This movie sucked.
The first reason is that it is based upon the stage musical of the same name. Nobody in the production rose above the material, which is pretty weak.
I love Eponine, and that’s about it.
The cinematography is so bad I pitted it.
I’m going to see it Tuesday. I am not surprised that folks were unimpressed with Russel Crowe. His acting skills have been lacking lately. He deserves a Raspberry award for his awful performance in Man with the Iron Fist.
Chapters and chapters of Marius and Cosette falling slowly in love.
And I also disagree that Amanda Seyfried is prettier than Samantha Banks. Amanda has this almost bug-eyed thing sometimes.
Just saw it over the weekend. Loved it, and I’ve seen the stage show. I was amazed at the vocal talent displayed, but I have to agree on this:
It’s not just that Crowe doesn’t have a strong voice. Damnit, some of those songs really need dramatic arcs and crescendos, especially “Stars”. Listen to any recording of it by other performers and you’ll hear what I mean. Crowe kept everything on almost the same level, and it came off as emotionless.
Still, he can sing. And a lot better than Butler as The Phantom of the Opera.
I don’t know why anybody who already knows he doesn’t like the stage musical would see this movie.
For myself, I didn’t really notice the flaws in the cinematography because I was deeply enveloped in the music, which I love.
If you could get the same effect by listening to a CD, why would you watch a movie?
I see a lot of movies. Some I have low expectations when I go in the door. Sometimes, those movies are really good.
Having heard of Les Mis but never seen or read it, I thought I’d try the movie.
The plot was rough. I didn’t like the religiosity. That’s a personal issue, and I made myself sit through it all.
Some of the group songs are hard to understand. And the close ups were a little off-putting.
Agree about Crowe’s performance seeming flat.
Anne Hathaway was stellar.
Still, this isn’t something I’m likely to repeat. Or go see the stage show. Or likely bother to read.
My wife and I saw the movie yesterday. I’ve seen three film adaptations of the book, but I’ve never read the book or seen the musical. I really wasn’t that familiar with the music either, although as the film went along, I had several aha moments.
First and foremost, it is well worth the cost of admission just to see Anne Hathaway’s performance. I teared up during “I Dreamed a Dream.” She was remarkable in delivering the performance of the song while also conveying such devastating emotion.
I couldn’t help but think of George Costanza during “Master of the House.”
However, the second half of the film was incredibly boring. It was interminable. I began alternatively nodding off or fiddling with stuff.
The music was largely an indistinguishable mush. The “black and red” song was childishly stupid - the lyrics were like a Simpsons parody of a middle school student’s speech. The big revolution was played like … well, a drama club depiction of a revolution. I got excited about “Drink with Me” because as it started a woman behind me said what a great song it was, and it didn’t seem much different than anything else around it.
The motivations of the characters didn’t make much sense. The lavish wedding of Marius kind of made his fomenting revolution and mourning his friends who died in the effort seem like a lark.
Still, it’s worth it to see Hathaway’s performance. I might suggest sneaking out shortly thereafter, though.
That’s actually a very good question, and made me think quite a bit. The visuals do add something to the story even if they are badly shot. I think about the fact that I like to watch opera on video, and it is often badly acted and terribly shot. Yet it helps tell the story.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the musical. As a through-composed piece only five or six songs really stand out, and the rest sounds like the same muddled, messy recitative repeated ad nauseum. I may get the guillotine for this, but I would have preferred spoken dialogue over two-thirds of the music.
The performances themselves I thought mostly good.
- Crowe (whom I normally like) was definitely the weakest link, and the on-camera singing was clearly beyond his capacity – note how the director let the extended closing notes of one song after another die into a fadeout as the camera soared away. From an acting perspective I totally bought his characterization of Javert up until the suicide, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Maybe it’s my unfamiliarity with the material, but I never felt that he had been dealt a blow significant enough to crack a stalwart and stoic heart.
