Les Misérables

I've been writing reviews for awhile now on this blog, and yet somehow I've never reviewed a musical.  I've done comedy, horror, romance, drama, Oscarbait, arthouse bullshit, crime, thriller, silent, war, grindhouse, surrealist nightmare, western, exploitation, and whatever the Hell "Cosmopolis" was supposed to be, but never a musical.  So now all I have to do is review a porn and I'll have completed the circle of movies.  Maybe the upcoming adaptation of "Fifty Shades of Grey" will make that a reality.

I live in the New York area, so I've probably seen more stage musicals than most, and I've seen the original stage version of "Les Misérables".  I've actually done one better and read the original Victor Hugo novel and seen a 1998 dramatic adaptation of that novel starring Liam Neeson.  Out of all the versions of the story that I've seen, I'll have to go with the 1998 film.  I guess I'm only in even remembering that version, but its actually a really great movie with easily the best performances I've seen for any of the characters.  Liam Neeson is a perfect Jean Valjean, Geoffrey Rush is Javert, a post "Batman and Robin" Uma Thurman is  Fantine, and Claire Daines is Cosette.  Its the most streamlined version of the story too, getting right to the point and hitting the important dramatic marks.  The stage musical is very good, I felt, but I'm not really much of a musical scholar as much as I am a movie guy.  However, its very good because its staged.  Its long, but there's an intermission, there are many great performances, but the staging is diverse and indeed epic in scale.  There are some epic sets, including most impressively an entire barricade for the Paris revolts that appears out of the ceiling.  Perhaps there was a really great movie that could have been made out of the musical, but I'm sorry to say, Tom Hooper's "Les Misérables" was simply not it.

There is a kind of ungainliness to the stage musical that is almost acceptable to that version.  There's definitely a pacing difference between a great stage musical and a great film musical, and "Les Misérables" does not seem to understand this at all.  Tom Hooper adapts the stage musical more or less line for line, including probably every single song, which is a choice that no stage director would ever make.  There's another greater problem in that Tom Hooper runs entirely out of tricks by the first hour, which up until then was extremely well-shot with excellent performances.  But then you start to realize rather terribly that you've already seen the best soliloquies, and the movie starts to run out of steam fast.  There's a tepid oddly joyless version of "Master of the House" which is followed by an hour and a half of thinking "come on, can we get this over already?".  The pretty imagery starts to fall flat, the drama fades away, and for whatever reason, Tom Hooper decides to start randomly throwing dutch angles around, as if screwing with the camera position will somehow breath life back into his movie.  More ruthless editing and the removal of a few joyless reprisal songs could have made for a much better experience.

Lincoln

I guess I had to see this after having the deep misfortune to have viewed "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter".  Also, despite living a post-Christmas world, I haven't really seen all that much Oscar Bait this year.  There was "Cloud Atlas" but that was far too experimental and divisive for the Academy to even consider.  So let's go with a director who is guaranteed to be nominated for just about everything:  Steven Spielberg.

A lot of people really hated last year's "War Horse" for being sappy and melodramatic.  If you wanted a perfect paint by numbers example of pure cynical Oscar Bait then you'd want to see "J. Edgar"... however "War Hose" was a nicely cynical attempt that somehow managed to sneak in a bit of real movie magic.  "J. Edgar" had all the artistry of a "Transformers" movie, but was better at fooling people.  "War Hose" actually had some very pretty shots and sequences, along with some very likable characters*, but obviously it was not Steven Spielberg's best work.  But if you're looking for something that actually is Stephen Spielberg's best movie that does not involve monsters, Indiana Jones, aliens, or WWII, "Lincoln" would probably be it.  Despite taking place just about 150 years ago, "Lincoln" may be the most politically relevant movie to come out this year, with at least the most important message.  If only the Democrats and Republicans right now would only watch this movie of complex political bartering and semi-corrupt double dealing from our nation's greatest president, maybe we could finally get something done.

