Les Miserables

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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Reza »

Magilla I hope the studio is paying you well for your Weinstein services in promoting Les Miz. Lol.

Frankly I can't wait to watch the film but sadly it will never get a release in my neck of the woods. Will have to watch it on DVD on the small screen.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Big Magilla »

I just watched the 25th Anniversary Concert which I thought was better put together than the 10th Anniversary Concert. Alfie Boe made a stirring Jean Valjean; Norm Lewis an excellent Javert; Lea Salonga a superb Fantine and Samantha Barks a thrilling Eponine. Ramin Karimloo was also impressive as Enjorias. Katie Hall, who has a bit part as a turning woman in the film version, was kind of blah as Cosette and Nick Jonas sung well as Marius but lacked the acting chops to carry the character off. Post-concert the casts of the two then current London shows came on stage as did the original 1985 company sans the original Fantine - Patti LuPone. Colm Wilkinson, the original Jean Valjean, Michael Ball, the original Marius and the current actors in those roles as well as various Cosettes and a few others sang. Composers Boublil and Schonberg and lyricist Kretzmer spoke as did impresario Cameron Mackintosh and the show ended with schoolchildren marching from the back of the theater to the stage singing "Do You Hear the People Singing".

Here's Hooper on Hathaway and Redmayne and audience reaction to the film:
http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/tom ... who-suffer
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by dws1982 »

1. I like the musical. It's no masterpiece, and I recognize that, but I like it, and I can think of many worse ways to pass an evening than by seeing a production of Les Miserables. I really like a lot of the songs, and I find it easy to get swept up in the big emotions of the piece. I also liked The Kings Speech, although more in the framework of a BBC-type biopic than as any type of major film. (I also liked Hooper's TV work from the 200's.)

2. The musical is not at all well-served by the film, which only seems to highlight the weaknesses of the musical. Trying to bring a sense of realism to the film adaptation only highlights how much the musical simplifies Hugo's novel. A lot of the complexities get reduced to more simple emotions, and you can really feel the emotional button-pushing here. The female characters, especially are weak links. They never really register as anything, really. They weren't strong in the musical (a lot of that due to adaptational compression) but I don't remember Lea Salonga's Eponine being such a non-entity in the 10th Anniversary Concert.

3. Theatre is a less realistic, more abstract medium than film, and that's why, for example, Fantine's life can fall completely apart over the space of about twenty minutes on stage, or why Cosette and Marius can go from total strangers to soul mates who can't stand to be apart over a similar (or maybe even shorter) period of time. But in the movie, when Fantine's downfall seems to be the result of one really crappy afternoon, or when the entire 1832 segment seems to take place over a 72-hour period (if not less), it just seems ridiculous. "Look Down" at the beginning feels like the opening of Prince of Egypt; "At the End of the Day" might as well have been outtakes of the opening sequence of The Muppet Christmas Carol.

4. This is a truly poorly directed film. Hooper doesn't seem to have a clue what he's doing here. There isn't any real thematic coherence, and often not much coherence between the performers. Everything is haphazardly framed and edited together. A song between Marius, Eponine, and Cosette is made up of cuts between close-ups of each character, when it might have made sense frame Marius and Cosette in the same shot for their parts, or to show Marius and Cosette in the background of Eponine's parts. The staging of "Stars"--Javert singing on the ledge of a building (against an obvious blue-screen background)--feels all wrong. In short, I haven't seen so much strange framing or so many off-kilter camera angles since Elizabeth fourteen years ago.

5. Why does Hooper use so many close-ups? Like I said before, it undercuts the effectiveness of a lot of the musical numbers; it isolates the actors, and almost makes them seem to be performing in different films. Most of the songs involve multiple performers, but it's rare to see more than one person singing on screen at a time. And the sets look great, from what we can tell. Could it just be old-fashioned laziness? More close-ups reduce the amount of blocking to be done, which allows for faster work.

6. "Do You Heart the People Sing?" is put in a different place in the film. In the musical it follows "Red and White/ABC Cafe", but in the film it follows "One Day More", and I think it actually works in the context of the movie. (I wouldn't want it moved in a production of the musical though.) They also move "On My Own" to right before "One Day More" rather than after it. The song doesn't really make a lot of sense before "One Day More", but I guess they kind of had to put it there.

7. The Javert/Valjean dynamic isn't really clear here. We don't really A) understand why Javert is obsessed with Valjean for so long; or B) why Javert does what he does in the end. You never get the sense of them as being opposite sides of the same coin, which is really one of the keys to the piece.

