Les Miserables
 

I went and saw the movie with Hugh Jackman and Russel Crowe
Both men I adore with the greatest adoration but put Russel Crowe just a bit higher than Hugh Jackman.

Ok enough about how awesome looking they are, especially in character! lol

The movie just has some awesome music and I'm curious as to whether the actors actually sang the songs or were they lipsynked. Either way the movie was just fantastic and since I haven't seen the play which everyone tells me I need to go see I will do it at some point. Even by those who saw the movie and the play really gave it a good review from what I have heard. The effects were tremendous and the background and acting was extremely convincing. I haven't seen such a dramatic movie that just took me in completely and had me feeling so sad but yet happy at the end and without putting any spoilers in it to ruin it

I must say and insist wholeheartedly that you go and see this movie or at least rent it from Red Box or wherever you get movies... or Netflix lol

The acting and the singing were nothing less of spectacular and if I was French, i would be proud to be French through this play especially.

I kind of learned a bit more about the later part of the French Revolution rather than just the initial part. I can see why the French are a proud people.

Great movie go see it!

I loved this movie! It was brilliantly done!
I high school I was able to participate in a theatre version so that helped me with the background of the story. As well since a good friend of mine ainebella: is a total know-it-all about Les Miserables. *laughs* ^.^

The part that I loved the most was the fact they did the singing live. It wasn't prerecorded and added in like some movies, no the actors sang while the camera rolled. It really gives you a different feel for the power and emotion behind each word.

Ahh I was wondering when someone would put a thread like this here.

Code is right, out of our friends I'm a walking, talking encyclopedia on this show. This is my child hood, my teenage angst years and my adult life. It shows all different emotions on all kind of things, on love, loyalty, revolution, the fight the right to be heard and the hope. I know this story like the back of my hand its one of my favorite Broadway shows.

I like how they were singing live in this movie than in most musical movies I have seen. I was a little hesitant about Hugh Jackman playing Jean Val Jean, but I now I love him. And I have a new respect for Marius... I mean he made me cry! Like sobbing like a baby! Gawd I cant listen to empty chair and empty tables with out almost bursting into tears.

The other one who i was impressed was Anne Hathaway. I knew she could sing but I never knew she could sing but not like this. I was amazed at how beautiful she could sing and how she took this roll seriously.

I like how very accurate they where to the to the Broadway show and this movie. Yes they cut some songs but they couldn't take a three hour long show and put it onto the big screen.

Im currently trying to read the book. Its going.... Interesting.

I didn't know they had a book as well I may have to check that out at some point. I'm glad to hear they stuck by closely to the actual script. I knew they wouldn't be able to put everything in a big screen script as you mentioned, but it does make me real happy when they actually stick to the main script.

The performance and the choreography were simply amazing, but I didn't know it but Hugh Jackman grew into fame out of plays like this when he first started and ironically played as a gay character. That's good when someone as manly masculine as Huge Jackman can take on a gay role especially when the man is not gay at all and make it believable. This movie actually has gotten me more interested in France's Revolution so I have been going online and looking up a lot of dates and getting some general information as to give myself more of a point of reference.

@Codette - Thank you for directing your friend here... it's nice to have others who have a lot more insight and prior knowledge to give their feedback as well. I may have to buy this one on DVD lol lol

@ainebella - Thank you for posting your insightful feedback here about the film, maybe I may actually go and check the book out and see just how true to the book or play the movie actually stays.

I watched it with my friends, and I thought it was so brilliant!

It made me cry, laugh, hurt and care. I think that's the magic of film, you feel so connected to all the characters. I absolutely loved it, I would want to go watch it again if possible.

I wouldn't mind seeing it a second time myself. The movie was just so visually attractive with all of the scenery and background making the movie look very authentic. It had a lot of elements in the movie which like the play carries you with much of its theatrics and wonder.

Definitely worth a second watch!

I went to see this with a friend who couldn't quite handle all the singing, and didn't understand what was going on, so I spent it like this:
*nudgenudge* "Bearzy, what's that guy's name?"
"I dunno yet, the movie just started!"

Nevertheless, I would watch it again. Maybe alone next time... I really liked the whole story.

I'm glad to hear you liked Bearzy, for a play to be done in a movie format so well I thought was rather amazing myself. I may decided to buy it on DVD and add it to my collected at some point soon. I hope you get to see it next time without any annoying interruptions. Stuff like that really takes away. If you knew all of that information then what would be the point in seeing the movie lol --- other than you saw the play or read the book lol...

The movie moved me so much and put me to tears like a dozen times that I would never watch it again! LOL...

