Les Misérables (2012)

Les Misérables is amongst my very favourite books, if not my favourite. It is also likely my favourite musical. This is often a surprise to lovers of the book, as so many hate the adaptation – as well as being very sick of musical lovers who pretend they have read the book then are revealed to only know the story in the musical – but as a matter of fact I enjoy both as very different properties. I keep them separate and enjoy each for what it is, though admittedly with every fresh adaptation like this one, a part of me hopes Gavroche will be transformed to his more thoughtful, vulpine, brotherly form from the novel rather than the irritating little cliché of the film. But hey, the familiar story goes that it was the Artful Dodger who inspired the adaptation to happen at all, so…

Anyway, this version I was not particularly looking forward to. The trailer stirred no emotional response from me at all, other than thinking Fantine did not sound very powerful, and Russell Crowe could not sing. Well, on the former point I was admittedly very wrong – though I’m afraid the latter stands. Overall, though, I ended up liking this far more than I’d expected.

There was much brouhaha before the release about the way actors sang live on camera – and not in the way of the old musicals, essentially filmed like a modern-day concert with less cranes, but with the sophisticated cuts and angles of modern filmmaking. Well, I find myself sceptical that all the vocals were recorded during what we saw on screen, partly because multiple cuts would totally change their flow and be a nightmare to mix, and partly because I really don’t believe Hugh Jackman was singing as he and Javert were fighting with sword and wooden plank with no effect to his breathing. But what we did get were some truly remarkable sequences where a single shot was held – when Valjean first decides to turn his life around, when Fantine has fallen to her lowest and when Marius sings of the empty chairs at empty tables – and we have something quite unique, something that cannot be captured in a musical, and which completely justifies the technique and the hiring of film actors rather than singers: close-up performances where every nuance is clear and every breath, every sniffle, every waver is caught. It works rather brilliantly.

Most of the cuts to bring this down to an appropriate running length are good, too, snipping here and there and thankfully making the only song I dislike, ‘Little People’, not much more than an aside. It was a shame ‘Castle on a Cloud’ was snipped a bit, as the young Cossette really doesn’t get much to do, and the lack of ‘You broke a window pane’ in ‘Look Down’ changes the perception of Valjean’s initial crimes in a way I didn’t like, but otherwise things proceeded nicely.

I definitely think there were a few poor casting choices, though. Crowe is certainly the most prominent. It’s impossible to watch him and not to think of him simply as Russell Crowe struggling, never as Javert. He delivers ‘Stars’ like he’s just singing along to himself in private, and when he switches from his gravely voice to a higher line he sounds absurd. The crucial chemistry between Valjean and Javert thus never properly forms and his complete mental confusion at the end is nowhere to be seen. The girl playing adult Cossette is bland and not very likeable, which makes something of the emotional centre of the film – that more or less everything Valjean does is for her – go missing. And yes, the kid who’s Gavroche is the perfect musical Gavroche…but I still did hope for the gamin of the book, the one with the fierceness of that famous Delacroix painting. There’s also no sense of the book’s M. Bienvenu, but the musical does render him plot device priest #1.

For every miscast, though, there are numerous that are spot-on, and bring that aspect far into a positive light. Jackman, who we all know by now can sing superbly, does a fantastic transformation, carries the role with gravitas and in fact doesn’t miss the barrel chest of most Valjeans. He does seem to affect an odd quasi-Northern accent at the start, though. Hathaway, who got so much negative press before the film was finished, was a superbly damaged, sympathetic Fantine, perhaps the most miserable of the misérables, and made some excellent decisions to foreground suffering over bombast, making her very believable even in an inherently artificial art form. The girl playing Éponine’s tragic love was delicately delivered and she did a lot with very little, making me care more about her than almost any of the others in the cast, and her parents the Thénadiers were brilliantly done by Sasha Baron-Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, repeating some elements from their Sweeney Todd appearances but stealing the show every time they were on and ad-libbing superbly. Cohen’s ‘How dare you?’ was perfect.

Eddie Redmayne, who plays Marius and who I last saw in My Week with Marylin, was likeable and delivered a very moving ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’, though when he sang falsetto I must admit I was reminded of Kermit the Frog and was glad when the song moved to its main register. I can’t shake the feeling I passed him a few times in University, perhaps in Hall or the bar or even at the ADC, but this may well be false memory syndrome based on recognising him from My Week with Marylin.

Overall, it wasn’t perfect, and if asked whether it was as good as the musical I’d have to say better in some places and not in others, and of course the book is the best overall experience, but it was very good and at the very least it showed me some things I haven’t seen before – which is remarkably unexpected for an adaptation of an old musical based on a very old book. 

