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Les Misérables (2012) (2 Viewers)

GMpasqua

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Originally Posted by Brandon Conway /t/321163/les-miserables-the-musical-hits-the-big-screen/30#post_4017884
I do find the notion that just because one can enjoy steadycam and modern editing (that wasnt anyway close to what I'd call rapid quick) that somehow they ignorantly are ok with scrolling text, tv logo bugs, etc., somewhat insulting.
I never said anyone was ignorant. I do not believe they are.

Though, I've met many people who were okay with the watermarks (Hey, it's free tv) so they didn't complain, then came the scrolls, and the pop ups - people still didn't complain. (Many people will accept what ever is thrown at them, young people don't know otherwise since it's all they've grown up with) The advertiser will keep grabbing more and more. Year from now I'll be long gone and people will only read about the way it was on kindels

The irony - we have bigger screens with sharper better HD picture, and yet we clutter them up with all this media garbage???? Can some one logically explain why we do this? It really makes no sense to me - really

Even on this web site we have to deal with the annoying little scrolling box at the right side of the screen - so much so that I've cut down coming to this site and may altogether stop posting here.

I give up, Rant over, my brian has offical turned to mush.
 

TonyD

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Greg-its pretty hard not to be insulted by those comments.
Do you not watch or listen to any thing anymore?
Everything is altered these days from what it was in " the good old days"
Including the staged version of Les Mis.
The only thing you didn't say was "get off my lawn"
Btw I always enjoy the Mr mcGoo version since its probably the first version of tht story I ever saw as a kid.
 

andrew markworthy

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For what it's worth, the Brit reviews have been, to put it mildly, BAD.
With regard to cutting back the length of stage performances - I saw the original London production and then saw it twice more in London. The main cutting seems to be to minimise the role of the kid Gavroche. 'Little People' was excised from the latter two productions I saw. IMHO this improved the musical 100%, but then I have a loathing for kids in musicals.
 

Steve Tannehill

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Little People was trimmed before Broadway but not before the London cast was recorded and released, and only appears in the show now in reprised form when Javert is captured. Don't know about the movie.
 

GMpasqua

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Originally Posted by TonyD /t/321163/les-miserables-the-musical-hits-the-big-screen/60#post_4017930
Greg-its pretty hard not to be insulted by those comments.
Do you not watch or listen to any thing anymore?
Everything is altered these days from what it was in " the good old days"
Including the staged version of Les Mis.
The only thing you didn't say was "get off my lawn"
Btw I always enjoy the Mr mcGoo version since its probably the first version of tht story I ever saw as a kid.
I'm sorry TonyD I did not mean to insult anyone. That was not my intention

I guess it also works the other way. I know people (Both young and older than I - and I'm in my 40's)

I'll say "Oh, you should this film - it's wonderful"

and they reply (and I'm not kidding as to how many times I've heard this)

"I don't like black and white movies"
 

jim_falconer

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Saw this yesterday with my 15 year old daughter, and we both loved it! I have never seen the stage play, so had no idea what the story was about going in. Needless to say, I was immensely impressed. We are planning on going back again on New Year's Day, as there are certain pieces of the story I still need to put in place.

Plus, I love musicals, and this was one of the best I've ever seen.
 

Chris Will

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GMpasqua said:
Even on this web site we have to deal with the annoying little scrolling box at the right side of the screen - so much so that I've cut down coming to this site and may altogether stop posting here.
I give up, Rant over, my brian has offical turned to mush.
There are a number of free downloads that can fix this for you, or download Chrome which has a very good ad blocker built in. I see almost zero almost zero ads during my Internet browsing.
Frankly, what does the use of handhelds and steady-cams have to do with advertisement? Yes, the cinematography in Les Miz didn't bother me; was it the best ever in the whole world... no, not even close but, it wasn't the worst. I fail to see how my indifference about how Les Miz was shot equates to me loving every kinda of advertisement thrown at us these days.
 

