Tommy

for when you need a followup to Pink Floyd's The Wall movie before the acid wears off. Sober it's WTF

Listening To You I Get The Music......and that's the truth while watching Tommy based on The Who's rock opera. I will say from the get go that if your not a fan of rock music or The Who, just pass it up. No one wants to sit through music they don't like and I totally understand that. However, if you appreciate 70's rock music and more importantly a fan of The Who, then you have a musical treat in store for yourself. The film is indeed a true opera and every scene is a song from the album. There is no reg talking dialog just like Pink Floyds The Wall, another epic masterpiece. The interesting thing about the movie is how they decided the tone and feel of the film. They already obviously had the songs and I assume that Pete Townsend got together with the director Ken Russell and explained his vision. It's a absolutely bizarre musical journey unlike anything else out there in the 100 years of film making...well except for The Wall. The difference is that The Wall is serious and somewhat depressing in its tone and execution while Tommy is a humorist comic book style execution with dark shades of gaudiness and over the top characters.The cast is fantastic and probably a dream team of sorts. You have the great Oliver Reed who plays the evil stepfather. His performance is so caricature and hilarious. People have criticized his singing capabilities but his performance is so great that it doesn't matter.You also have Ann Margret, Jack Nicholson, Robert Powell, Tina Turner, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Paul Nicholas, Roger Daltry as Tommy and Keith Moon as evil Uncle Ernie. All of these great actors and musicians just add to the films experience.This is the kind of film you put in and crank up the home theater sound and rock out with. If you don't get that kind of experience out of this then you're probably dead or at the very least, comatose.A note here about the music in the film vs the album. I actually like the soundtrack to the film a bit better then the original album. It's faster, a little harder edge, a little louder and a couple of more songs then the album. I have both version on my MP3 and you can tell a difference.

I loved this movie since I was 3 years old. I am 45 now. My mom thought it was harmless for me to watch because she was a fan of the Who herself. Looking back, it may not have been the most kid friendly movie, although the music was great. But Tina Turner as the Acid Queen and uncle Ernie "Fiddling about" didn't make sense to me when I was 3. I just thought he was being goofy. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized he was a child molester. Although I loved Tina Turner as the Acid Queen. Jack Nicholson was in it for a short period that was cool, Ann Margret, Oliver Reed, Eric Clapton with the Marilyn Monroe statues...… The music was absolutely fantastic even for a 3-year-old. However, my mother wondered why when I was a teenager I got so heavily into psychedelic drugs. Perhaps I shouldn't have seen the Acid Queen so many times. LOL. I also like the movie soundtrack better than Tommy by The Who alone that only had them singing. I much prefer the movie version and album where Ann Margaret and Tina Turner and all the others are singing. Since I became an adult quite a while ago, lol, my mother and I saw it on Broadway in NYC. Truthfully, I didn't like it very much live. They changed a lot of the stories around. Sally Simpson had a much different part and without Ann Margaret, it just didn't have that special something. It also didn't have the who in it so it wasn't even like listening to the album by The Who and minus the movie characters for Tommy it was a different story, different lyrics and for those of us who were die hard Tommy fans our whole lives it was just a little too different to the actual story then I would have preferred. And Believe it or not, I was 18 years old when we saw Tommy on Broadway and that was the first time I actually realized what Uncle Ernie's fiddling about really meant. I mean, it says it in the lyrics, but it was made much more obvious in the Broadway show. But the movie is one that should never be missed. One of the most amazing rock operas ever made.