Life of Pi

I have to say, Life of Pi was better than I expected it to be. I expected to really dislike it, but I actually quite enjoyed it.

I never read the book. It was recommended to me many, many times but I had taken an instant dislike to it. I read how its premise was taken more or less wholesale from a Brazilian novel about a boy stuck on a dingy with a jaguar. I read how it was rather artificially hanging on the Booker-baiting trend of an Indian setting with magical realism elements, especially when everyone has an oh-so-quirky history, like the main boy who is named after a swimming pool. I read how the boy and the tiger end up coexisting and end up on a fictional island of meerkats, and decided it would be trite and awful and try much too hard.

Nor was I enthusiastic about the film, initially linked to the director who has probably fallen furthest from grace of any I can think of beside Michael Bay – M. Night Shyamalan. He was then removed from it, and though directors I like such as Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and by the time years had dragged on an Ang Lee finally committed, I felt it was in ‘troubled project’ waters and likely wouldn’t come out of it well, especially as Lee is rather uneven, especially with more populist work.

Still, the film was finally made – and the trailer duly arrived, showcasing some rather lovely CG and annoying me with a motif of words matched with drumbeats. If I had missed it, I wouldn’t have been duly worried, but I caught it.

And yes, I should have given it more of a chance. It asked you to believe a lot less than I thought it would and it allowed for an acknowledged cynicism. There are some fanciful moments with the tiger, but you are never expected to believe it is anything but a wild animal. The island is indeed one of the parts that really stretches credulity, but a plot point was made of that. And though the framing device – about a visiting Canadian writer looking for a story – is lazy, but it also provides a much-needed alternate story. And yes, there is enough beauty in the oceans, as well as hallucinogenic fantasies of the oceans, that there’s a real visual spectacle.

It’s still a concept lifted wholesale from elsewhere, even if the devil is in the details here. Speaking of matters spiritual, I was not keen on the treatment of different religions, made into a quirk that comes over very differently when you remember it’s from Yann Martel rather than from a generalised, rather patronising Western idea of superior spirituality in India. It also still gets quite dull at times. But it is still lovely to look at – especially in 3D – tells a fun tall tale, centres on a likeable character with a likeable fierce tiger companion, and well worth the time to watch in the cinema, even if you can’t persuade me it would be worth the hours it takes to read a book. 

The Hobbit part 1: An Unexpected Journey

While both were fixtures of my childhood, I read The Hobbit rather more. Well, Lord of the Rings was a commitment of all your reading time for weeks, even months, whereas The Hobbit could be read in a few days. But it was a lot more inconsequential and I even came to view it as babyish, especially beside its big brother. The Hobbit makes Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in their little club sharing ideas make much more sense. It is in every way more child-appropriate, simplistic and indeed, superficial. I never really felt Bilbo was in any danger, unlike the members of the Fellowship. The dwarfs were silly griping fellows and for all their roots in Norse mythology, they had silly names and their quest seemed rather abstract and fuelled by gold. The trading of riddles, so iconic now, always struck me as a very unlikely scenario and I resented Bilbo for cheating, even if he did so inadvertently. The ring, meanwhile, even though Tolkien actually rewrote the passages featuring it once he knew how important it was going to be, seemed so trivial, as Bilbo slips it on and off as he pleases – though of course it takes time.

Well, I haven’t read the Hobbit since I was a preteen, but still remember much of it, largely because of family discussions. So I know just how much was added to this film, how much padding and embellishment there was – but that’s quite understandable in an effort to make a rather small quest story epic, and expand it to no less than three full films, which I can’t say I think entirely necessary when they could be getting on with The Silmarillion. The padding hasn’t just stretched the content to three films, though – it’s stretched this film to a full three hours, which is really too long. The first act in particular, when a mass of characters we can barely distinguish from one another are introduced, is long-winded and I am very sure that the main criticism The Hobbit will suffer is that it was dull. I had a very good time of it, recognising hints and references, but I was also aware that had I known nothing of mythology, deviations from the text or what was to come, I may have been bored.

However, bored I was not. A little surprised by sudden changes of scene once or twice, but very soon delighting in the new chapter. More or less all of the additions I loved, especially giving Radagast not only a role but a great and endearing eccentricity, with a very obvious visual clue to how little he cares for the impression he gives others. I was puzzling over who the actor was for a good few minutes, having forgotten the prior announcements but knowing he was terribly familiar, but when I realised it was the Doctor I remember seeing on Saturday evenings, I couldn’t have been more pleased. I hope this leads to Sylvester McCoy having a career renaissance, and his interactions with Gandalf were priceless. Though now I will no longer get to be quite so snobby about actually knowing who Radagast is – until now it was a bit of a bit of geeky esoteria.