8. Anne Hathaway. Yes, "I Dreamed a Dream" is well-delivered, but Hooper's decision to shoot it in a garish close-up is suffocating--give her some room to breathe. The song always felt like it came of nowhere, and it still does here. Fantine quite literally seems to lose her job, sell her hair, sell her teeth, and become a prostitute over the course of one afternoon and evening, and we don't know anything about her beyond the fact that she has (as she incessantly repeats) a daughter who she sends money to. Because Fantine isn't really a character, the effectiveness of "I Dreamed a Dream" tends to depend more on whatever memories and emotions we tend to associate with it than it does on anything else, and I don't find it terribly effective here. I can see--and respect--the emotion that Hathaway puts into it, but Best Supporting Actress? No way.

9. I honestly preferred Eddie Redmayne's big solo to Anne Hathaway's. I think "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" is one of the best songs in the piece, and I think it works (in the play and in the musical) because it doesn't come out of nowhere. We get a sense of the loss that he's singing about--we also got to know (albeit briefly) the friends he's singing about. I didn't care at all for the way the scene was put together, but I thought Redmayne nailed it. I really think that Redmayne, more than anyone else from the movie, deserves an Oscar nomination.

10. Russell Crowe. I'm not totally sure where to begin with this one. But I'll paraphrase a tweet I saw: His presence in the film has a whiff of, "This is the only guy who auditioned, so we'll just cast him and hope it works out." That said, his performance of "Stars" was nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be.

There's probably more I could say, but that's all that's coming to mind right now.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by flipp525 »

Love Hurts
“Les Misérables”
by Anthony Lane
The New Yorker


The long and thunderous film of “Les Misérables” arises from the stage musical, which itself was adapted from Victor Hugo’s enormous novel. Yet the story, at heart, is an intimate one. Valjean (Hugh Jackman) serves nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread: a punishment that he regards as unjust, though in fact it reflects well on the status of French baking. Had he taken a croissant, it would have meant the guillotine. In 1815, he breaks parole, vanishes, and emerges eight years later as a respectable factory owner and the mayor of Montreuil. There he is dimly recognized as a former convict by Javert (Russell Crowe), the local police inspector. These two cross paths for the rest of the film, with Javert in panting pursuit. Would it be too fanciful to suggest that they have a thing for each other, to which they never confess? That would explain why Crowe and Jackman, both tough Australians, are made to sing at so agonized a pitch. Crowe launches into his lusty anthems as if a platoon of infantry, stationed in his immediate rear, had just fixed bayonets without giving sufficient warning.

Then, there is a layer of lesser plots. A poor wench named Fantine (Anne Hathaway), one of Valjean’s workers, loses her job, becomes a prostitute, and dies, though not before summoning enough puff to sing “I Dreamed a Dream.” She leaves a daughter, whom Valjean raises as his own. We jump to 1832, with Paris in a rebellious mood and the child, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried), all grown up. She draws the gaze of Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a young hothead, who, in turn, is the idol of his neighbor Éponine (Samantha Barks). And so the action gathers steam and comes to the barricades—or, to be exact, to a single barricade, with an anti-monarchist uprising represented by a small group of students sitting on a pile of furniture. The director is Tom Hooper, fresh from “The King’s Speech,” and you can’t help wondering if this shift into grandeur has confused his sense of scale. The camera soars on high, the orchestra bellows, and then, whenever somebody feels a song coming on, we are hustled in close, forsaking our bird’s-eye view for that of a consultant rhinologist.

The actors were recorded live as they belted out the big numbers, and Hathaway, in particular, takes full advantage, turning in precisely the sort of performance, down to the last sniff, that she would be the first to lampoon on “Saturday Night Live.” Not that you can blame her. She probably took one look at the material and realized that the only way to survive it was by the naked power of oomph. I was unprepared, having missed “Les Misérables” onstage, for the remarkable battle that flames between music and lyrics, each vying to be more uninspired than the other. The lyrics put up a good fight, but you have to hand it to the score: a cauldron of harmonic mush, with barely a hint of spice or a note of surprise. Some of Hooper’s cast acquit themselves with grace, notably Redmayne, and it’s a relief to see Sacha Baron Cohen, in the role of a seamy innkeeper, bid goodbye to Cosette with the wistful words “Farewell, Courgette.” One burst of farce, however, is not enough to redress the basic, inflationary bombast that defines “Les Misérables.” Fans of the original production, no doubt, will eat the movie up, and good luck to them. I screamed a scream as time went by.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/c ... z2GHIuHWdk
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Sabin »

It's Armond White. There's no guarantee he's actually seen the damn thing.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by OscarGuy »

He also misspelled Boublil...not once, but thrice. Then again, I've noticed quite a few critics misspelling that name, but I've also seen many critics abandon standard grammar practices for title capitalization, so...
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Big Magilla »

Good on Armond White, but it's Cosette, not Ponette.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Sabin »

Armond White likes Les Miserables.


