Lez Mizerizzle and the Bad Rhythms

Like a lot of devout Mormons, I went to a Christmas Day showing of Les Miserables. It seemed like the right thing to do, plus Bethany's family bought the tickets. The ironic part is that despite lacking a zealous anticipation of the movie, I was probably the most familiar with the play--if only in regard to the lyrics--because of ceremonial, back-to-back listenings on my mom's semiannual 15+ hour road trips. Needless to say, I have a mean Colm Wilkinson impression. And I'm reasonably sure I can sing through the entire play doing all the voices (with the omission of those stupid Cosette songs at the top of Disc 2). I hope you can appreciate where I'm coming from on this.

One time when I was a missionary, I really wanted to bake something. But I couldn't go to the store and I didn't have much time, so in a mad act of domestic desperation I mixed pancake mix, a can of pumpkin, 9 packs of Swiss Miss powder, and a little milk, and slopped it into a 9-inch round to bake for 40 minutes. I don't recommend the recipe, but by a missionary miracle, it turned out really good. My companion thought I was Martha Stewart. There were some shriveled marshmallows from the hot chocolate mix, but they were easy enough to ignore.

In a heavy-handed metaphor, that's how I perceive Tom Hooper's insane and strange Les Mis adaptation. As I sat there, I kept having the impression that I was watching a bizarre experiment that surprised and moved me, but was a little sloppy and had maybe a little too much sugar.

Before we get into the acting, I have to say that watching Les Mis as a full-scale movie (not in concert) really revealed to me the play's striking flaws. It has enormous pace issues. The overture is all of 10 seconds, which in the movie doesn't give us time to settle in. It may have helped if our first shot wasn't a disorienting and completely unnecessary aerial swoop over men dragging a ship by hand, but even still, the events of that opening song were happening faster than you could keep track of them. Before the movie hit 5 minutes we had met Valjean and Javert in an unnecessarily epic chain-gang scenario in which these two tell each other their names and not to forget one another for absolutely no reason other than for the audience. Maybe Russell Crowe should have just looked into camera and said "Do not forget my name, do not forget me!" so we could know who he was really talking to.


This is more of an adaptation issue, but I bring this up because in an original screenplay, all of this would happen either before the movie starts or during the opening credits without any dialogue. But theatre is a verbal medium. The play needs to show us this stuff with words, a weakness that film doesn't carry. This problem exists throughout the movie--characters repeatedly singing things that could easily be shown without dialogue. I suppose the built-in fan base, not unlike in the Harry Potter franchise, would be up in arms if you cut too much, especially the iconic if pointless opening number.


The movie does feature a whole herd of added moments, whether through dialogue or new songs/snippets of song. Almost all of these made me think "Of course! Why didn't I ever realize that storytelling moment should be there?" The biggest example is the new full song that Valjean sings as he takes the young Cosette to safety and realizes his own capacity for love. Smaller examples include actually establishing Eponine's character both as a child and as an adult, adding Javert's presence to Thenardier's attack on the house, improving the believability of Javert's suspicion that the mayor is Valjean, and Valjean actually gaining the trust of the revolutionaries as he volunteers.

Many of the lyrics of the added snippets are pathetically written, but their presence is necessary to give weight to the most important beats of the plot. This is wonderfully counterbalanced by cutting entire verses of songs that aren't as important, e.g. In My Life, Turning, and that demonically bad song when Thenardier and Eponine "pick a bone in the street," my favorite rhyme of which is "I'm gonna warn them here/ --One little scream and you'll regret it for a year!" (a lyric that made it into the movie more for its plot importance than for its elegance and wit). My point with all this is that after the first few minutes of the movie, the poor pacing of the play is corrected by the shortening and lengthening of various moments. Maybe not an improvement in light of some of the poor writing, but at least a correction in terms of pace.

The only other significant complaint I had outside of acting was the camerawork. There's an astounding portion of the movie in which a featured singer (more often Hugh Jackman) is dead center in the frame, while the camera shakes and wobbles in an uncomfortable follow shot that's reminiscent of an episode of the Office. I really can't think of any reason for employing this style other than Tom Hooper's desire to violate the expectations for a big-budget Broadway musical. If that's the case, then why he opened the movie with that enormous CGI ship depot is beyond me. I would have liked to see more still, well-composed framing and camera movement. Not much to ask, since The King's Speech was chock-full of that.

