Les Miserables (2012)

Now Prisoner 24601, Your Time is Up and Your Parole’s Begun.

My friend Ashley Janet is not very good at requesting movies.  She told me I should watch this movie a while ago, and I told her (as I tell everyone) to make sure to request it on my Facebook Fanpage.  27 years later, lying on my deathbed, I received a request.  I had very little time – as the Reaper grew near – to meet this request.  I had my great, great grandchild run to a RedBox and pick up a chip that I installed in my futuristic eyeball player (I assume that’s what’s going to happen in the future).  Thankfully, after watching the movie, I welcomed the sweet release that the Reaper brought, so everything seemed to work out.  Did I want to die after watching the movie because it was so depressing, or because it was bad?  Or are they one and the same?  Let’s find out as I review Les Misérables, from a musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, which is itself based on a novel by Victor Hugo, written for the screen by William Nicholson and Herbert Kretzmer, directed by Tom Hooper, and starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Samantha Barks, Isabelle Allen, and Aaron Tveit.

Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is a slave in a prison where he’s serving a 19-year sentence for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child.  He’s released on his parole by the prison guard Javert (Russell Crowe), but finds it impossible to find work or shelter because of his criminal background, but he finds sanctuary with the Bishop of Digne (Colm Wilkinson) and in doing so adopts Christianity and changes his identity to start a new life.  Javert devotes his life to bringing Valjean back to justice.  But he’s not that good at it because eight years later, Valjean is a factory owner and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer.  A young lady named Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is working at his factory, but is fired by Valjean’s foreman because she has an illegitimate daughter named Cosette (Isabelle Allen), who is in the care of the unscrupulous  Thénardiers (Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen).  Fantine eventually resorts to prostitution, where she is found by Valjean, who then learns that he is (kind of) the cause of her predicament.  Then she dies and Valjean collects Cosette to raise her in her mother’s stead.  Nine years later and Javert still hasn’t caught Valjean.  Cosette is now Amanda Seyfried, and she falls in love with Marius Pontmercy (Eddie Redmayne) at first sight.  He loves her back … and her front, I assume.  The daughter of the Thénardiers, Éponine (Samantha Barks) is in love with Marius.  Marius is also in love with France, and is a member of a group of revolutionaries that blah blah blah sad things.  The end.

Man, I was beginning to get bored of my own summation there.  I was not a fan of this movie, but it’s not to say there are not things within this movie that are to be respected.  I was not really surprised by any part of the story.  There is a chance I’ve seen this in musical form before, but if I have, I have no recollection of it.  I think I was more able to predict the story by just thinking about what the most melodramatic thing that could happen was, and then that would usually happen.  It was comforting, at least, that the ending was vaguely happy, at least in comparison to the rest of the movie.  Well, Cosette probably wasn’t too fond of the way it ended, but it was a bit of a relief for me.  Of course, I may not have really realized what was going on half the time because they sang 98% of their dialogue, making it much harder for me to just listen to what they’re saying.  One thing I did understand is when Valjean asked the young Cosette what her name was and she responded, “I’m cold Cosette.”  I asked your name, bitch.  Not for your name and temperature.  You think you’re updating your Facebook status or something?

The biggest problems I had with this movie was with the directing and the singing, which is not a good sign because this is a movie and a musical.  First off, they sing way too goddamn much.  I’ve generally hated musicals, and this is usually the reason.  They have to sing everything!  They have small talk in musical form!  Like the song that the poor people sing after they jump forward 8 years in the story where they sing about being poor and downtrodden.  I can see that.  You’re all dirty and diseased.  You could just pan the camera over those people and I’d know what that song laid out for me.  I really do feel like I’d like this movie much more if they just sang the few songs that didn’t just sound like people were chatting while autotuned.  Of course, then I had the problems with the director to deal with.  Every time someone in the movie was singing, he seemed to forget that he had the ability to move the camera or make something happen on screen.  You wouldn’t really even need a camera operator for most of this movie because you could just set up a camera mount on the actor’s belt and let him or her film themselves.  They were all just shots of the people’s faces anyway.  And I understand why he did it in some ways.  I heard lots of stories about how the people in this movie actually sang live on the set and didn’t get dubbed over later.  First off, I don’t care.  Second off, you don’t need to prove it to me by just focusing on their faces whenever they were singing at the detriment of your movie.  And since most of your movie is people singing, you’re going to have a pretty visually boring movie.

