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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Les Miserables
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-27-2013 07:47 PM
I never watched this movie but I could hear it from my office, and after about four days I was ready to jab my eardrums with knitting needles just to end the torture. I really really hated the singing.
You can really tell when people who aren't singers, sing. For one thing, there was entirely too much vibrato. That's one way you can tell a fake singer -- they seem to think that if they can develop a really wavery vibrato, that makes them a "singer." Uh, no.
Not to take anything away from Anne Hathaway. I like her as an actress and I'm sure she was acting her butt off during her song. But I didn't like the sound of her singing. Because she is not a singer.
Anyway.... some of our patrons absolutely raved about it, and some were more "eh, it was OK." I personally was never gladder to see a movie go away.
In the "good old days," if they had an actor who was not a singer, they'd overdub that person's voice with a singer's voice for the songs. For example in "The Sound of Music" the Mother Abbess and Christopher Plummer both had their songs performed by others. I'd be curious to know what Julie Andrews or Christopher Plummer thought about this movie.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 03-04-2013 04:49 AM
quote: Frank Angel
Or directors' egos who insist that audiences must sit in their seats squeezing their legs together for super long movies without a break because it would somehow hurt their "artistic" something or other.
What happend to the Roadshow concept? -- intermissions stuck in no matter how long the film, and it never hurt the "art" at all. SOUND OF MUSIC, MY FAIR LADY, OKLAHOMA! et al where the intermission worked perfectly well in those titans.
I'm all in favor of intermissions... I really don't understand why there is so much resistance to the concept:
- It helps keeping the room quiet: People can visit the restrooms during the intermission and it also gives them the opportunity to talk about the movie.
- You will sell a whole bunch of extra concessions.
The only downside is that your movie will run an extra 10 minutes, but with the extra money you earned on concessions, you might opt to keep your commercials to an acceptable minimum...
Also, some people claim that an intermission will break the flow of the movie and will get you totally out of the context of that movie. Although it is hard to deny that you'll get out of the movie for a few minutes, it actually helps to restore your concentration for the latter part of the movie, especially for a long movie.
People that regularly watch movies on commercial TV must be kind of used to "intermissions", because last time I checked, that movie had like 6 intermissions...
Around here, many theaters are actually still doing intermissions in almost every movie, even some multiplexes.
Unfortunately, some of those multiplexes don't bother to time the intermission, so they just cut the movie in half. No matter if there still is a car flying across the screen or the hero is just about to get his ass spanked: Intermission... That's intermission gone wrong. The better ones actually time their intermission a bit better, mute the sound, close the dowser and bring the house lights on. Sometimes they also play an intermission title card and the best even manage to play some music related to the movie you're watching!
In the 35mm days, they put the intermission reel in between the reels somewhere in the middle, but since reels almost never end right in the middle of a dialog or a high-octane action sequence, that worked quite well for the past 30 or so years.
So, I grew up with intermissions in practically EVERY movie, even when the filmmakers didn't account for it. When the multiplexes came, they were the first to ditch the intermission, only to slowly bring it back later and it has been around here ever since.
Many studios don't want an intermission, they want as many shows a day as possible I guess. I've heard they even forbid intermissions in their booking contracts, although I've never noticed that here. Yet, it would still be great if filmmakers and studios would provide some instructions alongside their DCPs, so that the folks that actually do run it with intermission can plan it according to the wishes of the filmmakers.
Maybe my memory is wrong, but I remember King Kong (2005) as one of the very last movies that actually had a real (planned) intermission. There were actually two versions of the 35mm print, one with the intermission title card at the end of one reel and one who didn't have it.
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Rob J. Buskop
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 111
From: Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Registered: Aug 2005
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posted 04-22-2013 01:49 PM
As a great lover of the genre and being intimately familiar with les mis, I've not been able to exactly express my loathing of this misser of the century.
The following sums it up rather well....
This film makes me want to cry in more ways than one. The core story based on Victor Hugo’s novel is a touching story of disgrace, grace and redemption. Even in its crude rendering, I find the story touching. But the consistently poor direction by Tom Hooper and a cast that fails to do justice to Claude-Michel Schönberg’s music result in an adaptation that is a grotesque mockery of the musical’s greatness.
I’m convinced that Tom Hooper watched Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc at some point, admiring the film’s onslaught of oppressive close-ups, and decided to use the same techniques. While Hooper seems to imitate the style, he fails to recognize how Dreyer uses the limitations of the silent medium to express the experience of the protagonist’s torment through imagery. The problem is that Hooper already has an expression of the inner turmoil of his character: the music.