The film squeezes in a prologue of sorts with Frodo and the older Ian Holm directly before the opening of Lord of the Rings, which is a lovely nod to the films these quite clearly build from. We are then shown the younger Bilbo, and Martin Freeman does an absolutely excellent job in his usual slightly baffled Englishman role. I may not care much for Sherlock or The Office, but he’s certainly one of the best things in either, and provides a nice Hitchhiker’s Guide link with yesterday’s film, Seven Psychopaths. As Bilbo tumbles into the quest, he gains confidence, and it will be great to see him grow further in the next installations. As well as the familiar encounter with the mountain trolls, the stop at Rivendell, the encounter with the goblins and Bilbo meeting Gollum and finding his ring, the film gives itself more of a structure by introducing a baddy only mentioned in the book as part of the story of Thorin getting his full name Oakenshield. This allows for some pretty heavy action scenes, and gives the film the artificial climax it needs. We also get Radagast encountering Sauron in an early form, and having a rather confusing episode with what will become a Nazgul, here apparently a summoned spirit and not a man who can only be killed by a woman. There are also added appearances from Saruman and Galadriel as well as Elrond, which is great – seeing those familiar faces and getting Christopher Lee another screen credit is never a bad thing. Also present is Stephen Fry – his voice, at least – unexpectedly as a goblin king with a huge wobbling chin I’m sure insecure Stephen will quietly fret over. The eloquence of this hideous creature and his sublimely awful singing make for an excellent casting choice, turning what could have been a highly forgettable character into a very memorable one.

The dwarves are more memorable than they might have been, too. Though some are little more than ‘the fat one’ or ‘the daft one with a slingshot’, others get distinguished well, though of course it’s Thorin that does the most growing – and comes over as far more formidable than in the book. James Nesbitt’s one scene shows his great talent at seeming like a lovely guy in just a few words, and the guy from Desperate Romantics as the one bizarre good-looking and non-squat dwarf gets to stand out as a character as well as a face with his naivety and careless tongue.

It was long and in summary, doesn’t feel that action packed, but it was in fact very enjoyable and I’m looking forward to seeing Beorn, hearing Smaug and cringing at the spiders in glorious 3D – and yes, the 3D was exemplary here.

I may well go and see The Hobbit again, too. After all, I saw it in 24fps, which I had no complaints about, and was happy I saw first, but I am curious about the controversial 48fps. I remember when making a film for my master’s course, we were far happier with the lower framerate, the higher looking too amateurish, but I do want to know if it looks different large-scale. Perhaps I will see. I can’t see it being a more dramatic transition than that from film to digital, and we barely noticed that.

I’m also glad Jackson returned. I adore Del Toro, but…this just wasn’t the project for him.   

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths just by the skin of its teeth manages to pull off its concept and be a lot of fun, and that’s because it’s a comedy. If this had been presented without all the jokes, it would have been the sort of film I really dislike – trendy-trendy Tarrantino derivatives with the tired, deeply deeply lazy conceit of being about a screenwriter trying to write a film. I hate screenplays about screenwriters writing, possibly making allowances for Charlie Kaufmann doing it but in general finding it highly irritating – and it’s the centre of the plot here. Possibly I’d give the same leeway to Martin McDonagh if I’d seen In Bruges, but I didn’t catch it, so this was my first impression of him. The meta concept is supposed to give a sense of credence, much like books that pretend they’re written by the main character, but in film it only has a distancing effect.

Alcoholic Irish screenwriter Marty needs inspiration for his screenplay, Seven Psychopaths, as he just gets drunk all the time and rips off his friend Billy’s ideas. Billy is involved with a ridiculous scam led by an older Polish gentleman called Hans, in which the two of them kidnap dogs for a few days, answer the ads and collect the reward. To help Marty along, Billy puts an ad in the paper asking for psychopaths to get in touch to share their stories, and while that leads to a disturbing encounter, they have much bigger problems because one of the kidnapped dogs belongs to a mafia boss who wants it back at any costs.

The set-up isn’t terrible, but much of the early development is. It’s painfully obvious who the psychopath with the jack of diamonds calling card is, and it doesn’t make sense that he’s two of the titular seven. The line between comedy and drama is deftly toed everywhere but with the mafia guys, who are too cartoony. And honestly, it’s just not very interesting, with vague ideas about psychopaths thrown around and occasionally enacted – there’s one idea about a Vietnamese guy who’s going to take revenge for war atrocities, and another stolen from Billy about a quaker who stalks his daughter’s killer, which of course neatly gets referred to again later.

