Les Miserables - 2012

Viva la musical!

3.5 Stars (of four)

Les Miserables is exactly what it claims to be in its advertisments, a great musical.  One that could easily take its place among Hollywood's pantheon of great musicals like Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Singing In The Rain, Gigi, and Xanadu.  Ha!  Just kidding about that last one.   But all kidding aside, Les Miserables really is good, IF you like musicals.  As I have seen reported in other critics, it is designed with a hardcore audience in mind.  I happen to be one of them.  I have seen the play four times, once even in Spanish, and it never fails to evoke great emotions from me.  This movie will appeal to all diehards who have seen and were moved by the original stage production.  Whether it will appeal to others who have not seen it on the stage remains to be seen.  But, like all movie musicals, this is audience manipulation at its finest.  There are stirring calls to arms, heartbreaking laments and even some much needed humor here and there. 

Based on the novel by Victor Hugo, Les Miserables takes place years after the French Revolution has occurred and the idealism of it has died with it.  There is a new king on the throne and this one has apparently not learned any lessons from his predecessors.  The people are starving and calling for revolution.  In the midst of this, Jean Valjean (excellently protrayed by Hugh Jackman), is released from 20 years in prison and must carry papers that identify him as an ex-con.  Because of this, nobody will have anything to do with him until a priest takes him in and gives him some silver to start his life over again.  Valjean drops his name, breaks his parole, and starts a new life.  Because he has broken parole, Inspector Javert (played with appropriate menace by Russell Crowe) doggedly pursues him across France over the years.  Through a set of circumstances, Valjean helps a woman, Fantine (played by Anne Hathaway, in the highlight of the film), who is dying to look after her child Cosette (played by Amanda Seyfried).  Flash forward about 15 years and a new revolution is brewing in Paris.  Cosette falls in love with a young revolutionary named Marius in a chance meeting.  The revolution happens and quickly falls apart, everyone but Marius is killed and heand Cosette are married.  Unfortunately, such a quick summary of the story really leaves a lot to be desired.  It is a large cast with intriguing personalities that come together in dramatic circumstances that run the gamut of all emotions.  By the end, you really are emotionally drained, unless you have no soul.  If that is the case, there's not much I can do for you.

Anyway, a lot has been made about this movie recording the actors live, rather than what is done in most musicals where actors sing their lines before in a studio and then lip sync on set.  In this case, the rationale is that if you let the actors sing live, they will be able to ACT.  This was a great plan.  The results are spectacular.  Comparing this rendition to the Joel Schumaker version of Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom is particularly lifeless.  While it also has stirring and emotional music, the performances in that version are curiously lifeless, as if the actors were phoning it in.  In Les Miserables, you really feel like you are in a Broadway production of the play.  With the singing live, it gives the actors full range to act instead of making sure they sync to the music.  Since there is not a bad actor in the cast, this serves the movie well.  You are really pulled into the drama of what is happening because of this.  This made all the difference in the world.  Even better, movies allow for the closeup and different angles, which bring us even more into the emotions of the songs.  You can't really get this in stage performance because the audience is so far away from the performers.  Therefore, performers almost have to pantomime and emote in order to communicate those emotions.  But in the movie, the closeup allows us to get very intimate with the performer, we can see every nuance in the face and eyes, so you don't have to be overly bombastic.  Therefore, it feels more real.  Compare the difference between William Shatner's acting (good stage acting), to Patrick Stewart's acting (good cinematic acting).  It is quite jarring when you take stage acting and put it into television or movies.  It seems hammy and scenery-chewing.  This does not happen in Les Miserables.  Charlie Chaplin once remarked you use the medium-shot in comedy and the close-up in drama.  This is part of the subtle language of movies, and what worked then, works just as well today.