- The modern Broadway singing style had never fallen gently on my ears, Hugh Jackman’s included. That being said, I warmed quickly to his Valjean. As others have pointed out, the experience was perhaps too intimate, as I now know the exact number of hairs Hugh sports in each nostril, but I blame that on the director. His abilities as an actor outshone the mediocrity of the music and forced me to like him.
- Words cannot do justice to my impressions of Anne Hathaway. Simply stated, she gave the single best cinematic performance of a song that I have ever witnessed. I am not given to tears, but her big moment came closer to tearing (in both senses of the word) me up than anything I’ve seen in more than 20 years.
- I was far more impressed with Samantha Barks’ Éponine than Amanda Seyfried’s Cosette in every possible way. Éponine was soulful, noble, and sang of her heartbreak in a mercifully quiet tone – not the nasally, country-western inflected belting job that “On My Own” usually receives. Cosette was a pretty face but otherwise unmemorable. She could hit the high notes, but her voice was far too delicate and weak.
- I’d also like to toss out heaps of praise upon the young men of the cast. Each of the revolutionaries I thought outstanding. Yes, Marius was a twit, but that’s how the story goes. Eddie Redmayne’s singing was fantastic, as was Aaron Tveit’s as Enjolras. As I left the theater, the song that stayed with me the longest was “Red and Black”. I don’t think that Gavroche could have been more perfectly cast.
- The Thénardiers were wonderful, though Helena Bonham Carter seems to be sporting the same hair, makeup and wardrobe in every period picture she’s in these days. Her Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd, Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, and Madame Thénardier seem almost interchangeable. Sacha Baron Cohen was a delight, though with his chameleon powers I still had to remind myself who he was each time his character was onscreen.
Overall, I give the show a B-.
I went in wanting to love it. I even had kleenex pre-positioned for easy access. When I saw the PREVIEWS, for Og’s sake, I was tearing up. That said, I didn’t touch my kleenex until the very end. All of the songs that made me tear up in the previews, didn’t, in the movie itself. I Dreamed A Dream was good, but it didn’t touch me emotionally. Bring Him Home destroyed me when I saw the play oh so many decades ago. But it didn’t bring a single tear in the movie. Valjean’s death scene was the only one that turned on the water works for me.
I’ll also echo many others, when I say that Russell Crowe was miscast. His acting was ok, but his singing wasn’t up to snuff.
For all these reasons, and perhaps for the unrealistically high expectations I had, I have to give it a thumbs down.
J.
I keep forgetting how pissed off I am that they cut “Turning”. Cut it. Killed it. D-E-D dead. I know it only exists in the stage production so the audience has something to watch while they change the scenery after everyone dies at the barricade (and the women something to do after Act I), but I really love that song. It was such a tease to only leave in two lines and cut the rest…
Preface: I have seen the stage production 6 times, everywhere from London to LA to touring companies. I was prepared to hate this movie, but had to see it.
As I noted in Zebra’s pit thread, I hated the shaky cam. The best scene was LeMarque’s funeral and “Can You Hear The People Sing”, where we got to see the actors’ bodies and a bit of the city.
I doubted Russel Crowe’s ability to pull this off from the time I heard they cast him. I was right. He doesn’t even have the right vocal range for the role… why, why, oh why did you give the second most important singing role to a weak voice??? “Stars” was downright painful.
I’m not a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen, but he did pretty well as Thendardier (“Colette… whatever”). However, he didn’t inhabit the role as much as some of the other supporting cast (maybe because I’m not a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen…).
I understand the need to cut verses for time… but why, then, add another song?!? I, too, speculated that it was a bid for “Best Original Song”. I don’t think it was a very good one, though - it didn’t fit with the rest of the music at all.
I liked what they did with “I Dreamed a Dream” - it makes a great deal of sense to have her sing it after she becomes a prostitute, rather than right after she is cast out of the factory, when things aren’t quite so bad yet. As noted, Anne Hathaway killed it.
