les miserables (the movie film; not the concert film or book. Dutch angles! Americans! Australians!)

I remember liking the '95 Lelouch Les Miserables. Maybe I should try that again.

With this and Django opening on Christmas Day, it's no wonder Morbs is such a grinch.

I have such a loathing for Tom Hooper that I'll probably go see this.

Bring Him Home is a freaking amazing bit of work i don't care what anyone says.

Won't argue with you there, but I'd rather hear Kermit the Frog sing it than Hugh Jackman

man this thread is p stupid

this fucking owned

this was the best musical-to-movie adaptation I've seen since Chicago, which makes it the second-best musical-to-movie adaptation I've seen.

However, it turns out that I think Les Miserables is a really stupid musical.

i'm still planning on seeing it

This musical is the best of all the latter-day myoozicals, it doesn't even come close to making up for the entire genre but I will surely set aside 30 years of bullshit "musical" "theatre" when we go to see it tomorrow

you can have emphyzema and choke out "On my own / pretending he's beside me" and I'll still get goosebumps. Plus: everybody dies

pfft nah

several of the dumber characters were alive at the end in this version

I could reserve my challops till after listening to a cast recording or watching the concert film or whatever but that wouldn't be very ilxory

anyway I think this is dumber than Rent, and Rent is pretty dumb. *drops mike*

I wouldn't accuse Rent of being dumb so much as being manipulative, gaysploitative, blaxploitative, classist, patronizing and smarmy, plus every song was worse than the one before

iirc only Marius and Cosette are alive at the end, everybody else has committed suicide, been executed, died of starvation, or "ascended gloriously to heaven on the wings of song"

Oh my one funny story about watching this was, I was doing my usual thing of not learning too much about a movie before seeing it, and I was thinking to myself about twenty minutes in that it was a relief Helena Bonham Carter wasn't in this

then blammo as if on cue there she appeared

lol
she is in everything
she and Helen Mirrin and Judi Dench are the Hecate of British cinema

never seen/heard the musical before. some of the big numbers were stirring, but i thought the second half of the movie was interminable. eponine, marius and cosette were all dumbass fucktards. russell crowe was alright in his scenes with other people, but his two big solos were real bad. he seemed like he was concentrating as hard as he could on getting the singing right, and as a consequence was really stiff. wolverine's got some pipes on him though, damn.

i dunno, maybe somethings wrong with me. the whole theater was sniffling during valjean's death scene, but i was just thinking about how bad i needed to piss. my attention wandered bigtime during a lot of the songs, including that one.

i agree with most of that, partic crowe's stiffness. thought all the acting was pretty good though

hathaway's "i dreamed a dream" was AMAZING, like i knew nothing about the story coming in and sobbed during it amazing

also agree the last third was too long. again i didn't know the story beforehand but i kind of expected it to end after

...valjean brought the young guy back to his daughter, though i can see how that might have been too disney-movie of an ending

also i kind of just loved the character of valjean and jackman's performance. his eyes did a lot of srs acting imo,

everyone dying at the end was pretty cool too

I understand that Sacha & Helena BC stink up the place but at least some Youtube searching on that matter has caused me to find Matt Lucas and Jenny Galloway at the 25th Anniversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sD5hjYXD3E

oh they were fine for the comic relief they were intended to be, but they were probably in too many scenes

I have a soft spot for musicals -- I blame it on incessant listening to Oliver! when I was a kid -- and I like Les Mis more for its ridiculousness than in spite of it. My theater-geek girlfriend is similarly inclined, so we're looking forward to this. Not because it will be good in any serious sense. But, you know, shamelessness can be its own reward.

i dig a lot of old movie musicals, but broadway-style musicals never did it for me

This is one of those movies that turns my FB feed into a true tale of two cities.

movie musicals absolutely need abstract body patterns and lots and lots of fountains

jackman is pretty much 100% why I want to see this - love any opportunity to see him sing
and I'm v curious about Hathaway

who is responsible for trading in dancing for belting out hallmark cards, and can we flog that person

Hathaway as Javert?

jackman's real good in this. if he wins an oscar it'd be well deserved. same with hathaway

this movie shouldve had the lyrics onscreen the whole time with that little ball bouncing on each syllable

who is responsible for trading in dancing for belting out hallmark cards, and can we flog that person

otm. I guess Fosse was the last gasp of great Broadway dance? Or I guess, Twyla Tharp has had some big shows. But none of those have been made into movies (and I haven't seen any of them, so I don't know if they were any good).

hathaway didn't have much screen time at all but she was wonderful, yeah. jackman should get some recognition for his part i think

Jackman only seemed great because he played most of his scenes opposite Russell Crowe.

Like the Twilight movies, I'm only happy that this exists for the hilarious Walter Chaw review:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2012/12/les-misérables-2012.html

the only one who makes real emotion of the melodrama of cramped source material that has the audacity to not only introduce a new generation of characters post intermission, but also ask us to invest in a love triangle between three pretty little ciphers chirping their sorta-pretty little songs.

yeah, exactly. the part where it turns into a teen movie is when i started checking out mentally, and spent the rest of the movie counting the pores on the actors faces

I cannot emphasize enough, again, how horrible Crowe is in this

I really liked Crowe as Javert. I feel so lonely.

Doubt I'll be seeing this. Saw it on Broadway, didn't even love it THEN, and well...

But, ain't gonna hate on those who did like it. I'm just more miffed at the people who are writing scathing nastygrams on their FB Wall to people who had the audacity to criticize the film. One FB friend boasted that Crowe could "wipe his ass" with your paycheck.

(This criticism coming from a guy who...had yet to see the film).

can't find much to disagree with in that review - way too many closeups, at least 30 minutes too long, confused politics, and crowe's singing was pretty bad. yet...i liked it - am i just a sap? the whole thing is just so warm, deliberate, and kind-hearted. kind of think you have to be a real grump to not have felt it at times

Awwww crypto I love your DN <3

I like that the musical keeps the Balzacian epic quality of the book. It allows minor characters to have big lead songs. In contrast to, say, the latter day revisions of a lot of 19th c source material where the central romance is emphasized at the expense of setting and backstory (modern cinematic adaptations of Great Expectations, Jane Eyre for example)

way too many closeups, at least 30 minutes too long, confused politics.......yet...i liked it - am i just a sap?

i've been reading and re-reading this and i've decided this movie is just .... lyfe

aw sentimental k3v

i dig a lot of old movie musicals, but broadway-style musicals never did it for me

uh h4a these used to be basically the same thing until culture died.

Crowe's rock background is kind of obvious in this clip - dude stands like they're singing Evanescence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fB6LIsntpg

yeahhhhh i noticed that haha

for all the shit gerard butler got for his singing in phantom, crowe was way, way worse

I saw this, it was pretty OK. Considering how lame some of the songs are ("Bring him home", "Empty chairs") they did a great job, both actors and performers

I'm willing to admit that the 3 minutes of Anne Hathaway singing "I dreamed a dream" was the most moved I've ever been by anything since prepubescence

I liked also how gross it was, from Javert breaking his back as he fell to the snot and eye-boogers and shit and thing, it kept the pathos in the Real Zone

The whole second half has some dreadful songs though, some of them so bad I'd forgotten they'd existed

Russell Crowe wasn't as bad as people say, he just sings like a trombone. His death scene was good