Now, I have spent a lot of time ballyhooing this movie and saying how great it is.  But you look at the rating and it is only 3.5 stars out of 4.  Why do you ask?  For the very simple reason that while I recognize the need to have some star power in the movie, they are not very good singers.  Oh, they can sing just fine, insofar as they can carry a tune and carry off each of their parts fairly well.  But they are not singers.  Russell Crowe and Amanda Seyfried are especially lacking in powerful chops.  Hugh Jackman, once a song-and-dance man himself is quite good.  But Anne Hathaway's rendition of I Dreamed A Dream is truly spectacular and moving.  It is the centerpiece of the film.  And, I noted with great satisfaction, that the lesser-quality version that is used in the commercials was not used in the final film.  It is even better in the final film, something to be marveled at.  But the true scene-stealers in the entire film are Eddie Redmayne and Samantha Barks, Marius and Eponine, respectively.While Redmayne is a cinematic actor, Barks is a theater actress and played Eponine in the 2010 Les Miserables in Concert.  Both of these actors have amazing voices.  While Redmayne especially seems miscast at first, as soon as he opens his mouth, his voice is incredibly strong and vibrant.  Both of their performances are Oscar-worthy and will both, unfortunately, be overshadowed by the bigger marquee names in the cast.  There are a couple of new additions in the music to help with the cinematic transitions that are good.  There is also a really good addition in the end where Valjean, Cossette and Marius sing a trio that wraps up a motif in A Heart Full of Love which appears earlier.  In fact, this movie does a very good job at recurring motifs throughout the story, much more so than the stage production does.  This is, again, mostly to aid the transitions in cinema that you can't do on stage.  But, there were also some very jarring and abrupt transtitions that really spoil a moment.  Specifically, the song Turning before Marius sings Empty Chairs at Empy Tables.  It suddenly moves to him and takes us totally out of the moment for a few seconds and ruins a mood.  So, should you see it?  If you like musicals, yes.  If you are a fan of the original stage production, yes.  I don't really know if it will convince non-fans.  But, even if you are not emotionaly invested in the original production and are curious to see it, I would recommend it highly.  You just may like it.  I know I did.

Django Unchained

Tarantino Unleashed

Django Unchained  4 Stars (of four)

In Django Unchained, the newest film by Quentin Tarantino, it has finally happened.  Tarantino is finally unleashed with total abandon.  I'll get to that in a minute, but first, a quick summary.  For those of you who don't know, the film starts two years before the Civil War.  Dr. Shultz (played by the amazing Christoph Waltz-the guy who played the main Nazi in Tarantino's last film Inglorius Basterds) is a bounty hunter who stops a pair of slave traders in Texas looking for a slave Django (played by Jaime Foxx).  Schultz is looking for a bounty on a group of men who were overseers at a plantation where Django was a slave.  Schultz gets Django to help him because Django can identify the three men.  Once they kill the three men, they form a partnership to become a bounty hunting team.  Django also asks that they find and free his wife, who was sold away to another plantation owned by Calvin Candy (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing one of the slimiest bastards ever committed to film).  Yadda, yadda, yadda, great violence ensues to a bloody denoument.  I won't give away the ending, but it is quite good.

Now, much has been made of Tarantino's penchant for doing homages to other film genres, specifically older ones that really aren't done anymore.  Django Unchained, as has been ballyhooed a lot in the press, is no exception.  It is a loving tribute to the revenge flick and the spaghetti western in the vein of For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon A Time In The West and Hang 'Em High, or the more recent, more nihilistic westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Wild Bunch or Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid with a touch of the blaxploitation westerns like Take A Hard Ride, Posse, or Boss N----r (probably closest to what Tarantino was trying to get). This is not the John Wayne western, but rather the Clint Eastwood western or the Fred Williamson/Jim Brown blaxploitation western that were cynical, revisionistic and much more realistic as far as attitudes in the west are concerned.  The action is tense, exciting, and very violent.  As usual, Tarantino's writing is crisp and his dialogue realistic.  While the dialogue is a tad modern in its vernacular and slang, this is not a realistic depiction of historical fact, so it does not detract.  A lot has been made of its depictions of the violence and cruelty in slavery, and this movie does not shy away from that.  The big issue I have with this is that many people, including the actors themselves, view the movie as documentary rather than just telling a violent fictional story set in a place and time of reprehensible values.  I don't know if this is contrition for being involved in an extremely bloody movie to deflect criticism, or jjustification to end on an extremely bloody note.  In either case, I find this attitude a tad hypocritical, and the backpedalling that has been made by all involved (other than Tarantino himself) in the context of Newtown ridiculous.  Own up to the fact that you made something very violent and that you are playing to the masses, not that you are making something that has some kind of greater historical or cultural value.

