Sabin wrote:But Hooper, presented with an artisanal creation no doubt labored-over by legions of craftsmen, rarely relishes it, choosing instead to shoot, say, an extreme close-up of Jackman's moribund face with his chin and forehead lopped off, this impeccably detailed world relegated to the periphery of the frame. One would be hard-pressed to describe this, despite the wealth of beauty on display, as anything but an ugly film, shot and cut ineptly. Everything in the film, songs included, is cranked to 11, the melodrama of it all soaring. So it's odd that this kind of showboating maximalism should be ultimately reduced to a few fisheye'd faces, mugging for their close-up, as the people sing off-key and broken.
While I am looking forward to this film, I was worried about this very thing they are describing. I found all the close-ups in THE KING'S SPEECH quite annoying. I thought maybe doing a large scale musical would discourage Hooper from using many close-ups, and the trailer for LES MISERABLES showed some amazing wide shots. However, it looks like whoever cut the trailer found possibly the only wide shots in the entire film. I am not sure why Hooper thinks we need every actors face filling the entire frame of the screen, but hopefully he will read these reviews and realize he should stop doing this. Then again, if his film wins Best Picture again (or is even just nominated) then he will probably think he did everything correctly and will not change a thing about his style.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
Here we go - the all-important 60 Minutes December interview:
"60 Minutes" Will Feature Segment on Tony Winner Hugh Jackman
By Andrew Gans
07 Dec 2012
Tony winner Hugh Jackman will be featured on the Dec. 9 broadcast of CBS' "60 Minutes."
Jackman, a Tony winner for his performance in The Boy From Oz, will discuss his role in the forthcoming film based on the international hit musical Les Miserables.
"60 Minutes" airs on CBS beginning at 7 PM ET; check local listings.
"The actor who plays the dangerous Wolverine in 'the X-Men' movies shows a personal side celebrities usually hide," according to CBS. "Hugh Jackman opens up to correspondent Scott Pelley about his family, the father who raised him alone, his risky role on Broadway and his latest turn as Jean Valjean in the screen version of Les Miserables -- 'the role of a lifetime,' says the Australian film star."
Wow! There may only be 19 reviews accounted for, but RT has Les Miserables at 63%! And with only seven critics weighing in at metacritic, Les Miz stands at 55!
What's Slant got to say about it? Well...
Les Misérables -- */****
By Calum Marsh (who, to be fair, wrote a good review of The Master, but whose sensibilities are pretty Armond White-ish. Not sure he goes into movies without already having written his reviews. Quickly becoming my least favorite critic.)
Brazenly foregoing the prerecorded vocal tracks on which its contemporaries rely, Tom Hooper's Les Misérables was performed and recorded live on set—a gimmick claimed to be a revolution in the production of movie musicals despite having been standard operating procedure through the 1930s and having even been revived, nearly 40 years ago, by Peter Bogdanovich's under-seen Mark Sandrich homage At Long Last Love. This assumes that the use of live music has an advantage over the more common alternative, lending immediacy to every lilt, pause, and impromptu gesture, liberating actors from the strictures of a fixed soundtrack and granting them an uncommon freedom to modulate their performance on the fly. The idea is that, should the mood strike, a performer may add a beat mid-bar as though choked-up with emotion, their dramatic license with the material thus extended liberally and their performance, we are told, made immeasurably better and more real.
The opportunistic Les Misérables proceeds from the assumption that virtuosity is paramount and authenticity is self-evident, which is why it so confidently emphasizes the novelty of live singing. It seems obvious within minutes that the effect was difficult to achieve, and it's the film's hope that our awareness of that difficulty will be enough to impress; like a metal guitarist tearing into a conspicuously elaborate solo, the point isn't so much that it sounds pleasing, but that the act of pulling it off looks impressive. Flaws—and there are a great many that would have never made the cut were this a perfectible studio recording—are conveniently swept under the rug of candid expression, a necessary consequence of the film's more virtuous approach to be regarded less as mistakes than as proof of its sincerity. What's especially galling about all of this isn't that it smacks of underhanded exploitation (though playing off our skepticism of cinematic artifice to exaggerate its pursuit of something real is indeed a cheap strategy), or even that it presumes superiority over those comparatively stale and phoned-in musicals that deign instead to record songs the easy way. No, the worst quality of Les Misérables's live singing is simply that is puts too much pressure on a handful of performers who frankly cannot sing.