Working-Class Heroism
by ARMOND WHITE on Dec 26, 2012 • 9:00 am

How ‘Les Misérables’ soars past cynicism


Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne in Les Misérables.
Les Misérables works. Not the way musicals by Minnelli, Demy, Fosse, Kelly, Berkeley or Lubitsch worked—by demonstrating elegance, sophistication and eroticism—but through a kind of amazing brute emotional strength. The world-famous stage musical composed by French theatrical hands Claude-Michel Schonberg and librettist Alain Boulil stays true to Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel about social cruelty and human perseverance.

Schonberg and Boulil’s 1980 adaptation (translated to English and produced by Cameron Mackintosh in 1985) includes many of Hugo’s undeniable, irresistible narrated examples of suffering, justice, love and fate, and director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) presses those points. He maintains the universality of Les Misérables. The title means “The Miserable” or “The Wretched Poor,” which, in its compelling, unsubtle way, is aligned with Dickens’ great social critiques. The long tale covers years as ex-convict Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), arrested for stealing bread, helps a ruined factory girl Fantine (Anne Hathaway), then her daughter Ponette (Amanda Seyfried), who falls in love with politically engaged aristocrat Maurius (Eddie Redmayne). Valjean learns the ways of the world while unjustly hounded by policeman Javert (Russell Crowe).

Like the globally beloved stage productions, the film preserves Hugo’s worldview as an epic of French rationalism, the philosophy that, hipster critics fantasize, is in movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Amour and the moronic Argo—but rationalism is not traduced as in those films. With music, Les Misérables sings out the misery of urban inequality and deep human striving as if to lift those realities and make our common consciousness soar. Nothing could be less ironic or “smart,” but that’s what makes audiences inevitably weep by the time Hugo’s tale reaches its apogee.

It’s not that they’ve experienced the highest form of art—only art’s basic, often forgotten and essential purpose: Les Misérables’ yearning melodies and rising, rising recitative connect with primal emotional virtues. That is, if—and it’s a major IF—they touch our basic humanity. Most movies, TV shows, video games and blog sites have coarsened the human response. Les Misérables is fascinating due to its overstated tribute to mankind’s nature.

If this movie is the huge hit it deserves to be, it will contravene the bogus sophistication and vain smugness that have overtaken the pop arts for at least the past two decades and soured millennial film culture.

Les Misérables works despite its aesthetic problems. Hooper’s opening shipyard scene is gargantuan: hundreds of men pulling a vessel into dock. It first suggests the overscaled stupidity of Peter Jackson, but actually alludes to Raymond Bernard’s 1934 French film version, with its colossal opening image of Jean Valjean (Harry Baur) assuming the granite-like capacity of a sculpture that is the foundation of an artistically minded yet exploitative state. Hooper’s hallucinatory maritime symbol is perfect for a British production, but he then shifts into nightmarish English misery via the nearly unwatchable sequence of Fantine’s decline—one of Western lit’s key demonstrations of man’s inhumanity, made repellent by Hooper’s unfathomable habit of mismatched edits: extreme close-ups, unbalanced compositions and spatial gaps.

Hooper plods, yet the story’s slog is paced by singing performances that win you over. Schonberg and Boulil don’t cinch feelings with perfect song-structure (as Andrew Lloyd Webber can), but the actors, by singing live and full-out, achieve emotional completeness. Seyfried gives Ponette a sweet and clear voice, stronger than her Mamma Mia singing. Redmayne embodies Maurius’ courageous belief in loyalty, and his passionate youthful tenor makes you believe in justice. It’s a heroic performance—while Crowe’s Javert conveys heroic despair; his account of coming from poverty and knowing its kind makes an effectively tragic foil to Valjean, despite Hooper staging his final song showily. By Jackman’s finale–his intense Rembrandtian visage accumulates real force–the film stays powerfully true to Hugo’s prologue: “So long as ignorance and poverty exist on Earth…Les Miserables cannot fail.”