A note about Tarantino.  I actually agree with him and his recent statements on his irritation for being blamed for every violent action that occurs.  Despite what most people think, Tarantino's movies are quite restrained as far as the violence goes.  Up until this flick, he has subscribed to the Alfred Hitchcock school of less is more.  Despite what you think you may have seen in most Tarantino flicks, they are not very gratuitous with what is shown in the final product.  However, it is the implication of what is happening on the screen which is more disturbing to people, it is something they have never seen before.  Therefore, your brain fills in the rest.  Freeze-frame almost every Tarantino film (outside of the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill), you really do not see a lot of violence.  It is what you think happened which is far more horrible than anything he shows.  But in this film, he ends all pretense as to restraint.  This is a VERY bloody movie, and definitely not for all tastes.  But if you are up for a rip-roaring, bloody good time, this is a great movie, another worthy installment in a great series of films by a master filmmaker. 

One last thing.  While waiting to go in, I saw at least two kids who could not have been over 13 go into this film.  How are they getting in?  Please do not take your children to see this film.  It is really not for them.

The Hobbit

Peter Jackson Rides Again

The Hobbit-An Unexpected Journey-2012 (3 Stars-out of 4)

The Hobbit-1978

So, The Hobbit is finally here.  I certainly say, it took long enough.  I'm not exactly sure why Peter Jackson held out for so long.  Maybe he was burned out, but it is finally here.  So, I'm sure you're asking, how good is it?

The short answer is, it's pretty darn good.  The high level of quality that you have come to expect from WETA and their special effects.  Peter Jackson and his writing partners do a first rate job of adapting the film as they did last time.  However, there is a small wrinkle.  The Hobbit is a fairly simple book.  It is a very simple, children's book where not too much really happens.  I remember standing in line for the movie thinking, "how in the world are they going to make three 3-hour movies out of this book?"  As I was watching, there was a lot of elements I did not recognize from when I read the book.  It turns our that Jackson has added a lot of elements to the movie that I believe are either from the appendices in Lord of the Rings or other books like The Cimarillion.  There are at least three new elements that have been woven into the narrative.  There is a story about the Orc king that killed Thorin's father and is chasing them throughout the movie.  There is also the mention of a necromancer which is starting the setup to The Lord of the Rings.  This part is starting to bring about the story of the Nazgul and the beginnings lof the awakening of the evil of Sauron and the One Ring.  There is also a whole section on the elves and Elron/Galadrial where Gandalf becomes a detective of sort to figure out why the evil is awakening.

As I said, the special effects are magnificent.  But they get really over the top during the fight with the Dragon King.  There is just way too much action that is designed to show off the 3-D effects.  This is a movie that does NOT need to be seen in 3D.  Don't waste your money.  Go see it in 2D.  The acting is great and all of our familiar characters are back.  The movie ends on the escape from the Goblin King and Gollum.  One of the things I really enjoyed with the film was that you don't really get a good look at Smaug, the dragon.  I think that this will be most of the second film, the battle with Smaug and I'll bet the third film will be that battle of the five armies.  As a lark, I decided to rewatch the original animated film from the 70s to compare them.  Obviously, it shows its wear.  The songs are a little hokey, and the DVD transfer is one of the murkiest and worst transfer I have ever seen.  I know this is a fairly vanilla review, but there really is not much to say.  It is fun if you are a Lord of the Rings fan, and I recommend seeing it.  It is a tad long, but it is good.  I think you will have fun.

The Sessions

1.5 Stars (Out of 4)

Ladies, see if this job pitch catches your eye.  You are a seasoned professional in your chosen field for well over twenty years, have been recognized by your peers with some of the highest awards in your field and are generally considered to be one of the better professionals in your chosen field.  Now, for the last few years, you have hit a rut and not made quite the same heights you were known for, but you have been putting in solid work nevertheless.  Now, you are offered a new job with not as much visibility and you are told that if you spend approximately 60-80% of your time in the nude, you are guaranteed to make it back to the top.  Now I ask you, doesn't this sound like every girl's dream job comeback?  Hands?  Anyone?

Now I wonder: what in the world possessed Helen Hunt, the Emmy, SAG, Golden Globe AND Academy Award winning actress to do a film where she spends approximately 40 minutes of a 2 hour film in the nude?  She is not the first actress who has gone nude to give her career a boost (Meg Ryan, Elisabeth Shue, Rebecca Rominj, Tia Carrera, Drew Barrymore, Lindsay Lohan, Diane Keaton just to name a few), nor will she be the last, but it is kind of sad that this is one of the only ways that established actresses in a slump have to bring them back to the top.  I guess it is only a matter of time before we see Meghan Fox do her first nude scene (she already played a prostitute twice-Jonah Hex and The Dictator).  Anyway, we live in a time now that women have more opportunity than ever to make their own way in this world on their own terms.  Hollywood, as liberal as they think they are, still operates by the same old rules.  For the most part, actresses are a piece of meat to be exploited.  Now don't mistunderstand, I am not a prude about this.  If a role genuinely calls for anything, I don't have a problem with it.  This includes violence, nudity, whatever.  But the fact is, most of time, nude scenes are put in for their titilation factor, not necessity.  For instance, necessary (Belle Du Jour, The Accused, Irreversible, The Reader, The Last Seduction) and unecessary (Leaving Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, any Bo Derek movie).

