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egor-minion
Reviews
Les Misérables (2012)
What a wasted opportunity
Two stars, because it could have been worse, they might have cast Taylor Swift.
Hugh Jackman doesn't suck. Pretty much everything else does.
This film is horrible. Anyone who loves this must be on drugs. The costumes, sets, and cheesy staging are all awful. The pacing is off, this 'might' be the speed the music is written at for a stage show, although I seriously doubt it, the same mistake is often made in Shakespeare productions where everything is embued with Far! Too! Much! Importance! If! One! Asked! For! Directions! To! The! Corner! Store! It! Shouldn't! Take! This! Long! To! Get! Directions!
Anne Hathaway should be forced to return her Oscar and to publicly apologize for this awful performance. She is overacting like crazy. I agree with all the critics who said that if an actress is crying during her song then the audience is generally dry-eyed. For all her starving herself to the point that apparently when anyone hugged her they would "cry" because she was so "frail" she looks actually quite healthy with a positively anachronistic bosom, and much better makeup than anyone else in the factory, and she would have more money to send to her daughter if she didn't spend it on pretty pink dresses when everyone else wears drab blue/grey. Of course when she goes through her drastic decline I would really like to know how much money she got for her dress sleeves.
It's bad when a film makes you think of other films in disfavourable ways. I thought of "Forrest Gump", "Soylent Green" and "Sweeney Todd" before much time had past, and none of those were nice comparisons. I also once heard a 1930s "Threepenny Opera" starring Marlene Deitrich and Lotte Lenya, which I expected to be amazing, only to find it was a sort of sheepish trilling that set my fillings off, much like Amanda Seyfried's warblings. Not long after that though was the incongruity of noticing Eponine's manicured fingernails during her big solo.
Russell Crowe of course is hysterical. In all the wrong ways. Thanks for the laughs, Russell, I needed that.
Poor Hugh Jackman, he deserves better. The director, Anne Hathaway and Russell Crowe should spend a few hours in the stocks. Actually please leave the director in there for a week, along with Chris Columbus, whose work he appears to look up to. (shudder)
The Details (2011)
HATED it
I don't think there is a single thing funny about this film. As someone else said, "The War of the Roses" is a great dark comedy, this is just dark. The acting was terrible, especially Laura Linney, who is a great actress, which suggests that she was being directed to go over the top and to play it far too broadly. She seemed to be in a different film at times. No one comes out of this film well though, I don't know what any of them were thinking. It might have been different with James McAvoy in the lead, because that guy can out-act Tobey Maguire with his hands tied, but I think he was smarter to get out of it.
SPOILER:
Aside from already loathing the film, but being in a position where I couldn't turn it off because other people were watching it too, except the friend who'd fallen asleep on my shoulder, the very worst part of this film was how it used animals within its pathetic storyline. The crazy neighbor, Laura Linney, loses her cat supposedly to the poison Tobey Maguire put out for the raccoons, and she shows it to him, taking its dead body out of the fridge where she's keeping it in an open, decorated box as if it were a cake, emphasizing her crazy cat lady looniness. Weak. Later Tobey Maguire deliberately runs his car at a raccoon on the road, hits it, and backs up to hit it again. The dead raccoon is then the backdrop to the couple arguing with each other. Anyone who finds this comic is just a sick jerk and anyone who ever deliberately tries to hit an animal when I'm around is not someone I would ever speak to again.