This problem becomes apparent almost immediately, when, after overseeing an ostentatiously shot chain gang, the unwaveringly moralistic Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) releases a down-and-out Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) after serving his absurdly unjust 19-year prison sentence for stealing a loaf of bread. Those familiar with the stage musical will know that this early encounter sets the tone for the rest of the work, establishing immediately its theme of thwarted redemption and inciting the bulk of the action to come, and the difficulty every production of this text encounters is convincingly selling a bitter rivalry based on nothing more than Javert's belief that a criminal can never be morally exonerated. It's a flaw of the source material (a result of condensing a 1,500-page novel into a three-hour play, presumably) that Javert's enduring pursuit and persecution of Valjean is based on so dubious a dedication to the letter of the law, but a strong performance goes a long way to at least making it seem emotionally credible, if not, say, psychologically so. Crowe, despite his considerable talents as a dramatic actor, is plainly incapable of presenting Javert's convictions believably, starting with the embarrassingly obvious fact that acting well while singing is way beyond his reach; his warning to Valjean to head his words and remember his name is delivered with such flatness and with so little affect that it's difficult to think of anything else. And this, unfortunately, is only the beginning of the musical breakdown—just the first of the nearly 50 songs that comprise the three-hour film.
Translating the stage play into an entirely sung-through movie musical was nothing short of audacious, to be sure, but as a filmgoing experience the result is wearying, even when the songs themselves are capably performed. As has already been repeated ad infinitum, Anne Hathaway's one-take rendition of showstopper "I Dreamed a Dream" may well prove definitive, its to-the-rafters bleating a call for instant waterworks. But its success as a standalone number has the unintended consequence of making everything else look dull by comparison, exacerbated by the fact that it comes and goes so early. When Hathaway's Fantine departs from the narrative, barely an hour into the proceedings, she leaves a gaping hole in the cast that no abundance of cherubic would-be rebels can fill—least of all Fantine's daughter, Cosette (played as an adult by Amanda Seyfried), who here has the presence of a spectral waif. Again, some of these problems are easily attributable to flaws in the structure of the source material, particularly its struggle to briskly introduce a wealth of new characters after more than 90 minutes in the company of a manageable group, but even regarded as merely an inferior production of a musical better suited to the stage than to the screen, Les Misérables can't help but bring these problems into relief, highlighting flaws some may not have noticed.
Hooper, of course, also places a great deal of emphasis on his own flaws as a filmmaker, though perhaps not in the manner one might expect: Les Misérables seems, in his newly Oscar-carrying hands, an elaborate demo reel for his tics as self-styled auteur. Those who'd considered the milquetoast King's Speech an inoffensive but largely anonymous-looking production are here presented with a most persuasive retort—in the form of pronounced garishness. Fisheye lenses and poorly framed close-ups abound in Les Misérables, nearly every frame a revelation of one man's bad taste; the best that can be said of the style is that it's deliberate, which at least distinguishes it from Hooper's work to date.
What's frustrating is that the world of the film is, outside of how it's actually shot, magnificently realized, the filth-lined streets of early 19th-century France brought to life by the capable production design of Mike Leigh regular Eve Stewart (whose work on Leigh's Topsy-Turvy seems the best precedent). But Hooper, presented with an artisanal creation no doubt labored-over by legions of craftsmen, rarely relishes it, choosing instead to shoot, say, an extreme close-up of Jackman's moribund face with his chin and forehead lopped off, this impeccably detailed world relegated to the periphery of the frame. One would be hard-pressed to describe this, despite the wealth of beauty on display, as anything but an ugly film, shot and cut ineptly. Everything in the film, songs included, is cranked to 11, the melodrama of it all soaring. So it's odd that this kind of showboating maximalism should be ultimately reduced to a few fisheye'd faces, mugging for their close-up, as the people sing off-key and broken.