The movie is about Mark O'Brien (played by John Hawkes), a poet paralyzed by polio and essentially trapped in an iron lung most of his life.  Through the help of his therapist and priest, he goes to see a sex surrugate, played by Helen Hunt.  Through these sessions, he finds out a little about himself.  Yes, that's it.  I didn't find the movie particularly insightful or emotional.  Really, the only emotion I felt was sadness for Helen.  This is a woman who has been considered tops in her field for a very long time.  It just seems like this was a role she did not have to take.  But maybe that was the point.  I do like that a film came out that can deal with the subject of sex in a mature and adult way without adolescent snickering in the background.  Our country has a very strange predilection toward sex that may be left over from our puritanical days.  I found it interesting that a movie filled with non-stop violence like The Ring, Batman: The Dark Knight or The Lost World is considered just fine entertainment for children, but a movie whose primary subject is sex is usually relegated to the NC-17 or pronographic world.  There is a long history in Hollywood for trying to sell frank depictions of nudity and/or sex in a psuedo-educational or documentary fashion that started with the movie Mom and Dad all the way through this one.  My primary problem with this movie is that it seems to be more about Helen Hunt being nude rather than telling a good or interesting story.  Unfortunatly, most movies like this fall into this category.  So if you want want to see Jaime Buckman nude, this is your film.  But I found it fairly lifeless and unengaging.  I genuinely hope this helps Helen's career and that she will continue making great films.  She is a particularly gifted comedic actresses and I can only see her getting better.  Unfortunately, since we are a culture that worships youth and beauty, this may have been her paying her dues so she can continue working.  And that is a sad commentary on today.

"Hitchcock" & "The Girl"

The Girl            2.5 Stars (of four)

Hitchcock          3.5 Stars (of four)

Interestingly enough, two different movies with vastly different views of the same subject came out in November, HBO's The Girl and 20th Century Spotlight's Hitchcock.  Both are very interesting views of this very complicated artist, one who many consider one of, if not the best director of the 20th century.  While I won't comment on that, I will say that both movies are entertaining with fascinating subject material.  It would be interesting to see a biopic on Hitchcock someday, as he was a very interesting man.  Both movies focus on essentially the same period of his life, Hitchcock takes place as he was making Psycho, the movie that cut movie history in half.  The Girl was about his time on his next two films, primarily The Birds and Marnie.  It is a revealing choice to focus both movies on Hitchcock's career when it was nearing its end, rather than focusing on a rise and fall, Behind The Scenes-type film.  I'll take each one at a time.

The Girl was done by HBO with Toby Jones as a truly terrifying Hitchcock and Sienna Miller playing the beleaguered Tippi Hedron, who was Hitchcock's new blonde starlet in The Birds and Marnie.  The film traces Hitchcock's work with Tippi Hedron, the next woman he was going to make a star.  By this time in his career, Hitchcock was at the top of his game, with several great movies under his belt and a successful TV show watched by millions.  But Hitchcock is not the true focus of the movie, but rather Tippie Hedron.  While being a first class beauty herself, she had the unfortunate luck to be following some of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, from Kim Novak to Janet Leigh to Doris Day to Ingrid Bergman to Grace Kelly.  Quite big shoes to fill for anyone, but the movie goes to show how determined she was to take her place in this pantheon of starlets.  Unfortunately for her, her director, according to the film, was a lecherous and cruel taskmaster, driving her to literal near-insanity during the shoot of The Birds.  There is a telling sequence in the film, very famous in Hollywood lore, where she spent five days on a set with large, live birds attacking her, after being told the scene would only last 1 day in shooting with bird models.  And if this was not bad enough, the film also portrays Hitchcock as a lecherous fiend who even at one point at the beginning of filming, attacks her in the back of a car.  After this, he kept harassing her with unwelcome suggestions, filthy limericks and leering at her all the while.  And through it all, holding it over her head that she was nothing without him and that she never measured up to her predecessors, and that he could crush her and her career at any moment.