Don't get me wrong... I think the movie was absolutely fantastic and the star power was magnificent! Acting was great... singing was amazeballs but coming from a person who never watched the musical in real life or never really knew the storyline, I just couldn't take the whole package of misery that came with the 3 hours! Everything pretty much ended badly!!! I mean, yay for the love between cosette and Marius though I so much preferred Eponine... but that was pretty much all the happy it had.

In fact, I think I enjoyed the light-hearted moments more. Especially with Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen singing... And how they always get Cosette's name wrong XD Their characters were especially amusing to watch :)

I really hates to see Hugh Jackman suffer... I saw him as an old man in that movie and I hate old men dying... It totally breaks my heart. And Eponine singing in the rain... Thinking about it makes me cry! And Anne hathaway dying... All really too much that I think I can't bear to watch it ever again...

A great movie really but not something to watch more than once.

The who consent of Les Mis is based off of Victor Hugo classic novel Les Miserables. He also wrote another novel that Disney turned into a movie, you might have herd of it, its called The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Also fun fact, the man who played the bishop in the Movie version, has actually played Jean Val Jean in the Original Broadway Cast.


For everyone who is interested, if you go to youtube and type in Les Miserables the 10th or 25th anniversary you can see the Operetta that was filmed live for the public broadcasting station. I have both of them and they have such amazing singers and amazing bonus songs in it, they have a quartet of the Jean Val Jeans singing the amazing song "Bring Him Home"

Also feel free to ask me any questions about Les Miserables, if you are seeing it for the first time, when I saw it for the first time I was like six and I was watching the 10th anniversary with my mom and couldn't stop asking questions, just ping me and if I feel like its a spoiler I will PM you your answer.

Thanks for the information ainebella, I didn't realize that he also wrote 'The Hunchback of Notredame'
I will have to go on youtube when I'm in a movie watching mood and watch that version of the Les Mis
It sounds really nice!

I'm actually waiting for my copy of the 25th anniversary celebration at Albert hall to arrive in the mail. i've watched it a bunch of times already and only recently decided to buy it, haha.

On the topic of the movie. I was conflicted. Of course i loved the story, and the cinematography was beautiful...but the casting had me going "ehh...". Not to say it was a bad movie though. I was sobbing by the time they started singing "Drink With Me", much to my friends' confusion.

I think my whole movie experience wasn't so great only because i went with the wrong people. I went with two friends and they were texting the whole time, so i had cellphone glare on both sides of me. And then one of them didn't know the story at all and was asking me questions every five or so minutes. thankfully the second friend had done some research before the movie day. Unfortunately that also meant that they didn't understand that i needed my moment and the guy kept trying to pull me into a hug when I burst into tears.

But I liked that the movie did follow some parts of the book more closely than the musical did. And I'm just gonna say that I loved the fact that Colm Wilkinson was in the movie.

Haha, I think i ended up ranting more than anything, sorry about that. But yea, in short, the movie was good. i definitely want to go see it again. I'm on the fence about the cast. And... I kinda wish they hadn't taken out Grantaire's solo in "Drink With Me".

It's ok ranting about what you liked and didn't like is the whole purpose of the thread. I think if I would have had friends texting I probably would have gotten up and moved and eventually they would have gotten the message. That's just rude.

Yea I'm sure compared to the play and the book the movie has its high and low points... it's hard to get everything right. I have yet to see a movie that equally does a story justice does like in a book or actual play.

I used to never be able to until I found out about how Eddie Redmayne got the role for the movie.

Apparently he was on the set of another movie and decided to record himself singing the song, and sen it to his agent just to see if he'd laugh.

He not only really liked it, but went and sent it on ahead to say this guy was interested in auditioning...and they loved it.

He said that if he'd known that was going to happen, he wouldn't have done it while he was wearing his cowboy costume.

Anyway, that story out there, I was a little iffy about the casting in the movie - I enjoyed it for the most part, but both Valjean and Javert are tenor roles - yet they cast baritones for them. It isn't so difficult to find tenors who can act, but apparently Hollywood is only interested in putting big names on their main roles for the posters, as usual.

Then there's the fact that they had Samantha Barks clean up her vocals. A rougher voice is far more suitable for Eponine's character than the one they had her use (in the book, it's mentioned very clearly that she and her sister [who was omitted from the play] were the ones who were always sick, and the Thenardiers lied and pushed the responsibility for the medicine onto Cosette - her voice would have been damaged and rough by the time she was a young adult). She does it really well, too. No idea why they had her change and I didn't like it.

