Oliver Untwisted

Most adaptations of Oliver Twist leave out quite a lot, particularly from the latter half of the book. For those wishing to see a more faithful adaptation there's the 1985 BBC series directed by Gareth Davies. It's good, mainly for the performances, though it's also a reminder of why much of the second half of the book tends to be omitted--it's intensely plot driven melodrama.

Eric Porter plays Fagin, the biggest name in the cast, and for such a sensitive character you need a good actor to have any chance of avoiding an anti-Semitic caricature. That may be impossible anyway but Porter infuses his performance with believably real agony and distress.

Another reason the second half of the book tends to be avoided in most adaptations is that Oliver himself takes very little part in it, staying safely out of sight at the Maylies'. So he does here. One advantage, though, of this more thorough adaptation is to allow Nancy (Amanda Harris) the proper amount of screentime for a character who essentially becomes the book's tragic heroine. Harris gives a good performance too, really the most interesting one in the series, as she has to navigate the conflict between her affection and her morality.

The Ghost of Bill Sikes Strikes Again

Last night's Bad Batch was okay. Not quite as interesting as last week's but a nice enough retelling of a pretty standard adventure story. It was written by Moises Zamora, creator of Selena: The Series.

It's really Oliver Twist, or at least, the thieves' plot from that book, with Bill Sikes/Fagin this time being a threatening enough big alien called Mokko. This is an often used story formula and we even saw it in one of the Star Wars movies, at the beginning of Solo, in which Han himself was an Artful Dodger.

The Bad Batch's Artful Dodger is Benni Baro (Yuri Lowenthal), who stole the Batch's ship in the previous episode. Can the Batch win over this little rogue who's never had anyone he could trust his whole life? Yep. I'd have recommended Zamora read Dickens' Hard Times.

This is is another visually nice episode, with all the backgrounds looking like paintings and all the characters well animated. The action scenes weren't very well conceived but were good enough.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1672

The drinkers divvy up the street for blood.
To choke the city, velvet cinched the throat.
A row of teeth emerged from crimson mud.
Beneath the altar bleats a snoozing goat.
Ferengi fingers fix the liquor air.
Assembled houses shade the slapping hand.
Aggressive waters move the salmon's care.
His startled face is shoved in river sand.
Her flimsy arms were straw and golden dust.
Another morning marks the field for grain.
Between the sun and sky accrues a rust.
A man in charge divides the wet from sane.
With crimson straps the ankles carry on.
Her arm conveyed the nameless, careless fawn.

A Kitten for the Dogs

It makes sense for several reasons that Disney made 1988's Oliver & Company. The story of a cute animal orphan in New York, it could be seen as chasing after American Tail, former Disney animator Don Bluth's 1986's box office success--even beating The Great Mouse Detective. But the alignment of Charles Dickens' classic story of economic class with a Disney film about animals is also a very logical step on the road that began with Lady and the Tramp and continued with 101 Dalmatians, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, and The Great Mouse Detective. Sadly, Oliver & Company is not one of the strongest entries in the series but I do like it more than The Aristocats.

Like in Dickens' novel, Oliver (Joey Lawrence) is the least interesting character in the story, existing as a sort of living McGuffin. I like how Disney decided to abbreviate the beginning sequences at the orphanage, though, by showing Oliver as the last, unadopted kitten in a cardboard box by the road that eventually gets soaked with rain.

Yeah, a kitten no-one wants, that's how you know it's a fantasy.

It's not long before he runs into Dodger, an older and more dashing take on the character than Dickens' cocky youngster. This Dodger is voiced by Billy Joel and he sings "Why Should I Worry?" while skipping over busy, crude cgi, traffic. It's the highlight of the film.

Dickens' Dodger is more of a Little Rascal while Billy Joel's is more Errol Flynn. Still, he does try to cheat Oliver at first and it's the rest of the colourful Fagin gang who takes him in.

Fagin himself is voiced by Dom DeLuise and his depiction avoids being the anti-Semitic caricature he somewhat is in Dickens' novel and definitely is in David Lean's film. He's very well animated, too.

Starting with The Black Cauldron, I've noticed the more realistically human a character looks, the worse his or her animation is, and that goes for the little girl, Jenny (Natalie Gregory). The child of a wealthy family, she takes the place of the uppercrust household that takes in Oliver in the book.