The film rests, though, on two brilliant asides and a strong ending that mixes anticlimax, dryness and traditional action payoffs very nicely. The first aside is with Tom Waits’ character Zachariah, who goes everywhere carrying a white rabbit, telling the story of himself and his lover travelling the country as serial killers who hunt down and kill serial killers. When Tom Waits’ character is too horrified by the burning to death of the Zodiac Killer, they part, and he’s been searching for her ever since. The time and place the character reappears can be seen coming a mile off, but it is still quite brilliant, Waits’ inimical voice relates the tale perfectly and his presence here is worth the price of admission alone.

The second aside is Billy’s concept of how the film should be, an incredibly stupid shoot-out in a graveyard full of melodrama and absurdity. What makes it work is that it’s all filmed, done with a great seriousness by the actors, with every stupid twist enacted and every ridiculously violent moment realized. It’s easily one of the funniest scenes in any film I’ve ever seen, and is all the better for the contrast with the understated, wry humour elsewhere.

At the end, the neat way the ends are tied up is very nice. I was cynical about the Vietnamese man’s story, and it really only works because of how it’s delivered, but it does work, in the end. Hans’ stand-off with the mobsters, where he undercuts their schtick with wonderful deadpan responses, couldn’t have worked better. Loved it.

And no review of this film could be complete without mention of its fantastic cast. This ensemble is absolutely sublime, and Tom Waits is really the icing on an exceedingly tasty cake. Colin Farrell does bewildered and hapless yet likeable far better than expected, and Christopher Walken brings such measured gravitas to what is after all a role that oscillates between awesome and pathetic, and embodies a man so very different from his usual characters sublimely. Sam Rockwell, who despite loving him in Moon and enjoying in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I had hitherto paid little attention to, certainly distinguished himself this time, with a bravura performance balancing madness and goofy simplicity in a compelling, fascinating and rather unsettling way without ever being unbelievable – just the sort of role someone like him needs to stand out. And then there’s Woody Harrelson, whose character is simple on the surface but probably the hardest of any of them to make work in the film, being at once logical and precise, unhinged and unpredictable and also motivated by a rather daft love of his doggie. They all spark off each other, and it’s fascinating to watch it all work.

Arguably it shouldn’t work. It should annoy me. But largely thanks to the cast, it doesn’t. They are very enjoyable to watch. 

Twilight: Breaking Dawn part 2

I don’t think I really need to complain about the various glaring plot problems in this latest – and hopefully last – Twilight film. About the fact that the film is basically about the Volturi walking across half the world rather than getting a plane, and then just walking back. About what a lazy plot device Alice is. About how Alice could have just shared her plan from the start and prevented several deaths, plus the slaughter of a number of innocents in the vicinity of Forks as a group of vampires gather to protect super-special Bella. About how very annoying Bella is with her perfection and her super powers and yet how she just completely ignores her baby to have some sex for a few days. About how the series ends with the Volturi still in power, still doing whatever they like in Italy including slaughtering what ought to be a notably huge number of people. How Jacob is going to have sex with Renesmee when she’s seven and ‘fully grown’. But again, Dan Bergstein over at Sparknotes has already done all of that in his brilliantly funny readings of the books, and done the suffering for me.

I have to say, having read his summary of the books chapter by chapter, I’m very very glad that he did it so I didn’t have to, and presented it in such an enjoyable way. Plus once again I can find out about the stupider parts of the books – the absurd last-minute change where it turns out werewolves aren’t really werewolves. Marcus’ hilarious power of seeing relationships. The way she tries to write a bit of action at the end, and has some mist buffet against a love bubble and some snow, with the result that everyone is then convinced Bella was the one who won the ‘war’ for them.

So since I don’t feel the need to talk about that, I only feel the need to talk about the big climax, the one scene that makes the film enjoyable, the one scene that isn’t even in the goddamn books – a huge, gristly battle sequence. To be fair, not to have it there would make this an incredibly dull film, almost as dull as Breaking Dawn part 1. Again because the film was padded out to make enough material for two, this one is drawn out to great length, with only a scene with Bella’s father feeling like it brought any depth to any of the characters. But the fact is that the filmmakers put in a long, bloody battle between superpowered vampires, with some huge werewolves thrown in there. And it’s quite satisfying – annoying Cullens are dispatched, wolves rip off the heads of smug vampires and of course, there at the centre of it is Martin Sheen, always the best thing about these films, having a brilliant time with one of the campest roles it’s possible to have and looking both absurd and awesome doing it. It’s basically a comic book film at this point, not the turgid romance it was before, and it’s fantastic. And yes, like most of the parts of Twilight that are actually good, it’s not in the books.