TonyD

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Just got back with my wife.
I LOVED IT!
Got from exactly what I was hoping for.
Great story, great singing sets looked very good. Cried a lot.
I was ok with Crowe but he was an odd choice for this.
Only Seyfried seemed to not have a strong enough voice to me.
She was too warbly or yodely or something.
Hathaway completely nailed it. She is worth the price of admission alone.
Jackman was what he always is, perfect.
Closeups were aplenty but it was fine to me and the steady cam didn't bother me even a little bit.
4/5 stars.
 

Steve Tannehill

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I made it through the entire Highlights album and it was not as bad as I first inferred through initial samples. Russell Crowe is not a very good singer, but I'm sure in full regalia and on set, it will be acceptable.
My one problem with the Highlights album is that it is very truncated. Obviously, songs are not on the highlights album, but what songs are there are cut in lots of places. I don't know if that was for the album only, or if the movie is just as truncated.
I guess I'll find out.
 

Chris Will

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The movie is not as truncated as the album. The highlights album is really butchered IMO, I hope they release a 2CD version in the future.
 

Tim Gerdes

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Steve Tannehill said:
My one problem with the Highlights album is that it is very truncated. Obviously, songs are not on the highlights album, but what songs are there are cut in lots of places. I don't know if that was for the album only, or if the movie is just as truncated.
I guess I'll find out.
Many songs didn't seem truncated, as much as different. There seemed to be a lot of alternate/new lyrics. For me, the songs that were distractingly truncated while watching for the first time: "Drink With Me", "Javert's Suicide", and "Turning". The only song that seems to have been omitted entirely is "Dog Eats Dog".
Several songs were also reordered, but mostly in a way that seemed very natural to how events were depicted on screen I thought. The poorest sequencing choice was having "Do You Hear the People Sing?" first appear after "One Day More", since the later includes a callback to a song that, in this structure, we haven't even heard yet.
I didn't have any issues with the cast's voices. In fact, I really liked Crowe in the role of Javert. More bothersome were some of the edits to the music. On the whole though I thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation.
 

Michael Elliott

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Great looking, great sounding and greatly acted but on the whole I found this film to be incredibly flat. Outside Hathaway's one big scene I thought the entire movie lacked any good characters and I certainly never cared for them, which is somewhat shocking because I've really come to life this story (and several film versions) over the past couple years. I've never seen or read about the musical so I really didn't have any expectations going into it. I just found it to be rather hollow in regards to the characters. I'm not sure if it's a record because I lost track of how many times Hathaway cried in such a short screentime. I also thought the pacing was incredibly bad at times and especially during the last segment. I'd rate it a 2.5/4 as technically it's impressive but it was just way too flat and it certainly dragged.
 

GMpasqua

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Originally Posted by Chris Will /t/321163/les-miserables-the-musical-hits-the-big-screen/60#post_4018024
Frankly, what does the use of handhelds and steady-cams have to do with advertisement? Yes, the cinematography in Les Miz didn't bother me; was it the best ever in the whole world... no, not even close but, it wasn't the worst. I fail to see how my indifference about how Les Miz was shot equates to me loving every kinda of advertisement thrown at us these days.
I'm saying people have become so used to this kind of filming/editing and even pop up advertising that they don't even notice them anymore. I never said they loved them. (though I do know many who complain about it)

I thought the film had a lot of wonderful things in it, but to quote film reviewer Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune

[COLOR= red]"The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground."[/COLOR]

and by the way, if you love this film, you are lucky, because it's the only film version of the musical we're ever gonna get
 