Bette Midler fetchingly voices the vain Georgette, a self-absorbed poodle who lives in Jenny's home. Her introductory musical number, "Perfect Isn't Easy", is a perfect showcase, showing how nicely the actress was matched to the role. And the animation for her is deliciously expressive.

She might have been a great villain except the filmmakers completely lose the thread with her in the film's oddly rushed final act. Suddenly she's the love interest of Cheech Marin's amusing chihuahua character. And if this isn't a sharp enough turn, the end of the film has Fagin and the gang hanging out with Jenny and her butler. In a shot of unintentional surrealism, Fagin gives Jenny a pile of garbage for her birthday.

As with The Aristocats, the puzzler here is why Disney would so explicitly invoke economic class issues only to treat them as totally irrelevant. It really feels like production had to rush to the finish line and a whole lot of rational thought went out the window in the process.

Still, the movie's well worth watching for its good songs and impressive roster of character actors matched with brilliant animation. I didn't even mention Robert Loggia as a very menacing take on Sykes as a mobster.

It's Mr. Eddie nine years early.

Oliver & Company put Disney back on top, beating Don Bluth's competing film, The Land Before Time, handily at the box office. Still, the renaissance was yet to come.

Oliver & Company is available on Disney+.

Waiting on Mars

Ray Bradbury obviously found Edgar Allan Poe's forehead rather striking. In his short story "Exiles", included in The Illustrated Man, Bradbury more than once returns to the forehead as a point for vividly describing the 19th century poet.

Mr. Poe’s black eyes brooded under his round and luminant brow.

. . . They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim green level, down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing. “Don’t worry,” said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking.

It is an impressive brow, at least in every picture I've seen, and invoking it does help create the mental image. "Exiles" is a story in which many of Earth's great writers live in some strange form on Mars alongside hordes of their creations. The story actually begins with the witches from Macbeth, just a few of the many assembled to defend the planet from an approaching human rocket. On Earth, the great works of fiction have been routinely burned, a detail foreshadowing Bradbury's own Fahrenheit 451. In "Exiles", the book burning causes the spirits of the authors and their creations to fade and finally vanish entirely. It's a more fantastic tale than Fahrenheit 451 and bittersweetly effective.

An odd man among the denizens Bradbury places on Mars is Charles Dickens, who parties at Fezziwig's and refuses to join Poe and Ambrose Bierce in defending against the Earthlings, insisting he's above the stories about ghosts and witches and their authors. He even seems to kind of like the humans who only burned his books, he feels, by mistake. I wonder if this is due to the underlying leftwing nature of Dickens' basic arguments in his work. At the time Bradbury published "Exiles" he was a Democrat but in 1952 he took out an ad in Variety in which he wrote; "Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’ party, I will attack with all my heart and soul." Which goes to show how differently Democrats regarded themselves at one time.

Bradbury's Poe points out to Dickens that he did indulge in writing ghost stories, with A Christmas Carol and The Christmas Goblins. Of course, Dickens' writing also has much that could appeal to conservatives--I've heard Uriah Heep, the villain of David Copperfield, referred to as a perfect parody of a leftwing ideologue. The humans of "Exiles" have also banned Halloween and Christmas which reminds me of Oliver Cromwell's England in which Christmas was also banned. And plays, for that matter. Like the humans of "Exiles", the English Puritans believed in total commitment to reason and abhorred superstition. "Superstition" is a word that Bradbury uses twice in "Exiles" by Poe but I wasn't clear on whether or not this Poe approved of superstition or deplored it.

One of the men on the rocket has nightmares. I really liked the idea that humans without fantastic horror fiction would naturally have strange nightmares as though some natural feeling is being repressed and is finding other means of expression.

Twitter Sonnet #1318

A little thing disturbs the rubber tread.
A metal river shifts the plastic boat.
A diamond bee divides the footed bed.
A lamp appeared between the sheep and goat.
Decisive shorts define Colossus legs.
A second bun creates the burger plate.
Between the flour fold the thinking eggs.
A waiting knight observed a narrow mate.
Awaited plays deliver forest dreams.
Repeated songs appease a sleepy heart.
A newer sun was born of extra beams.
The sandwich mustard makes the yellow part.
The brilliant head was camped before the sea.
The crimson pot produced a cherry tea.