Eddie Redmayne is possibly the best Marius I’ve ever seen. Normally I dislike Marius for being shallow and vapid, but Eddie gave the role charactee. (Does anyone know if he sings opera? He seemed to have that quality to his voice.) Amanda Seyfried, on the other hand, brought nothing new to the role of Cosette. She is as shallow and vapid as ever. Marius should have dragged Eponine away from the barricades and run away to London with her :).
I do admit to crying at the end… the bishop got me.
6 of 10, mainly because of Russel Crowe and bad cinematography.
To go on a bit of a tangent, I’ve been seeing a bunch of reviews that go something like this: “I’m not a fan of musicals, don’t really understand them, but I thought I’d check this one out. Boy oh boy, they just never stop singing! If only there were some non-musical parts.”
It makes as much sense as if someone who had never been to an opera was asked to review a performance of Tosca, and said “the plot was interesting but there was too much music.” Way to miss the point.
I mean, it’s one thing if someone just doesn’t like the music. Anyone can have an opinion about it. But the music is inseparable from the show, just as important as the actor’s lines.
I’ve had a listen to the original French concept album on YouTube–a bit different from the show as we’ve come to know it, but still interesting and compelling. On this album, “J’avais revee d’un autre vie” (I had dreamed of another life) does, indeed, come after Fantine has become a prostitute. (In fact, the other prostitutes make up a backing chorus on the bridge and at the end, and the song segues into a short snippet of “La Nuit” (At Night), the song which later became “Lovely Ladies.”)
(Open spoilers ahead, so tread carefully…)
Anyway, I liked the movie a lot. The only thing which kept it from being a perfect 10 were some of the cuts. I realize that cuts were necessary, but some of them seemed rather clumsy. You could tell where they’d been filmed and cut rather than never filmed at all–and it seemed to be trimmed in rather strange places. (I mean, why cut a whole verse out of Javert’s suicide? And the first lines of the Attack on Rue Plumet–which explain why Thenardier and his gang were even THERE in the first place.)
Tom Hooper has said that he’s amenable to releasing an extended cut on DVD if there’s enough demand. I’d like to see that. I don’t necessarily need the 4-hour cut that Tom said one version was, just full versions of “Master of the House,” “On My Own,” “A Little Fall of Rain,” “Attack on Rue Plumet,” and “Javert’s Suicide.” Which would probably add no more than 10 minutes tops!
I must say I liked the fact that they worked more stuff from the Brick back into it. In fact, I’d read the leaked screenplay online this fall and was impressed by just HOW much from the Brick it worked in (some of which didn’t make it into the finished product). For example, after Eponine’s death, Gavroche was to have said, “She was my sister.” On the one hand, it was nice to have one more nod to the novel…on the other, it came totally out of left field. We didn’t even see a baby boy at the Thenardiers’ inn to set it up.
I didn’t think Russell Crowe was all that bad. It’s just that we fans have been spoiled by the likes of Philip Quast and Norm Lewis. I will say I’d have liked to see Brian Stokes Mitchell play Javert…but admittedly, as incredible a singing voice as he has, his acting style can be rather stagy.
Oh, and I had a little Les Mis moment the day I saw it. With a few hours to go until I saw it that night, I was strolling around a nearby small town to pick up a Christmas gift for the friend I was seeing it with. I cut through an indoor mini-mall with a small Italian restaurant in it. It wasn’t open yet, but they were bustling around getting ready. Glancing inside as I passed, I saw a little blonde girl of about six (the owner’s daughter, as I later learned), sweeping the floor with a broom twice her size.
A little girl with a broom taller than she is, sweeping the floor in an empty restaurant. Sound familiar?
HA, yes…She looked exactly like she did as Mrs. Lovett.
Frankly, I couldn’t stop thinking “Jeeze, Wolverine! Just bust out your claws and win this damn revolution already!”
My makeup complaint - Hugh Jackman didn’t seem to age at all. He appeared older at the beginning, with the beard, than dying some 30+ years later.
And the prostitutes were an interesting collection of diseases.
:D. I know, right?!! Wolverine could have totally kicked Gladiator’s ass. Ok, so what was Miss Haversham doing there anyway???