Mister Tee...well, Todd McCarthy wrote
Les Miserables: Film Review
8:00 AM PST 12/6/2012 by Todd McCarthy
Greatly compounding the problem is that director Hooper, in his first outing since conquering Hollywood two years ago with his debut feature, The King's Speech, stages virtually every scene and song the same manner, with the camera swooping in on the singer and thereafter covering him or her and any other participants with hovering tight shots; there hasn't been a major musical so fond of the close-up since Joshua Logan attempted to photograph Richard Harris' tonsils in Camelot. Almost any great musical one can think of features sequences shot in different ways, depending upon the nature of the music and the dramatic moment; for Hooper, all musical numbers warrant the same monotonous approach of shoving the camera right in the performer's face; any closer and their breath would fog the lens, as, in this instance, the actors commendably sang live during the shooting, rather than being prerecorded.
Y'know, all year I've thought "All right, I don't really like the play, I'm probably not going to like the movie, but it's going to win Best Picture and it's probably not going to be that bad." The movie that they are describing sounds almost intolerable. And by "intolerable", I mean an almost intolerable visual approach to an almost intolerably written musical.
And, Variety, Again, not bad...but far from the second coming we were hearing about two weeks ago.
Les Miserables
(U.S.-U.K.)
By Justin Chang
As a faithful rendering of a justly beloved musical, "Les Miserables" will more than satisfy the show's legions of fans. Even so, director Tom Hooper and the producers have taken a number of artistic liberties with this lavish bigscreen interpretation: The squalor and upheaval of early 19th-century France are conveyed with a vividness that would have made Victor Hugo proud, heightened by the raw, hungry intensity of the actors' live oncamera vocals. Yet for all its expected highs, the adaptation has been managed with more gusto than grace; at the end of the day, this impassioned epic too often topples beneath the weight of its own grandiosity.
The Universal release will nonetheless be a major worldwide draw through the holidays and beyond, spelling a happy commercial ending for a project that has been in development for roughly a quarter-century. Since its 1985 London premiere, the Cameron Mackintosh-produced tuner (adapted from Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg's French production) has became one of the longest-running acts in legit history, outpaced only by "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Cats." "Les Miserables" has aged far more gracefully than those two '80s-spawned perennials, owing largely to the lush emotionalism of Schoenberg's score, the timeless sentiments articulated in Herbert Kretzmer's lyrics, and the socially conscious themes, arguably more relevant than ever, set forth in Hugo's much-filmed masterwork.
In an intuitive yet bold scripting decision, scribes William Nicholson, Boublil, Schoenberg and Kretzmer have fully retained the show's sung-through structure, with only minimal spoken dialogue to break the flow of wall-to-wall music. Not for nothing is "Do You Hear the People Sing?" the piece's signature anthem; song is the characters' natural idiom and the story's lifeblood, and the filmmakers grasp this idea firmly enough to give the music its proper due. Even with some of the lyrics skillfully truncated, this mighty score remains the engine that propels the narrative forward.
In visual terms, Hooper adopts a maximalist approach, attacking the material with a vigor and dynamism that suggest his Oscar-winning direction on "The King's Speech" was just a warm-up. At every turn, one senses the filmmaker trying to honor the material and also transcend it, to deliver the most vibrant, atmospheric, physically imposing and emotionally shattering reading of the show imaginable. Yet the effect of this mammoth 158-minute production can be as enervating as it is exhilarating; blending gritty realism and pure artifice, shifting from solos of almost prayerful stillness to brassy, clunkily cut-together ensemble numbers, it's an experience whose many dazzling parts seem strangely at odds.