The brilliance of "Lincoln" is that is it not a massive biopic that depicts Abraham Lincoln's entire life from cradle to Ford's Theater.  Instead the movie is focused nearly entirely in January 1865, dealing primarily with Lincoln's desperate attempts to get the Thirteenth Amendment, one of the most important political events in American history, passed while slowly setting the stage for the Union's ultimate victory over the Confederacy.  The movie almost entirely takes place in Washington DC in the White House or the Capitol building.  Many of Lincoln's most important moments such as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the Gettysburg Address (which is recited to Lincoln by several soldiers), occur in the backstory and are left out of the film.  Instead its a far more concise, focused story on just one of Lincoln's many triumphs, which was the correct move.  Abraham Lincoln's entire life would have needed an entire trilogy equal in scale to "The Hobbit" and years of work to depict his impressive life theatrically.  Spielberg chose one of Lincoln's greatest accomplishments - an accomplishment that took place in the dirty, unsavory, and corrupt world of horse trading politics.  And somehow despite showing Lincoln at his most corrupt, he still manages to come off as the same saint-like figure that we were taught about in school.  However, he is somehow even more impressive of a historical figure because we see his darker side and all that he had to overcome in order to achieve his great works.

Wreck-It Ralph

Man, "Tron 3" got really weird.

We survived the Apocalypse, so I figure I owe you people that "Wreck-It Ralph" review that you've all been begging for.  (Or the four or five of you who actually comment have been begging for.)  So here it is, Christmas came early this year, and Hanukkah came weeks late.  As you'd expect, "Wreck-It Ralph" was a damn good movie and I'm glad I managed to catch it on exactly the last minute*.  This is easily the best animated movie of the year, so if you haven't seen it yet... well, you're screwed probably.  Wait for DVD.

For whatever reason Pixar this year decided that they were going to do the magical Princess movie, and Disney decided that they would copy Pixar's usual plotline of inanimate objects living happily in a secret tiny society.  And so with Disney making a Pixar movie and Pixar making a Disney movie, "Wreck-It Ralph" feels like a video game-style "Toy Story", and "Brave" felt like.... crap, honestly.  My biggest worry about "Wreck-It Ralph" was that it would descend into endless fanservice and video game cameos for the nerd crowd, but instead they actually focused on making a nicely solid kid's movie.  And they found a way to give Samus a voice and characterization that didn't also make her humorless codependent wretch.

The plot as the trailers have told you, takes place in one of the increasingly-few arcades.  All the little video game characters are connected together through the electricity, traveling through the plugs.  This is why the "Street Fighter" characters and Pac-Man are hanging around, but you won't find any "Zelda" or "Final Fantasy" - those games have never been in arcades**.  Impressively they even managed to sneak in characters from extremely gory franchises like "Mortal Kombat" and "House of the Dead", I'm guessing the Disney execs don't really know video games that well.  Wreck-It Ralph is the villain of a 1982 video game called "Fix-It Felix Jr.", a thinly-veiled copypasta of "Donkey Kong", who after thirty years of being the bad guy and ignored by all his dickish co-characters, decides that he wants more in his life.  To that end he "goes maverick" and jumps into other arcade games in order to prove that there is more to him than simply smashing buildings.  Along the way we get every once of the magical adventure that the trailers promised.

Cloud Atlas

I think I aged roughly a year watching all three hours of the Wachowski Sibling's "Cloud Atlas".  This is a long movie, and an emotionally draining movie.  I don't think a film this complex has been attempted since "Inception", and even that when you get right down to it was a heist movie with a SciFi setting.  "Cloud Atlas" is not one movie, but six movies spliced together for three hours fading back and forth continuously as each story progresses simultaneously.  The best way to simulate this experience would be to watch "Mutiny on the Bounty", "The Pianist", "The China Syndrome", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Blade Runner", and "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" on six TVs all playing at once.  That way you could properly recreate this movie's combination of adventure, romantic drama, spy thriller, dark comedy, SciFi action, and post-apocalyptic fantasy all at once.  You'd probably get a splitting headache at end and be confused as Hell, so I'd recommend that you watch "Cloud Atlas" instead.

"Cloud Atlas" is easily one of the most ambitious movies I've ever come across, and that usually doesn't translate well into a positive viewing experience.  Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" was definitely an attempt at a post-modern satire on post-9/11 politics and culture in a giant blender of SciFi and absurdity, but that also made it one of the worst movies I've ever seen - so confusingly terrible on every level as to not even be hilariously bad.  I assumed going into "Cloud Atlas" that it would be a movie I more respected than actually would be able to enjoy.  From the trailer it appeared to be a movie about everything, and it actually was a movie about everything.  You have a recurring cast of actors moving through a cycle of reincarnation across six completely different stories linked by only the faintest of references.  Each story looks different, has a different tone, and even are from different genres entirely.  And I was pretty sure that the end result of this would be an incomprehensible mess of impossible-to-follow ideas with all of the stories contradicting each other in an unwatchable disaster of pretension.  What did I expect to was instead a masterpiece of editing, where each of the stories in fact manages to (and I know I sound like an art major git right now) rhyme with the others, and together they add to the greater whole.

