Film #6 Les Mis (12.1.13)

#6 Les Miserables

Jesus. I'm not surprised they're miserable! After 3 hours of that I'm bloody miserable.

First things first, I like musicals, well some anyway. I like Singing in the Rain, Guys and Dolls, Chicago, Hello Dolly, Moulin Rogue and those Hollywood musicals of old when Bing would turn up  and transform your barn into the stage for a TV special.

When I see a musical I want some tunes to listen to, I want some proper song numbers, I want something I can hum later on, not just raw naked voices singing!

And whenever I see a film where Russ is going to sing, I want a lot less of that! It's bad enough when he's just acting but when he's warbling too, jeez! Seriously why is he considered to be an A list actor? He's only made three decent films, even Steven Seagal's made more than that!

In Les Mis, there's no rest-bite between the songs, as soon as one ends so another begins which means all the songs seem to share the same melody and sound the same. And the lyrics don't rhyme, so just as a song line comes to an end and your brain is telling you what the proper last word should be, let's say love with dove, these tossers throw in something completely random like 'Aardvark'.

Huge Jackman is the lead and if he could of, I believe, would have sweated real blood if the role had demanded it. He gives this film his all, every sweating, insanely close-up, shaky-cam second he is on the screen. It's through his eyes that the film slowly, ever-so-slowly unfurls at a snail's pace, wringing every gut-wrenching emotion it can from every millimeter of film as it goes. And joining him in the 'giving it your all' department is Anna Hathaway who goes one better by actually giving away her hair, just to show her commitment, almost as if she's saying to Huge, 'Beat that, mate!' Cos, boy is she magnificent! In fact both she and Huge are.

Shared second-place honours go to Ali Borat and Hellen John-Bonham-Get-Carter-nee-Burton. It's amazing what they can do when she's not being directed by her creatively-spent husband and he's outside his comfort zone.
 
After that I couldn't tell you who any of the other actors were, although I definitely saw the girl from Mama Mia (now that was a musical!) but since most of the time she was stuck in a carriage or in her bedroom pining for some simpering ladyboy I couldn't tell you if she was germane to the plot or even what her character's name was.

Overall the thing I learned from this was that everybody was miserable, oh so bloody miserable and that nobody in the first half of the 19th century France was happy.

A bit like the audience who I saw this with.


6/10