They all did really well, acting-wise, but the vocals were not what they could have been. Still, the movie had a lot of highlights for me. Favorite version of virtually everyone else yet (except Enjolras...only because I'm kinda really biased to a not-so-famous one). And I LOVE that they cast Colm Wilkinson as the bishop. Not only is that fantastic in and of itself, but it kind of alludes to the character's backstory that goes unmentioned in everything but the book, and I love when someone can do that.

Some of my partners and I want to do a live production of the show. We've already got half the cast worked out, plus a lot of other details. It's gonna be a lot of fun because there's going to be audience participation and immersion and...let's just say, we as producers are pretty evil. We're going to kill the entire audience. Only in the context of the show, obviously, but...

I read the book before I saw anything else, so I have a habit of judging from that. I actually don't like the musical half as much as the book, and our production is probably going to extend it a lot (because three hours after omitting several songs and several lines from the songs that were used wasn't long enough already, right?) to get in more detail. Even so...I guess I'm a little bit of a masochist because I've lost count of how many versions of it I've seen already. I've watched the movie about six times all the way through and more than I can count from beginning to Do You Hear The People Sing. Meanwhile, my fiance can't watch it to the end more than once a year or so unless he's actually performing or rehearsing it. [sweat]

But yeah, basically everyone I know is a fan.

I know it as "The Movie Where Only Three Minute In I Was Already Crying And Never Stopped"

I've seen the musical several times and the movie still hit all my sadness points. I KNEW what was coming, and yet I still bawled whenever death happened. I was slightly disappointed that they took out Thenardier's "Dogs eat Dog" song in the sewer since that was one of my fave songs, but I understand time restraints and that they edited more songs in.

Anne Hathaway was PERFECT! I know I'm echoing what everyone else says but oh wow she was sensational as Fantine. You can really see how much heart she poured in her performance. I was pleasantly surprised with Marius becoming one of my favourite characters in the movie, due to Redmayne being a surprisingly good singer. Everyone else was great as well... though I would have to say that Russel Crowe's Javert was my least liked character.

Maybe I had high hopes because Javert was my favourite character in the musical, and thus can't help comparing him to the 10th anniversary Philip Quast's Javert. Or perhaps it's because Hathaway was so awesome in her acting that he paled in contrast. But I didn't like his version of the cold strict law officer-- his voice was too soft, when he was supposed to be intimidating. When Quast's Javert appeared before Fantine, I thought "Oh No, it's Javert!" but when Crowe's showed up, my reaction was "Oh, here's the actor playing Javert about to sing Javert's lines". Javert was supposed to be the contrast to Valjean, and the movie didn't really sell it to me. I never saw Crowe's Javert to be a threat, more of a subplot annoyance. He always looked like he was lost. His 'singing' voice sounded different from his 'talking' voice, which was very obvious at Javert and Valjean's final confrontation (The part where he threatens to shoot Javert, the speaking part was lower). Again, this is all my opinion from watching the movie only once. Perhaps if I rewatch his parts with less bias, maybe I could appreciate it. But for now, his performance was the 'meh' part of the movie for me.

I haven't read the book, but my roommate has. She says that it's even more depressing and painful than the musical-- wow, Hugo sure loves writing about misery (and architecture, apparently). She says that Gavroche's death in the movie was splendidly done, since that part was in the book whereas it was omitted in the musical. I was surprised to learn that he and Eponine were siblings! That made her death even worse for me TAT And apparently in the book, he had two younger brothers which he met but didn't recognize. I'm glad that they didn't follow the book where Mrs. Thenardier dies while in prison. As much as that can be seen as karma finally catching up, the Thenardier couple is one of the lighter parts of the musical, and their survival and mocking last song is like a bitter reminder that sometimes, bad people get away and even get better in life.

Okay, I drabbled too long now << And just to be clear, I'm not bashing Crowe, since I love his other works and Gladiator has a special place in my heart for interesting grade-school me into history in the first place. I just think that his Javert didn't meld well with the rest of the cast, and that his interpretation of the character isn't the best that I've seen/heard.

I love the book, it made me cry on several occasions. I've never seen the broadway, admittedly. I am very curious to see this and am pleased at all the good reviews. >< Maybe I strong arm my husband into watching it with me...

Les Mis...so many tears I had shed for that movie...

My mum used to tell me all the time about how she saw the Les Mis 25th anniversary show live, so she was ecstatic when it came out - I ended up adoring it, too!

I had no idea that Russel Crowe could sing like that... *drools*

I need to go and just watch the live play for Les Mis
I think it would be a completely different perhaps more enriching experience.