No critic reviews this time (although "I screeched a screech" was clever), no Roger Ebert, no production notes, it's just me vs. Mis. In all fairness, 2012 was a very good year for film overall: The Avengers was delightful, The Dark Knight Rises satisfying, as well as having the best James Bond adventure in Skyfall, one of Tarantino's best in Django Unchained, and other sleeper hits like Silver Linings Playbook, Flight, Seven Psychopaths, The Iceman, Dredd, and Zero Dark Thirty. I thought capping the year off with an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's legendary Broadway musical, which at the time I was not familiar with, would be a nice way to round out a solid year for filmmaking. Seeing this film on my birthday (an anti-birthday present?) was such a horrible form of torture I actually thought less of the year overall knowing this was in it. I love watching and analyzing films so much because they engage my critical thinking skills and bring out emotions that most books can't. It's fun to look at what works and what doesn't work in the above films, how they moved me, how they changed my life. This film changed my life alright, because it makes me mad thinking how poorly made this film, what an assault on your senses it is. Transformers, Upstream Color and all the other All-Time Stinkers did this to a certain degree, but this one was like a appetizer sampler of all those films: the outright physical assault of Transformers, the pretentiousness of Upstream Color, and the bloated narrative of The Hobbit.
Les Miserables (make sure you pronounce it right or you'll have a legion of obsessive fans down your throat) follows characters who all sing about how horrible everything is for 2 1/2 hours. Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is paroled from a 19 year prison sentence of lugging bad CGI boats, but as he can't do anything in society because he is a convict, he fakes his identity and (very suddenly) becomes mayor of a French town. Javert (Russell Crowe) goes on an obsessive quest to bring him to justice for some reason. Valjean meets a woman named Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who is so poor she dies and leaves the care of her daughter Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) to him. And Borat and Helena Bonham Carter run a tavern somewhere in the middle of all that.
The story, like the original Les Miserables (which I read almost out of spite), is certainly interesting but way too overstuffed and overcooked. I can see why so many people like it because the cat and mouse game between Valjean and Javert is engaging, and the death of Fantine is tragic, but it didn't need to be 3,000 pages and have endless diatribes on the state of French society and the Napoleonic wars. But this is not a standard narrative, it is a musical, and there are fifty, count 'em 50, songs in this film. They all sound exactly the same: the first song is about how much it sucks to be a prisoner, the sixth how much it sucks to work in a factory, the tenth (Oscar winner "I Dreamed a Dream") is about how much life sucks in general. The fifteenth how much it sucks to be a parolee, the twentieth how much it sucks to run a revolution. These characters can't even say hello without singing "helloooo monsieur, what's new with youuuu?" The singing is almost always one extreme closeup of one of the actors screaming their song at you. And director Tom Hooper recorded the songs live on set as opposed to dubbed over later, leading to a lot of off key notes and screeches by Jackman that sound like he's going through puberty.
At the end of this film, everyone clapped, but I was too battered down to even be upset. As with Star Wars, there was nothing you could do wrong for a certain segment of fans. And the film won a number of Oscars, which was reasonable seeing as the film went so far past Oscar Bait to become full on Oscarbation. Luckily a lot of people weren't brainwashed by this flick, it only has a 69% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of people came to the realization it simply wasn't good. Cold comfort, indeed.
Rating: No stars
Yes, yes, yes. Fat bloated story sung “live” but not live makes for a miserable film. However…. Like an opera that repeats refrains over and over the score thunders where is should and haunts where it needs to. The emotion of an actor singing live on broadway works so well for such epic themes and a that element is lost when you try and tell it as a tory… it’s to open large and the people become lost in a world to big for the music. A filmed stage performance captures how powerful it is to put huge moments into small spaces. The musical is one of my favorites, but I never found the story particularly fascinating until the Masterpiece…