More than anything else, I was shocked, moved, and driven to tears by Anne Hathaway's performance. She may have started in Disney little-league and only slightly improved toward her performance in The Dark Knight Rises (which was fine but bland--not her fault, it was in the script), but she's gained my sincere respect after Les Mis. She better than anyone in the movie strikes a perfect balance between realism and musical beauty. She isn't too polished, she doesn't always carry through the notes or stay on rhythm, but you believe that in her world singing is a heightened language for dealing with intense emotion. And I could stay with the melody of her songs despite her acting through them. She's sure to get an Oscar nod.

Now, I might be Hugh Jackman's biggest male fan who doesn't like the X-Men movies, but in this movie he only had moments of passing brilliance. No one can doubt his emotional connection, or his desire to "act" through the songs (which half the time meant "change the rhythm beyond recognition"), but I would have liked to see him just sing a little more. His dilemma is telling of the movie as a whole. It wants to be a musical, but it wants to do everything as if it weren't--no studio-recorded songs or lip syncing, experimentally awkward camerawork, and (in Hugh Jackman's case) a style of acting that came this close to pretending there was no music at all. But man, that moment when he tears his parole papers with a passionate "another story must begin!" knocked my socks off. And he managed (with a lot of help from Hooper) to make the Finale actually interesting, which was impressive. Despite the occasional flare of solid, emotional work, I would have liked to have seen him embrace the songs a little more--and no, singing Bring Him Home without a single note of falsetto doesn't count. That's just something he wanted to show the world he could do, and to me it was the second-worst choice of the movie.

The first was Russell Crowe, who didn't actually appear in this movie, or if he did, he was all but present. I think his consciousness was in a back room with a vocal coach somewhere trying to focus on his placement. There's really nothing more I can say than that he took arguably the most interesting character in the story and made him blander than if he had been played by Orlando Bloom.

Of course, the story of Les Miserables is emotional, inspiring, depressing, and beautiful. The movie captures all of that in a display that's at least as good as watching it on stage. If you didn't like the play, you might like the movie, but if you hate the play, I doubt you'll love the movie. If you know nothing about it, you'll like it, but leave a little depressed and maybe a tad confused. It's a strange experiment that at moments works, and at others reveals that it was baked using hot chocolate powder and pancake mix. But given the ingredients, it's mighty impressive. It might be worth seeing just for Anne Hathaway, something I never thought I'd say.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, A Triple Review

The first installment of what's going to be a Hobbit trilogy has been unleashed. I liked it, and then again I hated it. I slapped my own face more than once, both in frustration and excitement. I've seen it now three times in the first 48 hours of its release (in 24 fps, in 24 fps 3D, and 48 fps 3D--oh yes, preciouss, we doesn't mess around), so I think I've got a grasp on how I feel about it in all three dimensions.

First of all, I assumed I would feel weird about the HFR 3D, since I've been really vocal about my distaste for the 3D movement from the beginning. But, lo and behold, I had no problems with it. Yes, 3D is very distracting if you're a traditional filmgoer, and no, it's not for everyone (or for me, for that matter). In my view, the HFR is no more distracting than the 3D effects themselves, but it dramatically increases the quality of the picture from the "old-school" 24 fps 3D. So much so that I don't think I'll ever see another 3D movie that isn't 48 fps. After five minutes, I completely forgot about the "soap opera effect."

I remember the feeling of watching The Fellowship of the Ring's midnight showing. It had a slow, quiet, simple beginning. When I watch it now, I still feel that sense of beginning something wondrous that I don't yet understand. There's no self-awareness, no pre-determined admission that this is going to be a billion-dollar movie. It's a very subtle thing that many first installments have. It's humility.

Unexpected Journey isn't a kid anymore. It's out of college with a twelve-figure budget and wants to date a supermodel with a crack addiction. And yet it reminds me of some ADHD children's features produced recently (Polar Express, Yogi Bear, Cat in the Hat, and other over-the-top adaptations of simple classics), particularly during the extravagant action sequences in Goblin-town. The movie opens with a rip-roaring prologue (V.O. by Holm as Bilbo circa his Long-Expected Party) that wasn't terrible. It threw a massive amount of CGI shots in your face right away. I could sense Jackson sitting next to me like a needy friend sharing a movie: "Like it? Like it? I do. I really do." For some, it might annoy. For me it did at first, but by the third viewing my self-righteous indignation had gone away.