Now, obviously "Cloud Atlas" is not a movie for everybody.  In fact, its probably not the movie for 99% of the population, it was a huge flop.  Its challenging, its bizarre, I could not imagine any way to try to market this to another person, its enough of a problem trying to review it.  The trailer, actually, is an excellent cross section of the actual movie.  If you enjoyed that, you'll enjoy the movie, because even though the transitions aren't quite that often, the movie actually does flip all around each of the six plotlines very frequently in what feels like almost an endless montage.  I don't know how many people can manage to keep track of six storylines at once, if you had trouble following "Inception", this would be hopeless for you.  But even so, there is real beauty here.  Not many movies would dare try to the cycle of reincarnation for a few characters over 1000 years, and if they did, they would probably take a more traditional linear approach.  I don't think a movie like "Cloud Atlas" will ever be made again, its an epic milestone in storytelling art.  Even I'm not sure of every detail of this film, I'll have to see it again to appreciate it more deeply, yet I still rank this as easily the most interesting movie made in 2012.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I love "The Lord of the Rings" movies.  Personally I consider them to be among one of the finest film achievements of all time, easily the greatest fantasy movies ever made.  They're easily one of the most important movies made during my lifetime, and are unrelentingly epic, beautiful, and amazing.  In fact, in repeated viewings I've found that I've come to love them more and more over the years.  I enjoyed them the first time I saw them when I was a little kid, but they were never equal to a "Star Wars" movie or a "Batman" film in importance to me.  Now, "The Hobbit" is one of the biggest movies of the year, all thanks to Peter Jackson's flawless and majestic film adventure.  They're so good that they make actually reading Tolkien nearly impossible for me.  Because who needs this dry literary masterpiece?  I got the extended editions with twelve hours of some of the most perfect movies ever made.

So "The Hobbit 1" obviously was not going to be able to match the original trilogy in terms of impact, quality, and tone.  Because "The Hobbit" is not a "Lord of the Rings" book, its a small charming children's book focused more on a whimsical fantasy story than an epic adventure.  Unfortunately that's a tonal problem that I don't think Peter Jackson or anybody else was ever going to solve.  You can see the problem just with the main cast.  In a kid's book (or a kid's animated movie from the Seventies) it would make sense to have thirteen dwarves running around.  Thirteen dwarves is a pretty impressive number to a little kid, even though the thirteen dwarves are basically just one bumbling character that Bilbo has to save several times.  But when its a serious dramatic film, thirteen dwarves is a massive weight, since all thirteen of these people need some kind of individual character beyond being one-dimensional comic reliefs.  How exactly do you connect together a scene where trolls get trick into being turned to stone by sunlight with the Battle of Helm's Deep in a single dramatic tone?  Or create a film trilogy that begins with dwarves singing songs about Bilbo Baggins' plates and ending it with a huge battle that will set up an apocalyptic war for all of Middle Earth?  I don't think you can.

Now "The Hobbit 1" is not a bad movie, but its still noticeably the worst of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth films.  The decision to divide "The Hobbit" into three movies is still controversial, though I can see how it might have worked.  But what I don't really understand is why this movie is so loong.  That shouldn't be a major surprise since "The Lord of the Rings" films are already three hours long (with another hour thrown in if you're watching the Extended Cuts like you're supposed to), but in the theater they didn't feel so long.  This one feels like a long movie, without the same single-minded sense of purpose and pacing that made the original trilogy work.  This movie feels padded and bloated.  "The Dark Knight Rises" is about equal length, but there's not a scene or subplot that I would have removed.  Just off the top of my head I could imagine at least a half hour of cuts that would have made "The Hobbit" flow better.  Still, its a mostly solid movie, I'm willing to see the others, but know, there is a clear step-down in quality.

Also, see this movie in a regular framerate, the 48 frames per second business is awful.  And see it in 2D.