A miserable movie

Les Miserables (2012)

The novel by Victor Hugo is brobably the most adapted book ever written, with hundreds of theatre, radio, TV and cinema versions from all over the world dating from the 1800's to today. Now I of course haven't seen all of those adaptations, but from the movies the 1934 one was quite ok and I kind of liked the 1998 version, but really I just wonder what the hell can anyone add to that story anymore. Well it turns out not much, except for a great cast. But the cast really is almost worth the whole movie. Hugh Jackman is great, Russell Crowe is good as well even though he can't sing that much, Samantha Barks was surprisingly good and pretty much everyone in the movie brings out a great performance. But there's one above everyone else and that's Anne Hathaway, her performance is just about as perfect as one can be. Too bad she's gone after the first 30 or 40 minutes and even though the rest aren't bad either, but you just feel the level going down from there on. Then the music, just about every line in this movie is delivered by singing. Now I'm not a big fan of musicals as they tend to take me out of the movie as it's not realistic in any way, but that being said, I don't hate them. But as the music here isn't exactly diverce, it gets rather boring towards the end when there's only an occasional word or two which aren't sung. After about 2 hours I was basically begging for some normal dialog between the characters, but no chance of that.

I didn't like the camerawork, the shaky cam tried to get some sense of realism to it, but really most of the time it was just annoying as it kept reminding you that you are watching a movie, the complete opposite of what it usually tends to do. Also the framing was simply boring, every single scene was framed with either closeups or some weird angle which left you just wondering why the hell was that angle chosen and does the cameraman have some sort of a balance disorder. And when I say closeups, I mean about 95 percent of the shots in this whole movie. Sure that brings out the emotions from the actor, but I guess they don't know what establishing shots mean or that you really need some diversity for it to keep it interesting. This is painfully obvious at some of the most powerful parts of the story where the movie takes out the scope of things by just giving you a face. Now that's a real problem as this story is really epic and demands some bigger scale to things, you'd expect that a big Hollywood movie would bring that, yet the movie manages to look small, kind of like a small theater play. Another problem is that every scene is built to maximize intensity and thriving for the biggest possible emotional impact, unfortunately that makes the movie annoyingly monotonious. It seems that the director doesn't even know what subtle or nuanced mean. So when you finally get to the end where you'd supposed to feel deeply for the characters, I found myself not giving a damn and just hoping this stupidity would be over. In the light of all that the fact that Tom Hooper gets so much acclaim for the direction of this is just criminally wrong.

In the end this movie was only worth the watch to see Anne Hathaway's performance, but unfortunately even as brilliant as it was the rest of the movie isn't worth it. And it's really a shame that those great performances by Hathaway, Jackman and Barks get wasted in a movie like this.

30%

Coppola's greatest failure?

One from the Heart (1982)

This is the movie that put the last nail in the coffin of Francis Ford Coppola's dream factory Zoetrope Studios. Even though the company didn't disappear, it went bankrupt and every bit of income from the following movies until the end of the 90's was used to pay off the debts from this movie. With a budget of 27 million and box office of less than one million it's clear that the movie was a disaster for the studio. Then again reading about how extravagant the production was I'm not really surprised, in a way I'm actually happy that it failed as it showed that you can't make a great movie by just throwing money at it. These “studio killers” are actually very interesting and there are quite a few of these kind of movies out there where the studio decides to bet all it's money on them and end up losing. Maybe some day I'll focus more on them, but for now lets focus on this one.

This is actually the kind of musical that I like, the music carries the movie but the movie does not stop so that the cast can perform their musical number. That's one of the main reasons I hate musicals as the movie stops when the music starts, same reason I don't like Bollywood movies. So the actors don't sing in this one, but the songs from the soundtrack tell the story as we go along. Even though the concept was great, this is still not a great movie. The biggest issues are the story, or the lack of it and the main couple. The story is just too simple and way too common to keep any interest up. And the main couple, even though Teri Garr has her moments, are just not up for carrying a movie like this. They were rather uninteresting and in a movie like this that's just not going to work. That's mostly the fault of the script and direction but also Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr are not the first that come to mind when speaking of captivating screen presence. It says a lot that the support cast, Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski, would have made a better lead couple for this movie. But the whole movie is not totally bad. I loved the look of it and even though the ridiculously expensive indoor sets were the main reason for the fall of the studio, they really worked brilliantly for the look. That artificial neon lighted look was by far the best part of this movie. Another thing I liked were the numerous split cuts throughout the movie and the music was quite good as well. So the audio-visual aspect of this movie is great, but unfortunately the heart is missing.

54%