The film's ambition is immediately apparent in a muscular opening setpiece that hints at the scope of Eve Stewart's production design: In 1815 Toulon, France, a chain gang labors to tow a ship into port. Among the inmates is Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), overpunished for having stolen a loaf of bread nearly 20 years earlier, now being released on parole by Javert (Russell Crowe), the prison guard who will persecute him for years to come. With his scraggly beard, sunburnt skin and air of wild-eyed desperation, Valjean looks every inch a man condemned but, through the aid of a kind bishop (Colm Wilkinson, who originated the role of Valjean in 1985), vows in his soul-searching number "What Have I Done?" to become a man of virtue.
In this and other sequences, Hooper (again working with "Speech" d.p. Danny Cohen) opts to bring the camera close to his downtrodden characters and hold it there. It's a gesture at once compassionate and calculated, and it's never more effective than when it touches the face of Fantine (Anne Hathaway), a poor, unwed mother ejected from Valjean's factory into the gutters.
Hathaway's turn is brief but galvanic. Her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," captured in a single take, represents the picture's high point, an extraordinary distillation of anguish, defiance and barely flickering hope in which the lyrics seem to choke forth like barely suppressed howls of grief. Hathaway has been ripe for a full-blown tuner showcase ever since she gamely sang a duet with Jackman at the Oscars in 2009, and she fulfills that promise here with a solo as musically adept as it is powerfully felt.
This sequence fully reveals the advantages of Hooper's decision to have the thesps sing directly oncamera, with minimal dubbing and tweaking in post. As carefully calibrated with the orchestrations (by Anne Dudley and Stephen Metcalfe) in Simon Hayes' excellent sound mix, the vocals sound intense, ragged and clenched with feeling, in a way that at times suggests neorealist opera. A few beats and notes may be missed here and there, but always in a way that serves the immediacy of the moment and the truth of the emotions being expressed, giving clear voice to the drama's underlying anger and advocacy on behalf of the poor, marginalized and misunderstood.
Hathaway's exit leaves a hole in the picture, which undergoes a tricky tonal shift as Valjean rescues Fantine's young daughter, Cosette (Isabelle Allen), from her cruel guardians, the Thenardiers. Inhabited with witchy, twitchy comic abandon by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, not terribly far removed from the grotesques they played in "Sweeney Todd," these innkeepers amusingly send up their venal, disreputable and utterly unsanitary lifestyle in "Master of the House," a memorably grotesque number that also marks the point, barely halfway through, when "Les Miserables" starts to splutter.
As it shifts from one dynamically slanted camera angle to another via Melanie Ann Oliver and Chris Dickens' busy editing, the picture seems reluctant to slow down and let the viewer simply take in the performances. That hectic, cluttered quality becomes more pronounced as the story lurches ahead to the 1832 Paris student uprisings, where the erection of a barricade precipitates and complicates any number of subplots. These include Javert's ongoing pursuit of Valjean, their frequent run-ins seeming even more coincidental than usual in this movie context; the blossoming romance between Cosette (now played by Amanda Seyfried) and young revolutionary leader Marius (Eddie Redmayne); and the noble suffering of Eponine (Samantha Barks), whose unrequited love for Marius is heartbreakingly exalted in "On My Own."
As the characters' voices and stories converge in the magisterial medley "One Day More," the frequent crosscutting provides a reasonable visual equivalent of the nimble revolving sets used onstage. Yet even on this broader canvas, the visual space seems to constrict rather than expand, and the sense of a sweeping panorama remains elusive. From there, the film proceeds through an ungainly pileup of gun-waving mayhem before unleashing a powerful surge of emotion in the suitably grand finale.
Devotees of the stage show will nonetheless be largely contented to see it realized on such an enormous scale and inhabited by well-known actors who also happen to possess strong vocal chops. The revelation here is Redmayne, who brings a youthful spark to the potentially milquetoast role of Marius, and who reveals an exceptionally smooth, full-bodied singing voice, particularly in his mournful solo "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables."
Jackman's extensive legit resume made him no-brainer casting for Valjean, and he embodies this sinner-turned-saint with the requisite fire and gravitas. Whether he's comforting the dying Fantine or sweetly serenading the sleeping Cosette (in the moving "Suddenly," a song written expressly for the screen), Jackman projects a stirring warmth and nobility. He's less at home with the higher register of Valjean's daunting two-octave range; there's more strain than soul in his performance of "Bring Him Home," usually one of the show's peak moments.