I liked the greater majority of the performances in the movie, so it does have that going for it.  Hugh Jackman did a great job.  Not only did he have the singing chops, but he played Jean Valjean throughout the 17 years of the movie very successfully.  From all I had heard of the movie beforehand, I kind of thought that Anne Hathaway was going to be a bigger part of the movie, but she actually dies fairly early on.  On the other hand, she was a motivating factor for the majority of the movie.  And she still kind of managed to steal the movie with her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream”, which was a good song delivered with a lot of passion and emotion.  I’m sure everyone already knows what it looks like because it was most of what I had seen of her part of the movie before I watched it.  If it hadn’t been filmed so boring, I probably could’ve been brought to tears.  I’d definitely say she deserved the accolades she received for that song alone.  I didn’t really understand what people were complaining about with Russell Crowe, though.  I didn’t think he was a mind-blowing singer or anything, but I expected him to be awful from what everyone was saying about him.  He did fine.  I doubt I could do better, and I’m pretty sure you couldn’t either.  And I thought the performance was a good one as well, because I could never tell how I felt about the character.  He was clearly the antagonist of the movie in that he chases the story’s hero to the end of … well the town, because Valjean never seemed to really try to get that far out of Javert’s jurisdiction.  But you also can’t really blame him because dude’s just really good at his job.  On the third hand, maybe there are people that deserve your attention more than a guy that stole a loaf of bread 30 years ago to feed a starving child.  And he’s rich now!  He’s not stealing bread anymore.  There were also some dumb people in this movie.  First, Eddie Redmayne as Marius, who is so dumb and in love with Cosette that he’s oblivious to Éponine’s obvious love for him, so much so that he is totally content to sing about how much he loves Cosette right in front of her.  But he did do an almost Hathaway-esque job performing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” near the end of the movie.  Also dumb is Gavroche, played by Daniel Huttlestone.  What is his motivation for crawling over the barricade and collecting ammo as he sings a song about how badass he is while he gets shot to death?  Possibly the most stupid thing is that Sacha Baron Cohen did this movie instead of Django Unchained.

I didn’t hate Les Misérables, but I didn’t like it either.  I’m just not into musicals, and I’m also not that into depressing movies.  I guess I should’ve known that the movie would be depressing as I was going in, but my French is just so rusty.  I still think the basic core of the movie would’ve worked a lot better on me if they didn’t sing every single menial line in the movie as much as the important ones, and if the director didn’t film most of those singing scenes in a really boring way because he was so impressed with himself and his actors that they were all singing on set.  The performances in the movie were either good or phenomenal, so I’d be impressed too, but I still would’ve recommended moving the camera from time to time.  I would say this movie is worth buying for people that are really into musicals, but for people like me a rental will suffice, if you get so inclined.  Les Misérables gets “You have only done your duty; it’s a minor sin at most” out of “Empty chairs at empty tables, where my friends shall sing no more.”

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In Time (2011)

For a Few to be Immortal, Many Must Die

I confess that I never had any interest in watching today’s movie.  And yet, while thumbing through a RedBox, I decided to pick it up.  I’m an enigma.  The movie seemed like a fairly typical action movie that even the very attractive cast could not pique my interest in.  But it was slim pickings in the RedBox that I went to, so you take what you can get for your entertainment dollar.  But I’ve been surprised by movies before, so let’s see how this one did.  Today’s movie is In Time, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, and starring Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Vincent Kartheiser, Matthew Bomer, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde, and Johnny Galecki.

What a shocker!  It’s the future and it’s not looking that bright.  Well, one part of it is: everyone in the future stops aging at the age of 25.  The catch is that everyone is given one year’s worth of time, starting at that age.  The time can basically act as money.  You earn it by working, you spend it on living.  But when you run out of money, you drop dead.  We follow a 28-year-old factory worker named Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) who lives with his mother, Rachel (Olivia Wilde), and struggle to get by day by day.  All that changes when he saves the live of a guy named Henry Hamilton (Matthew Bomer), who repays Will by giving him 116 years and then “times out” (dies).  Will is really excited to give some time to his mom, but she times out as well.  Not really knowing what to do with himself, he decides to go to the rich district to gamble with his extra time.  He wins 1,100 years from businessman Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) and meets his daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried).  But Will has a problem: the police force (herein called the Timekeepers) found Hamilton’s dead body and think that Will stole the time from him.  At a party at Weis’ house, the Timekeepers show up to arrest Will, but Will escapes using Sylvia as a hostage.  With all of his time confiscated by the Timekeepers, what is Will going to do next?

