Les Miserables



Les Miserable is a classic - well in my opinion anyway! I've loved the music basically since I heard it - sometime during school in the late 1980's, around the time it was in the theatre in Sydney. But I didn't see it until much later in a smaller performance in Newcastle. I had studied musicals in my HSC music course so I guess it had come up there & I loved the music.

So when I heard it was coming out as a movie, I knew I had to go & see it!! And I wasn't disappointed. It was absolutely brilliant. The whole thing is sung, like the musical, and it was great. I guess there would be lots of things for people to pick apart about the singing since the main stars are big Hollywood names, but I thought that it was pretty spot on. And I guess lots of people don't realise or don't know that Hugh Jackman was in musicals before he went to Hollywood! Anne Hathaway has a really nice singing voice too. I reckon most of the other characters that weren't played by big names were probably trained singers anyway.

Even though I could sing most of it, I had forgotten parts of the story line!! I found that it was much more intense on screen, after all it is a pretty tragic story in parts. When I thought about it, I realised that as a stage musical, you don't really see people's faces, & if you do it's from a distance. On the screen however, you see the intensity of the emotions on the faces of the singers & the other people around them. Then of course there's all those things that can't be done on a stage, dramatic background scenery, rooftop scenes etc etc. The barricade scenes seemed to flash by quickly & I was impressed to see that even though it is obviously violent & sad, the blood & gore wasn't overdone. Yes it was there, but not in a typical Hollywood fashion of it flying everywhere when someone got shot. You certainly knew what was happening though.

If you know the story, then the movie is pretty well the same, one song in particular seemed shorter, but other than that (& keeping in mind it had been a LONG time since I'd seen the musical) it was very similar. There are very few spoken words, just one or two in various places - it really is the musical transferred onto screen. I loved that it had obviously been filmed while they were singing. And that fact alone makes it an impressive movie. It would be really cool to see some of the other classic musicals done the same way!!

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