Movies

Spoilerific theatre report: Les Miserables (look, I don't see a lot of movies these days)

Where: Hoyts Broadway (inner-city Sydney). It's showing on a pretty small screen now.

When: 9.10pm on a Saturday night

How: Alone. (Having left my little baby at home with my fella. No buddies for me; apparently people without children have plans on Saturday nights. Go figure)

Snacks: my BPA-free Sigg water bottle, a date muesli cookie and a plastic cup of Pinot Gris from the cinema bar. I figured the wine would dull the tension of worrying about the kid at home waking up while I was out. This is a freaking long movie!

Tear count: At least three bouts of weeping. God I'm a soft touch these days. Anything to do with children looking sad, and I'm a mess.

Trailers (I know you have all seen them, but this is MY theatre report):

Lincoln: how do you make governance look dramatic? Lots of angry wielding of papers in the air, it seems. And clumsy exposition. I'm sure Spielberg made this with one arm tied behind his back, while painting by numbers with the other hand.
Anna Karenina: The trailer that proves that I won't in fact watch Jude Law in absolutely anything after all. Looks as dire as it did the first time I watched this campy car crash of a trailer. Joe Wright is a ham ham ham and I've always thought so. Also, surely Anna Karenina Adaptations 101 is Vronsky has to be hot. Fail.
The Impossible: two actors I usually like in what appears to be a blatant attempt to exploit the fears of parents that something will happen to their children (...or am I projecting here?). The trailer tells the whole story and I cannot believe there is any tension that this white tourist family will be reunited with one another. Oh - they even show that scene in the trailer. Hooray, now no-one has to see it.
I Give It A Year: looks like a cheap British comedy featuring the famous sister of someone I went to art school with (it's almost like *I'm* famous). I'm certain it's dire, so it'll probably do OK.

On to the show. I sat in my assigned seat between two other young women who also appeared to be attending alone on Saturday night. I was outrageously early and read my Hilary Mantel novel about the French Revolution to kill time, 'cause that's the kind of nerd I am. The movie opened brilliantly but kind of went downhill from there. As a side note, I once (twice, but that's a whole other theatre report) had a French boyfriend, and spent six weeks at his family home in Toulon, the former military port where Jean Valjean was imprisoned at the opening of the story. It is indeed still a pretty grim town. Anyway. I first saw this musical at an impressionable age and have hugely powerful affection for it (although i've not read the book; I should one day). I know it's completely button-pushy, but at the same time it tries to be true to noble ideas about love, sacrifice and sticking to your ideals about who you think you are, or wish to be. And I'm a sucker for it. The actors, while not all technically great singers (Thirty Odd Foot of Grunt, anyone?), were all very well cast and I was particularly moved by Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne's performances. And the Thenardiers were excellent. Everyone else, I was like, there are too many close-ups. Hooper's direction isn't great; the whole thing is perhaps too literal for the mythos required of a stage musical. And some stuff is hugely overstated (Javert goes 'thump' into the Seine - we didn't need to *hear* that). There should be more poetry in the shots, better integration of the music and singing; indeed, perhaps it could have been a bit more stagey. A little bit more Chicago - because you can't reconcile the pretend gritty reality with the fact that everyone's singing instead of speaking. In English, no less. Hello dissonance! I think it's to do with the different expectations one has from theatre to cinema. It took a while to get used to how fast we moved through the plot; somehow on stage the transitions are easier to swallow. Also, the end came across as all Christian, which I had never read a reuniting of the cast to be on the stage. On film, it all seems more literal and more difficult to generalise, emotionally. Still, at the close (Bring Him Home reprise) all three ladies in my row were discreetly patting their (ahem, our) cheeks with a tissue or a sleeve. If you don't like musicals much, or this one in particular, I'm afraid there will be little to recommend this to you. Go see it on the stage first.