I snored a snore

Les Misérables

Crit

Seriously? OK, look, I'll admit right up front that (please don't tell my daughter) I'm not really a fan of musical theater, though actually I'm probably a bit more inclined to enjoy musical theater on film. And anybody who knows more about music than I is welcome to tell me that these songs (the lyrics and especially the melodies) are not uniformly mediocre, or that the actors in the film--mostly mediocre-at-best singers--somehow ruined the best songs, or that the best songs were left out of the film version, or whatever, but as I'm seeing it right now, the 7 bajillion people who have loved this on stage must have found something--lots and lots of something--that is wanting here.

Far more interesting than any specific song is the fact that the actors sang as they acted, rather than acting to previously dubbed singing, the idea being that that would give them more flexibility in each reading/singing in each take. Well, yeah, I think that's a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that most of them have singing-in-the-shower voices, and the lyrics they're acting and the melodies they're singing don't merit the special treatment that the technique provides.

Not counting the 18 or 20 death scenes--'cause face it, who's unaffected by death, especially when the dier is noble (pretty much all of them) or in love or unspeakably young?--I found exactly two sequences moving. About 6 hours in, Samantha Barks as Éponine sings about her unrequited love in a scene shot with minimal cuts (hold that thought); but the real show stopper comes several hours earlier, so early that Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is still alive, a single tight shot of that song about dreaming and tigers inexplicably coming at night. Now, I'm betting that people who love Les Miz reaaaaly love that song, but it's trite tripe--trite tripe that Hathaway makes moving and appealing, largely on the merits of that one-shot performance. And that's what could make a genuinely good musical utterly fantastic via the sing-it-on-film strategy. Yeah, I know: the stakes still are nothing like they are on stage, where you get one chance per night to nail the mother; this may have been Hathaway's first take, but more likely it was her twentieth. Nonetheless, it created a convincing simulation of the immediacy that makes the stage exciting, and the Barks performance got us fairly close, and you wonder why director Tom Hooper didn't go for that more.

But whatever. Sad to think that's my last in a theater of 2012, and I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to cleanse my palate tonight.

Trailer

• Zero Dark Thirty--Yeah, I'd already seen a trailer for this, several times, but now that it's getting Best Picture buzz, the producers seem to have realized how unseductive that trailer was, and that even an unsmiling Jessica Chastain is more appealing.