The result is suffocating. This epic takes place over decades and branches into the lives of multiple characters over decades, and Hooper insists in shooting it all in close-ups. In Dreyer’s film, the entire focus is on one girl in one moment in history and it works. Here, Hooper strips the texture of context from his characters and takes the audience hostage, shoving these characters as they “sing” their hearts out into the faces of the audience.
Watching the various actors emote while singing these already gut-wrenching and emotional songs results in emotional pornography. Hooper strips these characters of all decorum and distance and shoves bare, raw emotion into the faces of the audience. You want to feel? Here’s all the feeling you could ever want! See Hathaway emote every muscle in her face, see the raw intensity in Jackman’s eyes, feel the screeching agony of every note!
It’s emotionally excessive. The music is prepared to be performed on a stage, to be projected to an audience so that the person on the back row can hear it clearly and feel the impact. Watching this is akin to being on the stage, walking inches away from the performers and staring into their faces. It’s too much.
Compounding this issue is the grimy imagery that cinematographer Danny Cohen and Tom Hooper construct. It’s not enough that there be grit and grim, the audience has to feel the dirtiness of every inch of every frame. It’s so overwhelmingly depressing, dark and muddled that the film is an eye-sour to watch. I had to look away more than once because of the strain it put on my eyes.
Hooper’s use of incessant close-ups wastes the medium of film as a means of exploring this musical visually. In any given moment with any given song, the camera spends almost the entire scene watching the faces of the actors. Most of the songs are people standing there singing while Hooper cuts to various shots of the camera around them.
In contrast, the spinning stage of the musical made almost every number visually interesting to watch because of how it used momentum and movement within many of the numbers. Here, unrestrained by the limitations of a preset stage, the film decides to be more restrictive and limiting visually than the musical. The closest it comes to any sense of flair or movement is the Master of the House sequence. The scene is so out of touch with Hooper’s grotesque and dower interpretation that it comes off as insensitive and tasteless. Another visually interesting idea is when Russell Crowe’s character walks on the edge of a stone wall, a visualization of the fine line he walks in his relentless quest for justice.
But the scene is tarnished by Russell Crowe’s singing. For a musical, this film has a baffling number of poorly performed numbers. One could make the argument Hooper’s vision encompasses an interpretation of the music whereby Jackman, Crowe and Hathaway half sing-half mutter/scream/talk their lyrics. It’s unpleasant and raw, which is a shame because the original music is beautiful. And about halfway through the film, this interpretation of music gets dropped altogether when people who performed the musical on stage enter the film. These veterans sing some notes, they sing loud, they sing clear, they sings their hearts out, because this is a musical, dammit, and you’re going to listen to some damn fine music before you leave this theater!
This stint involves the revolutionary movement of the film is the highlight of the film. Hooper’s terrible direction still persists, but hearing Samantha Barks, Eddie Redmayne and Aaron Tveit sing this music as intended shows that Hooper’s interpretation ruins what makes the original material compelling. This music works because of the beautiful bitterness of it and these performers let that beauty shine out with each note. Hooper is so infatuated with the bitterness that he’s repressed so much of the beauty and hopefulness in the music until a talented singer walks on his set and shuts him up with beautiful music. The music, in its full force, bursts forth, and the film is all the better for it.
The audio, which was recorded live on set, lacks the clarity of properly recorded audio. On a set you’re not going to have the consistency of a controlled audio studio environment and I think this makes some audio muffled. Once again, it could be Hooper’s grunginess at work, but the people I went with complained they couldn’t hear the words of the musical clearly, which I think is a fatal mistake.
Also, due to Hooper’s tiny visual vision of the film, a lot of the audio emanates from the front speakers because he shoots everyone straight on for most of the film. I only noticed the audio for the side speakers used effectively in one number. It’s a waste of surround sound, yet another benefit of the film medium that Hooper wastes.
I watched the musical at Queens Theatre in London twice. If you set up a camera and filmed the staged musical head-on, you’d make a more visually interesting and better performed film than Hooper’s Les Miserables. Even despite the butchery done to the musical, I find the story beats affecting and moving. That only makes this film adaptation’s offenses even more egregious. It’s one thing to make something bad, it’s even worse to tarnish something great.
© 2013 James Blake Ewing
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(and it becomes obviously clear who here at Film-Tech do not like musicals, or long ones at that)
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