Meh.  That’s what I have to say about this movie.  Meh.  The idea of the movie is interesting enough, but the execution leaves the greater majority of the movie people looking at their wrists while holding hands.  It’s not a new idea to film goers that the future is going to be a shitty place.  It’s not a new idea to anyone that rich people lead better and longer lives.  But turning the amount of time you have in this world into currency is a pretty nifty idea.  One that I hope never becomes reality, but it’s okay to watch it in a movie.  If it is something they’re looking at making a reality, I certainly hope they figure out how to transfer time between two people with something more than a handshake.  That shit will get stolen all the time.  Then the world would just be rich people and criminals.  But the movie eventually degenerates into a pretty basic chase movie, and even more often into a futuristic Robin Hood.  The message gets a little lost when Will and Sylvia are doing the right thing (kinda) by taking time from the rich and giving it to the poor, only to have the poor have their time taken and get killed for it.  The movie can’t decide if it wants us to do the right thing or not bother because it will only get people killed.  And to defeat these time thieves, Will must get into something that looks like an arm wrestling match, as if I was watching Over the Top with Sylvester Stallone.  Will also gets blamed for the death of Johnny Galecki because he gave him 10 years and Johnny decided he needed to go blow a year of that on booze and die in the gutter with 9 years left.  His wife then gets all bitchy at Will for that.  He tried to do something nice, bitch!  You’re the one that married the alcoholic!  The movie was not all boring though, and it at least looked good.  It shouldn’t be that hard when everyone in the cast has to be able to play 25.  Some Timberlake for the women, and some Seyfried and Wilde for the men.

The performances were fine enough, but nothing really spectacular behind the physical.  The movie didn’t require a lot of range out of anybody, really.  It was really weird to me to have Timberlake talking to Olivia Wilde as if she was his mother, even though they look to be in the same age range.  And the same could be said for Weis when he introduced his step-mother, wife, and daughter, who all looked roughly the same.  Nobody really had to put on that much of a performance in the movie beyond regular stuff and running a lot.  If you were pretty and able to look at your wrist, you’re in.

In Time is a decent idea that never really got very interesting.  Lots of running, lots of hand holding and clock checking, and pretty people everywhere.  But really not a whole lot more than that.  It’s not a bad movie, but it’s one you can easily do without.  If you need to see it so bad, you can find it at a RedBox, but there are better movies to spend your time with.  And so, In Time gets “Don’t waste my time” out of “I don’t have time.”

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Mean Girls (2004)

I Want My Pink Shirt Back!

Yimmy is such a sweetheart.  He has, thus far, been the only person to consistently recommend movies that are actually good.  I have seen today’s movie before, and have heard good things about the movie from pretty much everybody, but I strangely don’t remember thinking that much of it.  It’s weird.  The writer is one of my favorite writers ever, and the movie is filled with pretty girls and people I find funny, but I just couldn’t remember thinking that much of it.  I also have a terrible memory, so we’ll see how it turned out in my review of Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey, directed by Mark Waters, and starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, Jonathan Bennett, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Neil Flynn, Ana Gasteyer, and Amy Poehler.

Slutty, cokehead, whorebag Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) has been homeschooled in Africa by her parents (Neil Flynn and Ana Gasteyer) for most of her life, but now she must start high school.  Okay, slutty, cokehead, whorebag doesn’t apply to the character.  It’s more for the actress.  But she’s starting high school anyways.  She quickly befriends Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damien (Daniel Franzese), who teach her about the social structure of the school, most notably “the Plastics”, lead by Regina George (Rachel McAdams), toaster strudel heiress Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), and really dumb Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried).  Thinking it would be funny, Janis talks Cady into infiltrating the Plastics in order to destroy them from the inside.  But can Cady become the enemy without losing herself in it?  The answer: Lindsay Lohan loves cocaine!

I think the strangest thing about this movie is that I hate the type of movie, but I like this movie.  It handles exactly like numerous other movies about the new girl having a rough time in school, and the odd girl becoming cool but forgetting who she is, and so many other high school movies.  These movies are pretty played out and cliche and not usually worth watching.  The difference with this movie is that it was written by Tina Fey.  As with most things, having Tina Fey behind it makes it good.  This movie was pretty damned funny.  A little sappy in parts for my tastes, but still enjoyable all the way through.  There are a lot of really solid laughs in this movie, and a couple of things that didn’t make as much sense to me though, in the movie’s defense, I was rarely a girl in high school.  The whole idea of the Burn Book seemed like way too much work to rag on someone that will potentially never see it.  You could just sit around and make fun of them without having to actually buy a book, clip out photos, and paste them in the book with some snarky comment.  I suppose it’s something that high school girls might do, but I am way too lazy to do that.  Words are so much easier.  The other thing that didn’t make sense to me was in the end when Cady is breaking the crown into pieces and giving it to everyone.  The reason it doesn’t make sense to me is that she freakin’ Jesus’d that crown.  Every time she broke it, there was still enough to go around for everyone in the auditorium.  This is totally unbelievable because if Lohan had Jesus powers, you know she’d just be at the water fountain turning it to wine.