What twice-bakes my cram (and more so each viewing) is that the prologue fizzles out with a very contrived cameo-scene between Elijah Wood and Ian Holm that's supposed to take place minutes before the first scene in The Fellowship of the Ring. The continuity with the previous film is pretty atrocious. Both look much older and are wearing noticeably different wigs than they had in Fellowship. The dialogue seems pointless--they flirt for a few minutes with conflict over Bilbo's rising peculiarity, which goes nowhere and does nothing for the movie.

I'm sure the producers wanted to make a clear bridge into The Hobbit by giving the audience something familiar to chew on, but in a 162-minute movie, you can't afford this time. PJ is a repeat offender in breaking into act two deep in the second quarter, and this movie is no different. Maybe they just needed to give the Shire some more face time (they built it from scratch again, for real this time). Anyway, it didn't work for me. The Phantom Menace didn't begin with an older Luke and Leia discussing their father's childhood. Think how awkward that would have been. To me this is worse.

Prologues are great if there isn't a convenient story reason to do exposition in the dialogue early on. In this case, there's a perfect place for dialogue exposition: when the dwarves have to explain to the movie's protagonist why they're going east on an adventure--in one of the first scenes of the movie. All of the necessary information in the prologue could have been easily shifted to the party scene. What bothered me most was that it begins like a sequel, not a prequel, so they won't be as easy to watch in chronological order. It knows too well what it is--a blockbuster that's going to flash enough (metaphorical) 48 fps skin to get the (less metaphorical) gold.

But things look up from there. Martin Freeman explodes onto the screen with real heart. He's quirky and fun, upstaging even the celebrated wizard. The entrance of the dwarves is hilarious and charming, and it's immediately clear that Jackson has succeeded in differentiating all 13 of them. Here we see Bilbo as a strong protagonist who actually has a personality. The movie's already got a head start on the Rings trilogy, where Frodo really never became a person, just the personification of an emotional objective.

The movie also stays more true to its source material than many reviews are saying (and certainly more faithful than The Two Towers was). What reviewers don't always say is that the source material includes plot points from the Appendices of the The Lord of the Rings, where additional information is given on Gandalf's actions during the events of The Hobbit, and a good deal of background plot concerning Thorin and his family. This is where most of the material that appears in the movies comes from. Some of it, like Azog and his band of wolf-riding orcs, and our meeting the simpleton wizard Radagast (who has a lovely stream of dried bird crap down one side of his hair), works very well into the story. Other bits are more clumsy in their realization, like the impromptu meeting of the White Council. The scheming and intrigue of Middle-earth's most powerful minds could have been a lot more compelling.

Other highlights: the riddle game with Gollum (with whom I still have interpretation issues, but that's too much to address here, and doesn't really affect the quality of the performance), and a great ending sequence (if a little too long). Other things I hated: the dwarves doing dish-acrobatics, the cartoony ringwraith who for some reason is white (racists!), the dwarves being chased by wargs across seemingly identical plots of land for ten minutes, the stone giants, and the length of what should have been a relatively quick escape from Goblin-town.

The common denominator of most of my complaints is Jackson's CGI trigger finger. It must have been sore, as you can tell just by this video blog entry on his facebook page. Goblins, orcs, and even the villain Azog are--like Gollum--completely digital, whereas in the Rings trilogy such characters were done with physical makeup and costuming. Throw on top of that some laboriously long action sequences and overly-mobile camerawork and you've got an IMAX rollercoaster, where the set pieces do that thing where they almost hit you, over and over. In Unexpected Journey, the camera is forever spinning and jumping around. Compare it to The Fellowship of the Ring and you'll want to prescribe PJ some Ritalin. You also might realize how much Peter Jackson has come to ever-so-slightly resemble a kiwi George Lucas.

Bottom line: like the Rings trilogy (notably The Return of the King), Unexpected Journey is just too long. The amount of plot that occurs could have easily taken place in 130 minutes, but I make this point more on principle than on effect. It doesn't feel as long as, say, King Kong, during which I was wishing I could take a hacksaw to every action sequence and halve it. If you did so with this movie, you might miss some interesting visuals, but ones that in the end do little to improve the quality of the experience. Maybe Jackson will release an unextended edition that's better paced.

You could interpret the running time as adding insult to injury in light of how much of that time is spent on spectacle. It's easily a third of the duration, very telling as to PJ's storytelling priorities. To someone who desperately wants these movies to be good, that's concerning. But it entertains, and if that's what you've asked for, Jackson delivers. The fact is that I liked it more each time I saw it, because I knew what I was getting myself into. It probably won't change your life, which is something I couldn't honestly say about the book.