Nobody beats "Les Mis"

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• Tony Dayoub says:

  December 11, 2012 at 10:48 pm

  My wife and I just watched it. She loved it as much as she loved TITANIC (which should tell you some­thing right there). I liked it just a bit more than you did (but decidedly less than her). The cine­ma­to­graphy did­n’t both­er me as all of the move­ment seemed to “open it up” from its stage incarn­a­tion. Hathaway’s per­form­ance is the first I’ve ever seen where an act­or sews up an Oscar win in one uned­ited take. She really sang the shit out of “I Dream a Dream.”
  But Crowe was as wooden as you said, and like you, I prefer music­als of the Donen/Minnelli kind. I just don’t see how poverty and revolu­tion can suc­cess­fully fuel a music­al, but hey, it’s LES MIS, so what do I know?

• c.t.c.h. says:

  December 12, 2012 at 8:18 am

  “the music is by Claude-Michel Schönberg, no rela­tion what­so­ever to the 12-tone guy.”
  Maybe just my taste, but one of your fun­ni­est jokes.

• David Ehrenstein says:

  December 12, 2012 at 10:44 am

  “Will you join in our cru­sade?” may well win a LOT of con­verts. Fascinating that your wife com­pared it to “Titanic,” Tony, as I thought the very same thing. This is Epic Emotional Cinema at its most shame­lessly over­whelm­ing. Being an Orthodox Sondheimian I’ve nev­er much cared for this show either. But when its put across with such insist­ent force and flair there’s no point in try­ing to put up any form of resistence.
  Supreme Numbers-Cruncher Nate Silver has just declared it the front-runner for the Oscar, and I think he’s right. High school his­tory teach­ers love “Lincoln” – but few oth­er mor­tals. “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Argo,” and “Silver Linings Playbook” are highly likely to be recog­nized. But the Academy always ranks “The Heart” above “The Head.”

• lazarus says:

  December 12, 2012 at 12:02 pm

  …except when they don’t.
  No Country For Old Men was­n’t a “heart” movie, esp. com­pared to its some of its competitors.
  Nor was The Hurt Locker.
  Nor was The Departed.

• LondonLee says:

  December 12, 2012 at 12:08 pm

  ‘The Departed’ win was def­in­itely a “heart” vote for Scorsese.

• Olaf says:

  December 12, 2012 at 12:30 pm

  Whatever one thinks of “Les Miz”, it should be recog­nized as one of the bravest films to be released this year; brave, because it dares to com­bine and to be sin­cere about the two film genres that are most eas­ily ridiculed: the film music­al and the melodrama.
  Both thrive on open emo­tion­al­ism and because of that and because both are per­sist­ently as well as haught­ily cat­egor­ized as ‘female’ (and, by exten­sion, as ‘gay’)genres, they seem to make a lot of crit­ics, espe­cially male ones, really uncom­fort­able. They can deal with the satir­ic­al “Hairspray” or the cyn­ic­al “Chicago”, but the we-are-not-apologizing-for-singing-our-hearts-out sin­cer­ity of “Les Miz” is clearly one step too far: it is “uncool’.
  That the film dares not to water down that emo­tion­al­ism (most of which actu­ally comes out of Hugo’s nov­el, which uses melo­drama in the same way as Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” or “David Copperfield”, to make social com­ment­ary pal­at­able) partly explains those harsh, clever-clever, I‑am-so-witty reviews the film has received: its over­sized emo­tions, so easy to laugh off any­way, are den­ig­rated as “pom­pous”, “a bad case of gran­di­os­ity”, etc.
  It’s also instruct­ive to com­pare this crit­ic­al reac­tion to the inev­it­able cheers for “Django Unchained”:
  You won’t find many sneery reviews that make fun of that movie – like all of Tarantino’s films, it car­ries its post­mod­ern iron­ic detach­ment like a pro­tect­ive shield that makes tak­ing the piss ouf of it rather dif­fi­cult. And god, it’s ‘cool’ – and crit­ics want to be ‘cool’ as well, so they spend hours look­ing for shots that Tarantino might have ripped off from “Beach Bimbos from Mars” or oth­er “cult films” to be in on the joke. It’s rather dis­pir­it­ing how many crit­ics freely admit that they have nev­er read the nov­el “Les Misérables”. None of these review­ers would dare write about “Django Unchained” without first check­ing out the ori­gin­al “Django”.
  Another explan­a­tion why espe­cially US review­ers don’t know what to make of “Les Miz” is that it does­n’t have any use for the kind of soph­ist­ic­ated wit the best American music­als have in abund­ance. In that respect it is very much a French/British music­al; yet it does­n’t try to beat Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim at their own game and then fails – it’s simply an entirely dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of the form “music­al theatre”. (And no, Americans did neither invent nor per­fect the music­al, not even the film music­al – all they did was invent and per­fect cer­tain sub-genres.)
  P.S.: David – Sondheim him­self has admit­ted sev­er­al times that he is a big “Les Miz” fan; he may think it’s a bad music­al (how could he not? The show ignores most of the con­ven­tions he him­self so fer­vently fol­lows), but he still loves it…

