The All-New Bunrab

Having complained about LEs Mis, I should mention some movies I liked in 2012. Of course the awards nominations tend to be for movies that happened near the end of the year - they always neglect a lot of earlier movies. And of course, there will always be movies that everyone loved but the critics will NEVER take them seriously and no one will EVER nominate them for an award, even though millions of people had more fun than anywhere else - yes, I am talking about The Avengers - so it wouldn't matter where in the year that opened, it wouldn't get nominated. And I will mention one more movie I didn't like, even though it's been nominated for several awards, and that's Beasts of The Southern Wild. I just did not like that one - I am not a big fan of magical realism, and I'm also not a big fan of "every lifestyle and culture has equal value" - that's just not true, when it's a lifestyle and culture that perpetuates ignorance, poor health, and the neglect of children. OK, not gonna do a long rant on that. But I did not like the movie.

On to what I did like. The Avengers, of course - it was fun, it was funny, it was fast, I was never at any point complaining about the acting or historical accuracy or realism because hey, we all came in knowing it was a comic book, and it was a damn well done comic book!

Moonrise Kingdom. Too neat - right about that year, I was right about that age, and my family, while not rich lawyers with a summer home, was the sort of culturally and intellectually inclined family where kids played "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" on the little portable record players. Besides all the Britten and Mozart in the score, I loved the newer music too, that was written as homage to Britten. And damn, it was a funny little movie, with the omniscient narrator popping up looking like a crazed Jacques Cousteau with a Boston accent, and the heroics of the scoutmaster after his total failure as a troop leader - oh, and the wedding!

Robot and Frank. Can't believe how few people saw this. In fact, I bet most of you never even heard of it. Go look for it. Funny, decently done science fiction touches, great performances by Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon - and how often do you get movies about cat burglars anyway? There were just SO many neat scenes - and though there's a happy ending, there's also the heartbreak in the scene where we find out just how serious the extent of Frank's dementia has been... it was really touching. Go find it and watch it, people! It should be a damn cult classic like Harold and Maude.

Argo - while Ben Affleck apparently can't act his way out of a paper bag and has only one facial expression, ever, nonetheless the suspense in this was great, and a lot of the performances  by other people were superb. I mean, we all already knew how the story ended and nonetheless everyone in the theater was on the edge of their seats, rooting for them and practically holding our breath, until the plane took off, whereupon we all cheered. They really did good pacing and timing on this.

So, there's what I did like in the moooobies this past year.

The many, many, MANY uses of water, please stop hitting us over the head with virtual BRICKS of water, we GET it already! That was the essay I was composing in my head by about 20 minutes into this film.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker had it all backward - he thought that people who loved the musical would be the ones who love the film, regardless of anything he said. But in fact it's the opposite: people who have seen the stage production and are fans of it, people who are serious goers-to-musical-theater, are the ones who find the most to be upset about, myself among them. The people who like the movie seem to be people who have never seen a musical performed live, they've spent their lives going to the movies. And not even all of those sorts of people liked it; some people who aren't theater-goers or musicians nonetheless found that there were things about the movie that turned them off.

Let's start with the opening scene. My boyfriend, Larry, who is not a musician and who has never been to a musical performed live onstage, but who was a history major at Penn, was upset right off. That's NOT how ships were brought into drydock. Doing it that way would destroy a ship completely. Ships, even really disabled ones, were floated into the dock, and THEN the hard labor was pumping the water out of the dock - treadmills and turnscrews and such. And, the flag that Javert has Valjean retrieve, is the wrong flag - it should have been the Bourbon flag with the fleur-de-lis, not a tricolor.

Javert using spoken word to have Valjean do that is a big omen to many of the flaws in the film: Russell Crowe can't sing worth a damn (I don't care if he's in a rock band; rock bands are almost never known for the quality of their singing anyway!!), and the director is going to hit us over the head with bricks of message, because he's afraid that the subtleties of the show will go right past us, so he has to make the message far more obvious, and Russell Crowe is the least convincing Javert ever, and close-ups of people's faces while they're singing is a really bad idea. All of that is telegraphed in that couple of minutes. We get closeups of Jackman's face, with lots of twitches and tics even when he's not lifting heavy objects. We get Russell Crowe trying to look mean and succeeding only in looking constipated.

Jackman, for someone who isn't a singer by trade, does a workmanlike job of the songs - one can tell he's put some effort into trying to do it right, even if he's never going to be able to sing it like an opera singer. Hathaway sobs through most of her songs, so we have this close up of her face with tears, and frankly, I kept thinking that she must really have anorexia, because even at the beginning of her role where she has a job, that is one skinny face with way too prominent cheekbones, and really skinny arms - when she's starving and tubercular at the end of her part, she doesn't look that much different, because she was already far too thin. Couldn't they have CGI'd her a bit at one end or the other, so that Fantine alive and well looked somewhat different from Fantine dead?

And then Marius - he did an OK job, and his singing was OK - but he has those freckles, and zooming the camera in on those freckles for minutes on end while he sings is really distracting and really detracts from whatever quality he gives the song. About the only person I enjoyed as both a character and a singer was the grown-up Eponine, whose singing absolutely blew away everyone else in the movie. I liked her much better in the movie than I had liked her as a character in the stage show; I suppose for many people that would depend on the casting in whatever production they saw. But I liked her acting as well as her singing.

Larry's comments on Crowe as Javert: "He's not obsessed; he's not even focused." and he noted that when Javert jumps, we don't even really know why - as far as one can tell from anything Crowe expresses, it might just be because he's disappointed that he's apparently failed in his mission to catch Valjean - there's no hint of the conflict in his mind about his rigid notions of right and wrong and justice. Even when he sings the lyrics about it, we don't feel any connection between the song and what he's doing. And jeez, can we stop with the repeated, repeated, repeated identical views of the Seine already?

Cosette is a character I've never liked - she's wimpy. She's too pretty and too sweet and too passive for my tastes. Wimpy. My opinion of her in the movie is no different.

So, overall: The zooming in on the faces did a disservice to just about everybody; the stuff that was changed from the stage show was mostly for the worse, the director's conviction that we wouldn't understand anything subtle without spoken hints was especially insulting; Crowe as Javert was a complete failure. People who loved the stage show will mostly dislike the movie; for people who aren't used to stage shows, your opinion of the movie will rest on what balance you give to individual acting performances.