Crowe reveals a thinner, less forceful singing voice than those of his co-stars, robbing the morally blinkered Javert of some dramatic stature, although his screen presence compensates. Barks, a film newcomer wisely retained from past stagings, more than holds her own; Seyfried (who previously flexed her musical muscles in "Mamma Mia!") croons ever so sweetly as the lovely, passive Cosette; Aaron Tveit cuts a dashing figure as the impulsive student revolutionary Enjolras; and young Daniel Huttlestone makes a delightful impression as the street urchin Gavroche, bringing an impish streak of energy to the proceedings.
Screen Daily. Better -- but nt exactly matching the tweets from that NY screening.
Les Misérables
6 December, 2012 | By John Hazelton
Dir: Tom Hooper. UK-US. 2012. 157mins
With Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe starring - and singing - for director Tom Hooper, the highly anticipated Les Misérables is a bold sung-through adaptation of the massively popular stage musical that substitutes close-up intimacy and naturalism for theatrical scale and sheen. The approach could well divide audiences, with fans of the show and musical theatre in general falling heavily for the full-on emotion and non-fans finding it all a bit confusing and over the top.
Jackman stands out for the force of his performance and the nuance of his singing.
The balance between the two groups will go a long way to determining box office performance when worldwide distributor Universal releases the Working Title production on Christmas Day in the US and through the early New Year in international markets.
Musical adaptations are notoriously unpredictable at the box office and to reach far beyond the built-in audience - the 60 million people in 42 countries who have seen Les Misérables on stage over the past 20 years - Universal will need to leverage the awards season attention that this beautifully crafted film is already beginning to attract.
Gladiator writer William Nicholson worked on the screenplay with original show creators Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Herbert Kretzmer and the team jumps straight into the story of love, sacrifice and redemption set against the backdrop of 19th century France.
In just a handful of pacey scenes, the film takes Jackman’s Jean Valjean from the brutal prison where he first encounters ruthless policeman Javert (Crowe) to his new life as a mayor and factory owner. Valjean’s encounter with prostitute Fantine (played by Anne Hathaway) leads him to adopt Fantine’s daughter Cosette.
Pursued by Javert for breaking parole, Valjean goes to Paris with Cosette where they become involved with a group of students trying to lead the struggling citizens into rebellion.
The film follows the stage show format of having the characters sing almost all their lines, but here the singing is more natural and speech-like than it could ever be on stage. The approach preserves the feel of a musical but offers little context to ease newcomers into the story.
Hooper (best known, of course, as director of The King’s Speech) chose to have the actors singing live on camera rather than lip-synching to playback and the decision gives many scenes a real emotional force. In early scenes particularly, that force is underlined by shooting characters in close-up and often singing almost direct to camera. The effect is most dramatically felt during Hathaway’s anguished delivery of I Dreamed a Dream, one of the shows best-known songs.
As the story goes on, scenes begin to open out and the songs become more elaborately staged. Another key number, Master of the House, allows Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter to provide comic relief as sleazy innkeepers. And love song One Day More is performed as a nicely staged ensemble piece.
Among the individual actors, Jackman stands out for the force of his performance and the nuance of his singing. Crowe’s singing is less confident but his intensity mostly makes up for the lack of vocal range. Elsewhere in the cast, Amanda Seyfried (from Mamma Mia!) makes an appealing adult Cosette and Eddie Redmayne (from My Week With Marilyn) is strong as Cosette’s love interest Marius.
Les Miserables: Film Review
8:00 AM PST 12/6/2012 by Todd McCarthy
The Bottom Line
Well-sung but bombastic screen version of the musical theater perennial.
Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe sing -- and wage a Sisyphean battle against musical diarrhea -- in Tom Hooper's adaptation of the stage sensation.