I’ve now seen every one of these films, and I’m pretty saddened by the fact that such awful, awful books were actually enjoyed by a target demographic that – and I don’t care what an intellectual snob I am to say this – have to be morons to actually think is good plotting or romantic in any way. I don’t mind things I think are crap but have the bare minimum of decent writing make it big – like Harry Potter – but for this to sell so very much is quite distressing. That said, the expensive films were with a couple of exceptions at least amusing, fun and I quite genuinely liked the first one, in an ‘it’s not good but it’s nowhere near terrible’ sort of way – I even preferred it to the Harry Potter films. But that was imagining something better had to happen after the first film…and it didn’t. It got worse and worse and oh so much worse. 

Conclusion: Meyer is teeeerrrrrrible but Hollywood can indeed polish turds - to some extent. 

Skyfall

With every new Daniel Craig film, we get told that it’s a brand new Bond in a gritty post-Bourne world, where modern sensibilities abound and the cartooniness is gone. Well, it’s not. Daniel Craig isn’t a wise-cracking Brosnan with perfect teeth, that’s for sure, but it’s still the same cartoony silliness – and that’s what I liked about Skyfall.

We have Bond surviving things that will kill anyone without even an explanation. We have lots of ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ moments, with computers doing things like launching trains at people and hiding maps in daft 3D rendered mushes of strings. Bad guys come flying in helicopters blaring out ‘Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, but neglect to buy, y’know, missiles for it, which would have wound up his problems right away (though I suppose it can be justified by his desire to look his victim in the eye…though his tactics anyway could have made that impossible quite easily). Of course, we also get the baddie dithering and speechifying when he could have outright completed all his goals if he just got on with it.

But these things are part of Bond, and part of what makes watching Bond fun.

There are attempts to maintain the veneer of having the franchise grow up. Characters talk about pain and tortured pasts, and the whole thing revolves around MI6 being flawed and accountable rather than able to get away with anything. Bond himself is still portrayed as a bit past-it and out of touch. We get a few examples of having cake and eating it – the new Q dismisses silly old gadgets, but we get the retro fun of the old car with machine guns under its headlights; a little aside about Bond not knowing what the rush hour commute is like hints at a desire for him to be more socially conscious, but he really shines swanning about absurdly plush casinos in Macau; the new Moneypenny gives as good as she gets and teases Bond, but she’s still far from a progressive figure.

But expecting a Bond film to suddenly become a lefty fantasy of equality and progress is to wish for a different film altogether. And a good Bond film is a uniquely tasty occasional treat. The last couple had their moments but really missed their marks, especially the extremely forgettable Quantum of Solace. So for all its rebirth theme, this film subtly asserts that sometimes doing it the old way is best, and comes off much better for it.

Oh, and the intro sequence was fantastic, even if I don’t like Adelle undercutting her big notes in that way she does…

Silent Hill 2

The first film wasn’t exactly brilliant, but this one has been even more cruelly panned. Which is fair – this version had its moments, but its main flaw was that it was very, very boring. It dragged and dragged, and when it finally got interesting, it got disappointing.

The way the Silent Hill worlds work means just about anything can happen. Any monstrosity can appear and creep after you. You can find the world shifting to something truly horrific. The first film had some pretty harrowing scenes, like the one in the bathroom, but this one unfortunately gets past the silly jump-scare phase and straight into stupidity. Whose decision it was to make the first significant monster a dumb waxwork dummy-making spider thing that screamed at the screen in daft attempts to use 3D effects was sorely misled on what was going to be scary.

And the trouble is that there just aren’t enough monstrous creatures here. There’s the silly wobbly thing with no arms, that spider, the nurses – whose bit makes them look good but is very ill-conceived – the main baddie and Pyramid Head, who they really awkwardly try to make some kind of antihero. Bunnies with blood on their mouths aren’t terrifying. Silly heads under the grills of the floor aren’t terrifying. Nothing here is terrifying, though Malcolm McDowell gets close a couple of times before he’s turned into a daft monster whose mortal weakness is that someone can daintily remove a magic artefact from a gaping hole in his body. Eventually the main girl gets to the chamber where the final showdown will happen and various Game of Thrones actors are strewn around helplessly, and then basically it turns out that nothing mattered after Malcolm McDowell’s scene, because the same ending would have happened if the girl went there directly.

Short on scares, short on humanity and crucially short on any sort of action or tension that could have kept things interesting, this was a definite dud.