The cast is almost entirely great.  I may have already indicated (in the sly, hidden way that I did) that I am not that big of a fan of Lindsay Lohan, but I give her credit for doing pretty well in this movie.  This was probably the best looking she’ll ever be (as I hear meth ruins your teeth), and she also pulled off her comedic and emotional bits very well.  It was super racist and not cool for her to “Jambo” at the black people she saw, and seemed a little out of character.  I mean, I laughed, but I’m a racist.  Also, never really believed Lohan as a math expert.  I understand that there is some math involved with dividing drugs up, but I don’t think that would make you an expert.  I feel a little bad for Rachel McAdams because she’s gorgeous and probably a super nice girl, but she’s also really good at playing a bitch.  I’d like to see her play more sweet girls so I could just fall in love with her.  Of course, it’s not bitchy for her to tell Lohan that she was just a less hot version of her.  That’s just good, solid facts.  I feel extra bad for Lacey Chabert because she is so completely gorgeous as well, and also pulled off the comedy and the parts where she had to cry so well, but she really hasn’t become as mainstream as she should.  She had Not Another Teen Movie, and her one line was pretty hilarious in that, but she needs to be more famous.  They let Kate Hudson ruin so many huge profile comedies and yet Chabert hasn’t really done a big movie since 2004?  Not fair, Hollywood!  The same could be said for Amanda Seyfried, I guess.  She had that one horrible Red Riding Hood movie, but not a lot worth talking about.  Nothing good, but at least they were big.  She was pretty funny in this movie, and easily the sweetest girl in the Plastics because she was so dumb and innocent.  Tina Fey was great in this as well, and quite frankly, arguably the hottest woman in this movie.  I’ll stand by that.  She gets her bra out in the introduction of her character as well, and I’m always down for that.  She has a great deal of funny parts in the movie, but she isn’t in that often.  Tim Meadows kills practically every time he’s on camera as well, but he was a little underused.  He was very put upon in this role, but still very funny.  I love Lizzy Caplan a lot as well, but her character in this was a little too hateful and irritating.  She was sometimes justified, but sometimes you should just move on with your life.  Get a boyfriend, that’ll clear up that whole “lesbian” thing.  I’ll even volunteer!  It’d be way better than ending up with that creepy Mathlete guy!  I didn’t like her gay friend, Daniel Franzese, at first, but the second he called that short girl Danny DeVito, I was in.  Amy Poehler was consistently hilarious as the mom that won’t let go of her youth.  The best thing she did was when she was in the audience, dancing along with her daughter and the other Plastics in their overly-sexy “Jingle Bell Rock” dance.  That made me appreciate it double!  Ana Gasteyer made little to no impact on me as Cady’s mom, but they did give Neil Flynn a couple of funny parts, like when he had no idea that Cady wasn’t supposed to be allowed to leave when she was grounded.  Jonathan Bennett never really did much for me as the object of Cady’s desire.  He wasn’t really around much beyond something to look at, and he got on my nerves with how he reacted when Cady was drunkenly confessing things to him.  Why would you get all pissy that a girl was afraid to talk to you because it would make her friend angry?  That’s fairly normal.  I do understand getting a little upset when she throws up on you, though.  Of course, that’s kind of something you should expect when working with Lohan.

I think I’ve just about run out of Lindsay Lohan jokes.  Mean Girls was an enjoyable watch, and I feel like I enjoyed it much more on this viewing than I had on whichever viewing made me give it two and a half stars on Rotten Tomatoes.  Sure, it’s basic premise is one that is a little played out, and one I don’t usually find that enjoyable, but Tina Fey can make almost anything work.  There are a lot of very solid laughs in this movie, and pretty awesome performances to make those jokes work.  There’s also some good emotion to the movie, and it ends up with a nice message that we probably all expected from the start of the movie, but it’s still very enjoyable.  I rented the movie from Netflix, but it’s not available for streaming.  Next time I want to watch it, I will feel comfortable just going out and purchasing it.  Mean Girls gets “I like this movie like Lindsay Lohan loves heroin” out of “I can’t help it that I’m so popular.”

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