A gallery of stellar performers wages a Sisyphean battle against musical diarrhea Les Miserables. Victor Hugo's monumental 1862 novel about a decades-long manhunt, social inequality, family disruption, injustice and redemption started its musical life onstage in 1980 and has been around ever since, a history of success that bodes well for this lavish, star-laden film. But director Tom Hooper has turned the theatrical extravaganza into something that is far less about the rigors of existence in early 19th century France than it is about actors emoting mightily and singing their guts out. As the enduring success of this property has shown, there are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it's good.
The first thing to know about this Les Miserables is that this creation of Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, is, with momentary exceptions, entirely sung, more like an opera than a traditional stage musical. Although not terrible, the music soon begins to slur together to the point where you'd be willing to pay the ticket price all over again just to hear a nice, pithy dialogue exchange between Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe rather than another noble song that sounds a lot like one you just heard a few minutes earlier. There were 49 identifiable musical numbers in the original show, and one more has been added here.
Greatly compounding the problem is that director Hooper, in his first outing since conquering Hollywood two years ago with his debut feature, The King's Speech, stages virtually every scene and song the same manner, with the camera swooping in on the singer and thereafter covering him or her and any other participants with hovering tight shots; there hasn't been a major musical so fond of the close-up since Joshua Logan attempted to photograph Richard Harris' tonsils in Camelot. Almost any great musical one can think of features sequences shot in different ways, depending upon the nature of the music and the dramatic moment; for Hooper, all musical numbers warrant the same monotonous approach of shoving the camera right in the performer's face; any closer and their breath would fog the lens, as, in this instance, the actors commendably sang live during the shooting, rather than being prerecorded.
With Hooper's undoubted encouragement, the eager thespians give it their all here, for better and for worse. The “live” vocal performances provide an extra vibrancy and immediacy that is palpable, though one cannot say that the technique is necessarily superior in principle, as it was also used by Peter Bogdanovich on his famed folly, At Long Last Love.
One of the chief interests of the film is discovering the singing abilities of the notable actors assembled here, other than Jackman, whose musical prowess is well known. Crowe, who early in his career starred in The Rocky Horror Show and other musicals onstage in Australia, has a fine, husky baritone, while Eddie Redmayne surprises with a singing voice of lovely clarity. Colm Wilkinson, the original Jean Valjean onstage in London and New York, turns up here as the benevolent Bishop of Digne.
On the female side, Anne Hathaway dominates the early going, belting out anguish as the doomed Fantine. Playing her grown daughter Cosette, Amanda Seyfried delights with clear-as-a-bell high notes, while Samantha Barks, as a lovelorn Eponine, is a vocal powerhouse.
The problem, then, is not at all the singing itself but that the majority of the numbers are pitched at the same sonic-boom level and filmed the same way. The big occasion when Hooper tries something different, intercutting among nearly all the major characters at crossroads in the Act I climax "One Day More," feels like a pale imitation of the electrifying "Tonight" ensemble in the film version of West Side Story.
It's entirely possible that no book has been adapted more frequently to other media than Hugo's epic, one of the longest novels ever written. About 60 big- and small-screen versions have been made throughout the world, beginning with a representation by the Lumiere brothers in 1897, and Orson Welles did a seven-part radio version in 1937. In 1985, five years after the Paris debut of the French musical, the English-language production, with a new libretto by Herbert Kretzmer and directed by Trevor Nunn, opened in London, to less-than-stellar reviews, and is still playing. The New York counterpart packed houses from 1987-2003 and, at 6,680 performances, ranks as the third-longest-running musical in Broadway history (it reopened in 2006 and played another two years).
At the story's core is Jean Valjean (Jackman), a convict who has served 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and trying to escape and, upon his release, redeems himself under a new identity as a wealthy factory owner and socially liberal mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. But his former prison guard Jalvert (Crowe), now a police inspector, finds him out and, over a period of 17 years, mercilessly hounds him until their day of reckoning on the barricades in Paris during the uprising of June 1832.
