Here are reviews of Les Miserables and The Guilt Trip, as well as some of my favorite books, albums, and songs of 2012. As the year grows shorter, my posts grow longer. Well, hey, it could be War and Peace!
Les Miserables
How does Hooper pull it off? He works with screenwriter William Nicholson to smartly streamline some of the show's famed talk-sung exposition. With the aid of a dedicated yet commendably unshowy design team, he shows us the slums of Paris as they really were, favoring grit and grime over Oscar-bait ostentation. And, most importantly, he casts seasoned screen veterans who know their way around a camera, and then---here's the clincher--records their vocals live. This ingenious decision has two beneficial effects. Firstly, it immediately relieves lifelong Les Mizzers from the duty of obsessively comparing the stage cast to the movie one. It's clear from scene one that most of these folks are imperfect singers, and that Hooper and co. won't be using digital fairy dust to alter said imperfection. Freed from the trouble of contrasting an apple with an orange, we're able to simply get lost in the timeless tale of Jean Valjean (Jackman), an escaped convict trying to raise his adopted daughter Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) while on the run from the relentless Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe). The other benefit of recording the musical numbers live is that it allows the actors, to, well, act, to authentically express the lyrics and melodies in a way that's awfully difficult to do when mouthing to a pre-recorded vocal track (see: Evita, Phantom of the Opera). Freed to sing and act all at once, this exceedingly committed cast gives it their all. Tears swell, jaws quaver. And yes, throats tense up and voices break, but for me that only heightened the experience. Hooper and his cast understand that a musical about agony should not be sung perfectly--it should be sung truthfully.
No one gets this better than Anne Hathaway. As, Cosette's ailing mother, Fantine, she's only in the movie for about the first half hour, but she's without a doubt the number one reason to see it. You've heard this from every media outlet ever, but when she takes on "I Dreamed A Dream", she doesn't just nail it, she reclaims it, wrestles it out of the hands of pop culture ubiquity and makes it ache and smart anew. Her body wracked by violent coughing, her jaw working furiously to keep her scalding anger in check, Hathaway reminds us that the song is not meant to be a power ballad--it is, for all practical purposes, a death scene, a metaphysical surrender to the encroaching darkness. Mia Thermopolis has earned her inevitable statuette. But enough fangirling--I suppose I should mention that many of the other actors are real good, too! As the tender-but-tough Valjean, Jackman makes good use of both his Oscar-host charm and Wolverine fury, and masters the taxing demands of his solos like the Broadway pro he is. As Marius, the object of adult Cosette's affection, Eddie Redmayne does star-making work, enlivening and intensifying a character who can come off as a straightforward goodie two-shoes. And I can't go without mentioning Daniel Huttlestone, a sly, scruffy wonder as the young street urchin Gavroche. He steals the show whenever he's onscreen, and, best of all, he delivers a new piece of music which helpfully clarifies that, contrary to popular belief, this show is not about the French Revolution.
This is a remarkably strong ensemble. It is not, however, a perfect one. Crowe offers a radical reinterpretation of Javert, playing him not as a villain with an introspective side but as an earnest, well-intentioned soul with a bit of a mean streak. It's a commendably unique approach, but it takes some of the air out of his confrontations with Valjean. As Cosette's conniving former foster parents, the Thernardiers, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen are on mug-for-the-camera autopilot, milking their characters' comic potential while totally ignoring their darker sides. The film is occasionally hampered by behind-the-camera mistakes as well. Like far too many modern directors, Hooper is comfortable with spectacle, but struggles with shooting a couple of people alone in a room. He stages some truly unforgettable, money's-worth set pieces (especially "Look Down" ), but he also botches some of the musical's more intimate moments by throwing in extraneous camera shake or, conversely, sticking the lens a few inches away from the actor's face. But these are, for the mostpart, quibbles. The movie stumbles over a handful of minor obstacles, but dodges most of the big ones handily. It doesn't always shepherd the beloved musical to the screen masterfully, but it still does so impressively. If you appreciate musicals, enjoy a good cry, and can stomach a few flaws, then I'd really recommend going to hear the people sing. See what I did there? Movie: B+ "I Dreamed A Dream": A+
The Guilt Trip (A Haiku)
Babs wrings modest laughs
From lines that are not that funny
Please be my grandma
(C+)
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The best.....
Books I Read During 2012
EM Forster, Howards End--Bookwise, 2012 will always be the year I fell hard for the Europeans--DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. But I fell hardest of all for Forster's magnum opus, a sophisticated and deeply touching romantic drama that uses a squabble over the rightful owner of a country estate to symbolize the struggle for Britain's political future.
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks-You wouldn't expect a 400 page book about cell research to be a Potter-esque page turner, but this one is. As Skloot reports on the story of a dying black woman whose cells were taken from her body and experimented upon without her knowledge, she deals honestly and thoroughly with knotty questions of ethics and science, but smartly leaves the task of answering them up to us.
Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories-It's best known as the book of short stories from which "Brokeback Mountain" originated, but the other tales in this collection are equally stunning, each one a quietly tragic, darkly funny, dazzlingly poetic mini-epic of thwarted love and lingering loss.
Albums of 2012
Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel---At long last, a new album from one of the ballsiest and most beguiling pop artists of the last several decades, who warbles and croons like a 30's chanteuse even as she spits out madly inventive, heavily rhythmic couplets worthy of a modern-day rapper. Sample lyric: "We can still support each other/All we gotta do's avoid each other/Nothing wrong when/a song ends/in a minor key."
Gregory Porter, Be Good--There are plenty of great vocal jazz singers out there, but few great vocal jazz writers. With his second album of soulful originals and ingenious covers, Gregory Porter reminds us that he's both.
Alabama Shakes, Boys and Girls--Forty minutes of nuts-and-bolts songwriting and clear-cut guitar riffs, blissfully free of digital overproduction or hipsterish irony. At the center of it all is Brittany Howard's one of a kind voice, a decided unladylike instrument that comes at you like a runaway freight train.
Songs of 2012
Norah Jones, "Miriam"--The highlight of Jones's comeback album is this delectably creepy electro-folk ballad in which the singer stalks and murders her husband's lover.
The Lumineers, "Stubborn Love"--This year, the founding fathers of the folk revival (Mumford and Sons, The Avett Brothers) released long-anticipated new albums, but they were actually bested by these scrappy Colorado up-and-comers. "Ho Hey" is getting all of (and I do mean all of) the attention, but this gorgeous ballad, which gathers aural and emotion steam before exploding into an acoustic-rock sing-along, is just as good if not better.
LP, "Into The Wild"--Like all of indie-rock goddess LP's songs, this one is so catchy that you only realize how utterly heartbreaking it is after a few listens. I wish this woman would release an LP!
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