Doogie Hoser, on 20 January 2013 - 05:47 AM, said:
I saw it for a second time tonight and I liked it much better. Now I saw it on an IMAX screen and the sound was much, much improved, the orchestra didn't sound so buried.
My principal criticisms, upon second viewing:
Russell Crowe. He has a nice voice, it's just the wrong voice for Javert, IMHO.
The cinematography. I grew to yearn for those epic close ups, because it seemed like the only time the camera was stable. The rest of the time it seemed shaky, jolting, meandering. It didn't do the story any favours.
The editing. They seemed to be unable to hold a shot to let the impact establish. Everything seemed nicked a few seconds too soon.
I would have cut Stars. Russell Crowe only did an adequate job of it and it was already established that Javert was never going to give up on pursuing Valjean. It was redundant and the performance wasn't strong enough to warrant it. As heretical as it sounds, I also would have cut Bring Him Home. Hugh Jackman again was just adequate at it. I think one of the problems was they tried to shorten the length from the musical without making any clear effort to reduce the number of stories they were trying to tell. So you got a little bit of everything, generally nicked down. The movie didn't feel as rushed to me as it did the first time I saw it, but it still felt somewhat rushed.
Again, I can't stress enough how much a decent sound system improved the experience and IMAX delivers that.
Stand outs for me:
Eponine, still.
Eddie Redmayne. If Anne Hathaway earned an Oscar nomination for her bit, Eddie Redmayne surely deserved one for his Marius. That Empty Chairs was just a fantastic piece of work.
The treatment of LaMarque's funeral as the spark of the uprising. It just flowed beautifully and was a wonderful idea.
The Thenardiers. As hilarious as they could have been given the mangled reduction of their numbers and the horrible editing.
I think the timing problem is there because they decided to fill in the implicit bits of the story with new scenes, and the new song. There's also an attempt to put back in some of the book story on top of what was put in the stage show. You then have to cut the ensemble songs to bits, and truncate some of the big numbers, or you end up considerably longer than the stage show - with no interval. It may be that you have to dumb things down to that extent. Its debateable though how many people won't get that the grown up girl with Valjean in Paris is the same little girl that they saw a minute before leaving the inn with Valjean, without multiple scenes showing them arriving in Paris - or that we need extra scenes to explain that Javert is looking for Valjean when all he has to do is say that he's been looking for him once. Some people claim in newspaper comments that they hey still couldn't understand what was going on, so perhaps the more dumbed down the better.....
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