Woven through it is no end of melodrama concerning Valjean raising Fantine's beautiful daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen as a tyke, Seyfried as a young woman); the latter's star-crossed romance with Marius (Redmayne), a wealthy lad turned idealistic revolutionary; his handsome comrade-in-arms Enjolras (Aaron Tveit) and the earthy Eponine, who woefully accepts that her beloved Marius is besotted by Cosette. Well and truly having rumbled in from the film version of Sweeney Todd, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen gallumph through as small-time swindlers in very broad comic relief.
Startlingly emaciated in his initial scenes while still on strenuous prison work detail, Jackman's Valjean subsequently cuts a more proper and dashing figure after his transformation into a gentleman. His defense of the abused Fantine and subsequent adoption of her daughter represent the fulcrum of Hugo's central theme that a man can change and redeem himself, as opposed to Jalvert's vehement conviction that once a criminal, always a criminal. The passions of all the characters are simple and deep, which accounts for much of the work's enduring popularity in all cultures.
But it also makes for a film that, when all the emotions are echoed out at an unvarying intensity for more than 2 1/2 hours on a giant screen, feels heavily, if soaringly, monotonous. Subtle and nuanced are two words that will never be used to describe this Les Miserables, which, for all its length, fails to adequately establish two critical emotional links: that between Valjean and Cosette, and the latter's mutual infatuation with Marius, which has no foundation at all.
Reuniting with his King's Speech cinematographer Danny Cohen and production designer Eve Stewart, Hooper has handsome interior sets at his disposal. However, with the exception of some French city square and street locations, the predominant exteriors have an obvious CGI look. His predilection for wide-angle shots is still evident, if more restrained than before, but the editing by Melanie Ann Oliver and Chris Dickens frequently seems haphazard; the musical numbers sometimes build to proper visual climaxes in union with the music, but as often as not the cutting seems almost arbitrary, moving from one close-up to another, so that scenes don't stand out but just mush together.
The actors are ideally cast but, with a couple of exceptions, give stage-sized turns for the screen; this bigness might well be widely admired. Jackman finally gets to show onscreen the musical talents that have long thrilled live musical theater audiences, Hathaway gamely gets down and dirty and has her hair clipped off onscreen in the bargain, and Redmayne impresses as a high-caliber singing leading man, but there is little else that is inventive or surprising about the performances. Still, there is widespread energy, passion and commitment to the cause, which for some might be all that is required.
Greg wrote:I am certain Armond White will write a poison-pen review for Les Miserables; but, I cannot think of what film, when he writes his year-end list, he will say is better than Les Miserables. Any ideas?
The second half of Dark Knight Rises with all of it's French Revolution inspiration? How To Survive a Plague for a more contemporary revolution? Rock of Ages for being a musical?
"Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good."
- Minor Myers, Jr.
I am certain Armond White will write a poison-pen review for Les Miserables; but, I cannot think of what film, when he writes his year-end list, he will say is better than Les Miserables. Any ideas?
I am not sure if someone else already said this, but the other thing to factor is the Best Actor award and Best Picture award are strongly linked. For the films released between 2000 and 2011, three of the Best Actor winners came from Best Picture winners that year. Six came from Best Picture nominees. Three came from films not linked to Best Picture. Of those winners, one of them was up against actors who were also not in Best Picture nominated films. The other two beat actors in Best Picture winning films, but I think most of us can agree these were career awards.
So far the Best Picture line-up looks like this:
Les Miserables
Lincoln
Argo
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
Life Of Pi
Two of these films will definitely have a lead actor nomination, two of them might have a lead actor nomination, one of them will probably not have a lead actor nomination, and one of them definitely will not have a lead actor nomination (since there is no lead actor in the film).
While Phoenix's film could still be nominated for Best Picture, it seems pretty likely that if he is nominated he will be going up against two (maybe three) lead actors whose films have the highest chance of winning Best Picture. No matter how good Phoenix's performance is (and despite hating his character, I do think he gave a great performance), the odds are not in his favor to take the award from actors whose films will either be nominated for or win Best Picture. If his film is nominated for Best Picture, then I will start believing in his chances to go all the way.
Similar to the Visual Effects category, being a part of a Best Picture film helps you immensely to win Best Actor.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
