Les Miserables

I know that I'm not the best writer in the world. I wish I had more time to spend on writing reviews on here. Basically, I get 15 minute breaks at work and that's all the time I get. But I like writing and movies and so this blog is totally for me. If a few people stumble upon my reviwes, then that's fine too. Sometimes, when I write a review about a really great movie, I wish I was a better writer so I could properly convey certain things about the brilliance of said movie. But, I wish this was even more true when I want to write a review of a movie I hated. Because I wish I had the time, energy and talent to let everyone know why I hated Les Miserables so damn much.

I've never seen the stage musical of Les Mis, but I am a fan of musicals in general. In fact, besides horror movies, there probably isn't a genre of film I love more, guilty pleasures and all. I will make excuses for badly done horror movies and musicals more than any other type of film. Rock of Ages came out earlier this year, a musical that was average, at best. But no matter how bad that movie was, it is, at the very least, infinitely more fun than the borefest that is Les Mis. Maybe it has something to do with director Tom Hooper. This is two films I've seen him direct now, and both I absolutely hated while the rest of the world praised them to no ends. The first was 2010's Oscar winning The King's Speech which I found just as dreadful as this, and which took the Best Picture Oscar away from the greatest film of the last decade - The Social Network. I really did try to like Les Mis, which is basically the story of a bunch of poverty stricken prostitutes and slaves, trying to better themselves through a lot of songs. Like, A LOT of songs. Boring song after boring song after boring song. AND THEY ALL SOUND THE SAME!!! Eventually, we get to the real story, about the beginning of the French Revolution and the plot keeps fast forwarding years at a time so we can meet new characters and THEY could sing boring songs that sound like the boring songs the other characters just sang. And all of this is done with the use of incredibly annoying, disconcerting extreme close ups that literally made me want to scream at the top of my lungs.

And while I want to give this movie an F so, so badly, I can't do it. I can't do it because there are two, and exactly two good things about Les Mis. There are two good performances, and these two women get to sing the only two good songs in the entire play of seemingly 60 some songs (THAT ALL SOUND THE SAME) and then they die. The first is Anne Hathaway. She plays factory worker / single mom turned down on her luck prostitute Fantine. Fantine is about twenty mintues into the movie and only sticks around for about twenty minutes which is just enough time to cry and grovel and nail I Dreamed a Dream and then die, leaving the audience wanting more. (Although, she does show up as some sort of angel / ghost near the end which sort of ruins her performance for me, almost, although it's not her fault. I imagine it was the filmmakers way of saying, 'Hey, remember she was in this movie for 10 minutes what seems like 6 hours ago. Remember how good she was so give her an Oscar.') I'm not sure she is going to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress but if Jennifer Hudson can win it essentially for killing it singing And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going, then Hathaway has a shot. After Fantine's death, we have to suffer through a lot more crap - terrible singing from Russell Crowe, swoony doe eyes from Amanda Seyfried, Helena Bonham Cater and her newest weirdo character (SIDE NOTE: If she ever wants to impress me again the way she impressed me in Fight Club, she's going to need to play some boring suburban housewife who drives an SUV and wears Cardigans and walks her dog and shops at Target), and Aaron Tveit who is too talented to be stuck playing "Guy in Red Jacket" and really should have played Marius, and Eddie Redmayne's bizarre handsomeness, etc. etc. Then finally we come to the second great performance, one I think I even prefered over Hathaway. Samantha Barks plays Eponine, a young girl who loves a boy who loves someone else, and she is fantastic as the girl who is a friend, sure, but maybe unloveable to the only boy who matters. She sings the single best song in the movie - On My Own and nails it, walking in the rain, whispering "I love him." She's perfection. And then she dies too and we are stuck with more boring songs (THAT ALL SOUND THE SAME) and more annoying close ups and more opulence that, I guess, is supposed to make us think the movie is epic when really it's just all too much.

There might be a good movie in here somewhere, but Les Mis needs a better director, and a better editor in order to find it. Mostly I just found the entire thing dreadful. And the worst thing about the whole thing is that after it was over, people in the theater STOOD UP AND CLAPPED! I had been imagining ways to fake a seizure or something in order to get the hell out of there, and people were giving it a standing ovation! It completely blew my mind, which is possibly why I've been so angry about this movie for the last few days.

I told myself I was going to be a less snarky, nicer person starting in 2013, but I guess I'm not off to a good start.

Grade: D