• Pete Apruzzese says:

  December 12, 2012 at 2:03 pm

  This tri-state area res­id­ent recog­nizes the inspir­a­tion for your head­line – top marks! Now you need to fig­ure out how to incor­por­ate “His prices are in…sane!” in your head­line for “Django Unchained.”

• Tony Dayoub says:

  December 12, 2012 at 3:01 pm

  @Olaf
  Bad form to take down a movie based on “inev­it­able cheers” vs. actu­al ones in order to prop anoth­er film up. Especially since I hear that even the cool­critz have some prob­lems with QT this time.
  @David E.
  No argu­ment from me. I pre­dict LES MIS is the one to beat this year too since ZDT ran into some con­tro­versy. Doesn’t mat­ter to me since my top three thus far–AMOUR, HOLY MOTORS and THE MASTER–aren’t even in the running.

• Olaf says:

  December 12, 2012 at 3:08 pm

  @Tony
  My “take down” (if you want to call it that) of “Django Unchained” w a s based on “actu­al cheers” (by the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, The Guardian among oth­ers) that merely con­firmed what I had expec­ted to hap­pen all along.

• David Ehrenstein says:

  December 12, 2012 at 3:59 pm

  “they seem to make a lot of crit­ics, espe­cially male ones, really uncomfortable.”
  Especially STRAIGHT male ones.
  “It’s also instruct­ive to com­pare this crit­ic­al reac­tion to the inev­it­able cheers for “Django Unchained”:
  You won’t find many sneery reviews that make fun of that movie – like all of Tarantino’s films, it car­ries its post­mod­ern iron­ic detach­ment like a pro­tect­ive shield that makes tak­ing the piss ouf of it rather difficult.”
  Oh not really. It’s just more “post­mod­ern” retro non­sense, revamp­ing 70’s black­spoit­a­tion flicks for the delect­a­tion of “hip” fan­boys (QTs primary audience.)
  If your look­ing for a ser­i­ous film about slavery see “Mandingo.”

• Bettencourt says:

  December 16, 2012 at 10:11 pm

  I don’t think it’s fair to say that “few oth­er mor­tals” besides high school his­tory teach­ers love LINCOLN, con­sid­er­ing it’s already made $108 mil­lion in the U.S. and dur­ing the week­end just end­ing it had slightly high­er grosses than SKYFALL.
  However, I do think LES MIS has a bet­ter shot at Best Picture right now than LINCOLN, unless it tanks at the box-office which seems unlikely.
  I was­n’t bothered so much by Tom Hooper’s cam­era style as by the edit­ing, which was fre­quently much too fast and at a rhythm which totally ignored the rhythm of the music, which seems an odd styl­ist­ic choice for a through-sung musical.

• Partisan says:

  January 9, 2013 at 6:15 pm

  Norman Jewison and Sidney Lumet aren’t the most admired dir­ect­ors of the day, but hav­ing seen LES MISERABLES last night, I respect JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and THE WIZ a lot more.