Steve Tannehill

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I saw the movie this afternoon. The camerawork did not bother me, although one person behind me asked a theater employee on the way out if the movie was playing on a smaller screen, because all the close-ups bothered him. This was coming from the largest screen in the multiplex.
For me, Les Miz is a show frozen in the late 1980's. That is when I first saw the show, and when I acquired the Complete Symphonic Recording, which I have listened to literally hundreds of times. I know the lyrics by heart, and the intricacies of the arrangements, too.
The show was cut for its 10th anniversary, and later cut for time to keep the show under 3 hours with intermission. These cuts are reflected in the movie, as well as new songs and lyric changes. Little things, like Javert's introduction to Mayor Valjean, and Javert's request for charges are entirely new. Little things are swapped around...in the stage show, the line from Valjean is "I run a business of repute/I am the mayor of this town." In the movie, it is "I am the mayor of this town/I run a business of repute."
Master of the House is cut, but as I recall, it was cut the last time I saw the show on stage.
Songs are reordered. Not the end of the world.
Performances were good. Even the weakest voice (Russell Crowe) could hold his own when acting against others.
I'm sure that Anne Hathaway will be winning awards. Hugh Jackman was pretty good, too. I expect the Golden Globes will name it Best Picture (musical/comedy).
 

Michael Elliott

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It seems Crowe is taking the most heat out of everyone but I liked him vocals....to a point. Yes, they are quite messy compared to a real singer and yes they don't "fit" with the "good" voices of the other cast members but I thought that roughness somewhat fit the character quite well. Again, I'm no expert on the musical but his voice didn't really bother me.
 

Dave Miller

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Saw it this afternoon and I really liked it. I probably wouldn't have noticed the amount of steady cam footage had I not been reading this thread for the past few days. Jackman carried this film well and everyone else was good too, including Crowe. Hathaway was so impressive, I'd bet she gets the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. It's that kind of performance.
Peace,
DM
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Hugh Jackman's performance didn't really work for me. At critical junctures, he prioritized emoting over the singing, where a more traditional vocal performance would have conveyed the underlying emotion better. Russell Crowe's issues have been amply covered. His voice just couldn't take Javert's numbers where they needed to go, and he played the role with rigid resoluteness substituting for fanatical megalomania. It's a respectable choice, but what you lose is the feeling that bringing Jean Valjean to justice has become the driving force of Javert's life. The way Crowe played it, I could have believed that he had dozens, even hundreds, of Jean Valjeans that he was keeping his eye out for.
On the other hand, Anne Hathaway surprised and impressed me. Her "I Dreamed a Dream" is a true lament; you feel to your bones that this woman is broken.
I thought the rest of the cast was uniformly excellent. Amanda Seyfried explored transitioning from modeling to opera and Broadway before ending up on the daytime soaps, so it's not a surprise that she had the pipes. Isabelle Allen was haunting as the young Cosette, doing a lot with her handful of scenes.
The standout, though, was Samantha Barks as Éponine. She'd played the role for a year in the West End production that's been running since 2004, and again for the 25th Anniversary Concert of Les Misérables at the O2 Arena in October 2010. You can see why they brought her back for the film. If this doesn't make her a film star, there's something very wrong with Hollywood. Just fantastic.
Most of my problems with the film come from the first third of the film, which felt really rushed to me. I greatly admired quite a bit of the camera work. The preponderance of closeups is a necessity when you're capturing the audio live.
 

GMpasqua

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Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt /t/321163/les-miserables-the-musical-hits-the-big-screen/60#post_4018372
I greatly admired quite a bit of the camera work.
Please explain why
 

Adam Lenhardt

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GMpasqua said:
Please explain why
It's a movie about tumultuous lives amidst one of the most tumultuous periods in any Western country's history. The swirling soaring plunging camera work captured that through a pretty seamless mix of crane shots, wire shots and steadicam work. Sedate camera work on dolly tracks and static setups wouldn't have accomplished the same thing.
I did think there were too many closeups, but as I mentioned in my previous post, that was necessitated by the technique they chose to use for capturing the audio. When the players are performing to prerecorded tracks, you don't have to worry about capturing the audio and a greater reliance on wider, longer shots both helps showcase the choreography and helps hide some of the dodgier lipsyncing. With capturing the audio live, they need a clean track for every shot, and they have to splice together well into a final mix. Every additional person on screen means an additional performance that has to be perfect simultaneously. The easiest way to accommodate this is to only have the main singer at the time on screen while they're singing.
 

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