Les Misérables (2012)
Directed by Tom Hooper
An adaptation of the successful stage musical based on Victor Hugo's classic novel set in 19th-century France. Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread, must flee a relentless policeman named Javert. The pursuit consumes both men's lives, and soon Valjean finds himself in the midst of the student revolutions in France.
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26 films that influenced Les Misérables
What critics say influenced Les Misérables
With the exception of Peter Bogdanovich’s disastrous 1975 Cole Porter tribute, At Long Last Love, this approach hasn’t been used since the early sound era.
The one big thing he knows about Les Miz is that the songs should be performed live — recorded on the set, not in a studio before the shoot — as was the custom in Hollywood in the early sound era and was revived, not too fruitfully, in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1975 At Long Last Love.
Most famously, Peter Bogdanovich’s career-crippling At Long Last Love (1975) used the technique.
Peter Bogdanovich came a cropper doing this in At Long Last Love .
Several things hold the film together, the most notable being Claude-Michel Schönberg's music and the English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, which like Rouben Mamoulian's 1932 Love Me Tonight and Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort are sung through using rhyming couplets at all times.
You may get more out of it than I did — you could hardly get less — but if I want dramatized French history tarted up with songs, I’ll take Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade (1967).
To be fair, Alan Parker ("The Commitments," "Evita") reportedly tried to bring the musical to the screen back in the late 1980s, but those plans fell through.
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Mamma Mia! (2008) took a staggering $609m at the international box-office and not far behind have been the likes of Chicago (2002) with $306m, High School Musical 3 (2008) with $252m, and Hairspray (2007) with $202m.
Don’t expect the lavish dance sequences of films like “Moulin Rouge” or “Chicago.”
This is, of course, all set in the 18th century–the latter half of the film predominantly featuring the Paris Uprising of 1832–amongst some of the society’s most unrefined people, so audiences expecting a glitzy musical along the lines of Chicago or Moulin Rouge! will be sorely disappointed.
However, “Les Misérables” has a bigger and sometimes more complicated cast than something as simple as “Annie” or even “Chicago.”
When Bob Fosse made "Cabaret," he completely reimagined it for the screen.
As fans of the musical might expect, the real piece de resistance is when Hathaway sings “I Dreamed a Dream,” one of those showstopping moments on par with Jennifer Hudson singing “I Am Telling You” in “Dreamgirls.”
As when Jennifer Hudson sang And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going in Dreamgirls , it's a bravura performance that makes you want to stand up and start applauding.
(Considering that Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar for one good song in Dreamgirls, it's hard to see how Hathaway won't do the same thing thanks to "I Dreamed a Dream," which is a powerhouse tune she nails.)
Dreamgirls (2006) managed $155m internationally but it’s the best of a bunch that includes The Phantom Of The Opera (2004) with $154m, and Sweeney Todd (2007) with $152m.
That moment is the implosive equivalent of the house Jennifer Hudson brought down in “Dreamgirls.”
To be fair, Alan Parker ("The Commitments," "Evita") reportedly tried to bring the musical to the screen back in the late 1980s, but those plans fell through.
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It's like when Janet Leigh disappears from Psycho...or it would be if Leigh were the best thing in Psycho--and had Psycho been directed by an absolute hack, which leads to a conversation, of course, about how Tom Hooper has one more Oscar for directing than Hitch does, but that's perhaps one of those rabbit holes one should just leave alone.
Inevitably, you wonder what the likes of My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and The King and I would have sounded like if they'd been made this way, and without the reassuring soprano of Marni Nixon emanating from their leading ladies.