While I have no doubt this actually happened, based on the accounts by Ms. Hedron herself and others, the movie comes off as a cheap and lurid expose along the lines of a Behind The Music.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Workplace harassment is unacceptable anywhere or anytime.  I don't think one should whitewash history.  It is important to understand all its context in order to make a objective judgement.  But this movie demonstrates to me a disturbing propensity in Hollywood that, unfortunately, is not a new.  This movie focuses primarily on the morbidly obese man forcing himself on the young, beautiful woman and we react in characteristic disgust.  How dare he, we ask ourselves.  Doesn't he realize his place?  Yet when an attractive harasser does the deed, the victim is usually portrayed as at least conflicted (Indecent Proposal), enjoys it or at least looks like it (Straw Dogs), laughs at it or treats it as a joke (Anchorman, Horrible Bosses), and, at times, even falls in love (Unfaithful, Memoirs of a Geisha, Cast Away).  Being beautiful or ugly should not determine the tone of the film when dealing with this subject.  There have been precious few movies over the years that have taken on this difficult subject matter and shown it for how ugly it really is (High Country, Repulsion, The Accused, Disclosure).  When I finished The Girl, two things were on my mind.  One, I felt I needed a shower, as this movie dripped with lurid undertones.  Second, I marveled at how tough this woman was as well.  I don't know if Hollywood today is as much of a jungle as it was then, but this is the day of the casting couch, and many woman had to compromise themselves to get ahead in the business.  Just dealing with what could only be defined as a very hostile work environment, both professionally and personally, Ms. Hedron certainly went through hell and back.  In the end, though, the movie comes off as a shallow hatchet job on Hitchcock with all the taste and depth of a National Enquirer article.  Puerilily entertaining, yes.  But deep and insightful?  Not really.

Hitchcock, I believe is the superior film.  While it is a little more reverential about the "great Hitchcock", it is also the more adult of the two.  It focuses more upon the relationship with Hitchcock and his wife, Alma, who was his constant companion and collaborator over his long career.  Most people probably don't know the enormous influence Alma had on her husband.  She was herself an accomplished writer and director who had worked just as long has Hitchcock had, if not longer.  All of his movies have both of their stamps on them, not just his.  It discussed his enormous insecurities and pressures that were on him while making Psycho.  And yes, it also dealt with his predilections and did not shy away from them, but they were a little glossed over in this story.  I believe that this was a movie that actually gave a more rounded view of who Hitchcock was and why he was the way he was.  Unfortunately, it does require the viewer to know a little about his history with the business and Alma.  There is not a lot of exposition in these matters.  (For a good, concise history on Hitchcock, read Francois Trauffout's excellent Hitchcock, an extended interview where the master of the French New Wave (himself a celebrated director) has an unusually long and frank conversation for the normally very guarded Master of Suspense.)  Hitchcock also has a very wicked sense of humor, very much in keeping with the man himself.  It is introduced and ended in a very similar way as his introductions and conclusions to his TV shows, with the blackest of black humor.  Anthony Hopkins is his usual amazing self.  I honestly believe he is one of the five best living actors of our time.  Helen Mirren plays Alma, and she is the real star of this movie.  Maybe it is because so little is known of Alma, that this is such a vision.  Mirren herself in interviews bemoans the fact that there is so little out there on Alma that she could use to educate herself for her performance.  So therefore, she had to make up a lot of if, and showed just how capable she is and adding another fantastic performance to her very long list of great performances.  I doubt she will get the Oscar for this film (mostly because she already has one for The Queen), but it is an Oscar-worthy performance.

One last thing I would like to add about Hitchcock.  It is one of the three best instances of visually showing the creative process, the other two being Finding Neverland and Amadeus.  In all three, it shows just how true artists see the world and how their work occupies their souls and how they must literally and figureatively live with their creations.  Hitchcock, being a writer as well as a filmmaker, needs to live with his character.  In this case, there are several sequences where he was with Ed Gein, the mass killer whose exploits are the inspiration for Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deranged and The Silence of the Lambs. It is very difficultr to show the creative process.  It is easier to show its result (Pollack, Frida).  These three movies come the closest, in my opinion, to accurately portraying the artist and his (or her) process.  It would be better to watch these movies in the order of their placement in Hitchcock's life, so one's context guides the other.  I know I would have preferred to see Hitchcock before The Girl.  But, in the end, I found them both fascinating portraits on a subject I truly love.  Both are worth seeing and I would recommend each of them.