly what it was I didn’t like, but I felt like I was suffering my
way through it. Luckily that’s been rare so far, but it happens.
Perhaps it has something to do with my apathy toward Charles
Dickens. I thought Great Expectations
was wonderful, but that’s about the extent of my love for his work. Everything
seems so bleak and hopeless, even when it’s not supposed to. I admit that this
problem exists almost completely in my head, but there you have it.
But on the bright side, I could cross something else off my
list. As with Hamlet, I had somehow
gone my entire life without hearing/seeing/reading Oliver Twist, and while this film isn’t completely faithful to the
original work, at least now I have the basic idea. Sure, I knew about Fagin,
and the Artful Dodger, and “Please sir, may I have some more?” but that was it.
I mean, I even thought he spent most of his time in the orphanage, but hey, he
got out about five minutes into the movie!