Also check out the 1996 updated Les Misérables. Director Claude Lelouch’s masterfully controlled narrative flow with memorable characterizations by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Annie Giradot, yet Hooper’s blunt faux opera is as moving as real opera. To deny this is to prefer the culture’s sarcasm and nihilism.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

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Sabin wrote:In other news, Silver Linings Playbook finally doubled its number of screens from 371 (all December) to 745 and added another million to its total. Why Harvey Weinstein is treating this like Sideways and not As Good As It Gets in a year where seemingly any movie could win Best Picture continues to be beyond me.
I'll mount a mild defense of Harvey here. Silver Linings Playbook did NOT open huge in its first limited week; it opened OK. This suggests it didn't have a big built-in "dying to see" audience. If it had tried to expand right away, I think it might have petered out and died a quick death. The way it's gone instead, it's held onto its gross level in limited release quite successfully for weeks on end. This has given time for positive word to spread, and I think chances of it maximizing its reach and becoming a bigger hit are greater with this pattern than with a big initial splash. (I know alot of people think in this virtually-connected world, word of mouth spreads much faster than it did, say, 30-40 year ago, and makes such a staggered release unnecessary. But I've seen too many good movies die when they went wide quickly to be sure that's true)

As to the main subject of contention:

It's certainly true we all go into certain movies with levels of expectation, and, while we try to be true to our real-time reactions, there are times we can be tipped one way or another by pre-disposition. But, Magilla, the level of conspiracy you're attributing to Les Miz's critics -- they must hate all musicals!...or, at least, musicals from Broadway!...or they're still pissed off about David Fincher! -- suggests you've invested pretty hard in this movie being a super-smash and are resistant to anyone saying otherwise. Honestly, the boosterism you've shown toward this film over recent weeks makes your personal take on the film one of the least trustworthy posted around here since...well, since Penelope finally officially swooned over Brokeback Mountain after pre-adoring it for about a year.

But, let me say, you're not alone. What I'm getting from the various Internet boards, among Les Miz fanatics and others who committed to the film months ago, is a belligerence directed at critics that mildly recalls the Republican "Skewed polls" folk of October and early November. The idea that others simply have differing opinions/reactions doesn't seem to be considered; all in the negative must be Working from An Agenda. (As if the crying-throughout/standing-ovation folk aren't) The film is Great Great, and audiences will drive a stake through the heart of the critical establishment by making this the film event of the decade. It's almost a war.

And, I'll tell you...I still very much doubt the possibility Les Miz will make a real run at the best picture prize, in a year when so many films seem to have a more legitimate critical/commercial consensus behind them that would make them prime Oscar candidates. But I have to acknowledge that this level of devotion among the hard-core fans -- people who seem to be returning the word "fan" to its original derivation from "fanatic" -- makes me waver just a bit. Are they just a movie version of the Tea Party...people whose intensity makes their numbers seem greater than in reality? Or are they a passionately devoted group that can coalesce to form a majority in the Academy's final voting, making the film a latter-day Sound of Music?

The usual disclaimer: my life situation keeps me from seeing this and most all the rest of the movies in contention, so I'm simply going by what I read. But it's an unusually fascinating best picture race this year, and this is one more wrinkle in it.
Last edited by Mister Tee on Wed Dec 26, 2012 10:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Sabin »

72% on RT.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Big Magilla »

No, I'm just tired of going into long explanations.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by dws1982 »

Big Magilla wrote:There are no opera singers in the movie.
Did you intentionally miss Sonic's point?
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Big Magilla »

There are no opera singers in the movie.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Sonic Youth »

Big Magilla wrote:
Sonic Youth wrote:
Big Magilla wrote:I think mostly I wonder what all these people complaining about close-up think of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc . Do they agree with the consensus that it is one of the greatest films ever made or do they see it as " just close-ups of a crying woman and grumpy old men" as someone on the IMDb. described it.
But they don't sing.

That's not a minor distinction. I can imagine a huge difference between crisp, black-and-white images of faces in a silent film vs. faces projecting spectrums of expressions in song, complete with nostril-flaring, chin-wagging and all sorts of shape-shifting of the lips. And since the cast sings entire songs, I'm guessing the close-ups are held for much longer in Les Miz than they are in Joan of Arc.
There is no nostril-flaring or chin-wagging and no more shape-shifting of the lips in Les Miz than in Joan of Arc.
I've heard differently from someone else, but I haven't seen the movie so I can't take her word over yours. But it is true that when singing passionately, one's face does, shall we say, emote differently than they do during non-singing acting or in real life. I've seen close-ups of opera singers and they do plenty of exaggerated facial emoting.
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Re: Les Miserables/Zero Dark Thirty

Post by Big Magilla »

Sabin wrote:Les Miserables led Django Unchained on Christmas $18 million to $15 million on two hundred fewer screens. I'm too lazy to do the math, but that's gotta be the largest opening for a musical entirely composed of Dreyer-esque close-ups in a few months!
It's the largest opening of a musical ever. Les Miserables made almost as much in one day ($18.2M) as 'Nine' ($19.7M) and 'The Producers' ($19.4M) in total. It also received a CinemaScore rating of A from males and A+ from females.
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