Les Miserables (2012)

I'm already predicting a barrage of "Lees miserable-s" mispronunciation jokes at next years Oscar ceremony.

Anyway...I hate the casting of Amanda Seyfried as Cosette. Besides that, it looks like it could be good. The visuals look very theatrical. The fact that they're singing as they're shooting and not rerecording any vocal tracks in post-production is really interesting.

I saw the theater production in my native language Dutch and saw it in a theather in England as well. This musical has some really great songs.

I am not sure if I will go and see this in the cinema, it just might spoil my memories of two great days in the theatre.

Ugh. Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried in a movie together... :x

Visuals look great though!

:sleep:

Looks theatrical but nothing special. I guess it might get some Oscar noms.

*fart*

Clips have been flooding the internet. I think they're pretty terrible.

Anyway, I have a friend who's seen it and is adamant this is gonna win Best Picture. I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Personally revered stage show and book. There are some really good songs in the thing and some enjoyable parts. However, I'm going to have to agree with the Amanda Seyfried thing. Poor choice.

FieldsMan wrote:

Ugh. Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried in a movie together... :x

If you know the play, I believe you at least won't have to suffer the two at the same time.

I don't know why you would cast a musical that is well-known for being made up of belt-it-to-the-back-row anthems with non-singers. And then why you would direct the few actual singers your cast has to go for weak vocal performances, when the songs lack the musical and lyrical complexity to sustain those intimate interpretations.

And the whole thing just looks ugly. This is LES MISERABLES, for crying out loud. This should be going for the full David Lean.

Is this the one where Russel Crowe sings?

Yeah nah.

Just watched a clip from it with Crowe. Yikes. He sounds like he's on the edge of a rock ballad.

I like the Bille August film from the 1990s - Neeson and Rush were enjoyable and thankfully didn't sing.

Not sure I understand the choice for all the close-ups and handheld work. If they want it to be like the musical, then you'd think they'd want a larger perspective. I'm still pretty excited to see it, though. I didn't see anything conspicuously horrible in any of those clips, aside from Crowe, who sounds downright awful. Like...worse than Gerard Butler in Schumaker's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

I don't recall ever seeing a production of Les Mis where every single line was sung. The net effect here is very strange - it's like a bad round of the theatre sports game "Opera", where every single line has to be sung without any tune.

The stage show doesn't really have any spoken dialogue in it. It's a sung-through musical.

But the "conversational" bits are the worst parts of the score/libretto. Very clunky.

I'm intrigued enough to want to see this.
I am preparing myself for an epic letdown though.

I'm not familiar with LES MIS but yeah, not a fan of this. Have they written a script or are they just cramming the libretto into two hours?

Visually it looks like a run of the mill BBC made-for-tv-film (I thought THE KING'S SPEECH did too).

The Jackman and Crowe clips are laughably bad.

Harmsway wrote:

I don't know why you would cast a musical that is well-known for being made up of belt-it-to-the-back-row anthems with non-singers. And then why you would direct the few actual singers your cast has to go for weak vocal performances, when the songs lack the musical and lyrical complexity to sustain those intimate interpretations.

Isn't Hathaway an operatic soprano? And she's singing I Dreamed A Dream like she's Jane Horrocks in CABARET?



I'm not the biggest fan of the medium, but I really hate the notion that an actor in a musical needs to sing weakly or terribly to convey how distraught they are. Not if they're a good actor. And not if the song is doing it's job.

Even sillier on film where the camera is right in their face capturing every twitch of the eyebrow.

Vesper wrote:

Isn't Hathaway an operatic soprano?

Well, technically, no. She isn't Renee Fleming. But she has received vocal training and has musical theatre experience.

Vesper wrote:

I'm not the biggest fan of the medium, but I really hate the notion that an actor in a musical needs to sing weakly or terribly to convey how distraught they are. Not if they're a good actor. And not if the song is doing it's job.

Agreed 100%.

Harmsway wrote:

Vesper wrote:

Isn't Hathaway an operatic soprano?

Well, technically, no. She isn't Renee Fleming. But she has received vocal training and has musical theatre experience.

Ha. I saw someone describe her as such on some blog and assumed it must be true. But yeah, I found the video from the Oscars, she can sing.

Harmsway wrote:

Vesper wrote:

I'm not the biggest fan of the medium, but I really hate the notion that an actor in a musical needs to sing weakly or terribly to convey how distraught they are. Not if they're a good actor. And not if the song is doing it's job.

Agreed 100%.

It'd be like cutting the belting out of 'Rose's Turn' because she's having a mental breakdown. Even though Sondheim/Styne wrote both the belting and the mental breakdown into the song. It makes no sense.