Originally Posted by
McTeague
Because those who have been biased against the project all year, plus those who have a grudge against Hooper for 2010, are exaggerating everything? Not sure why so many people are failing to acknowledge this.
Look, despite all my tongue-in-check fanboy-ness, which I exaggerate on purpose, I’m very aware this won’t be a groundbreaking visual cinematic exquisiteness. This won’t be the next “Satantango”. It’s not a matter of opposing high-brow to anything or of deriding auteur film by calling it snob, or anything, you know me well and I adore my Tarrs and my Wheerasethakuls.
I think the original show is a musical theatre masterpiece because it basically amplified all the innovations introduced during the 60’s and 70’s in the genre into an epic popular production that was masterful in everything it set out to do. Kinda like what “Gone with the Wind” did with everything Hollywood had been learning and improving since the talkies appeared, distilling it in an epic filmic experience that was a pinnacle of popular art, a true filmic equivalent to cathedrals and pyramids. To me, Les Mis is the “Gone with the Wind” of musical theatre, and you know how much I love that film.
In fact, it pushes so much the boundaries of stage spectacle and stage narrative breath and scope, that I think it begged for becoming a film, that allows the definitive expansion of that spectacle and that narrative. I had goosebumps reading the script because it had everything it needed to clarify in cinematic terms a narrative that was so condensed on the stage that many found certain plot points confusing. The script, just by describing a shot that must be included here and there, clarifies everything without making the narrative any longer, in cinematic terms. Reading it I thought they had exactly done what I felt the show needed: using the tools of film to really make that narrative scope work. Now it still tells a sprawling story filled with events, characters and webs of relations, and with the same intensity given by condensing it in three hours, but without the stage limits that made some of those events confusing.
So, visually, really, I only expect that Hooper doesn’t fuck it up, and brings the spectacle. Yes, I would have preferred Martin Scorsese’s Les Miserables, but I think Hooper is good enough. He may not be a visionary or an exquisite “visualizer”, but he knows how to do epic spectacle and how to reach and display the motional core of a story. I mean, he made a story about reading a speech on the radio incredibly moving and without doing so in a distasteful or overly manipulative manner. I had many visual quibbles with “The King’s Speech”, but overall the balance of Hooper’s direction was quite positive.
This time, yeah, I have quibbles too. I don’t know why the clothes of the Thenardieres are so colourful and garish or why they have to be blond (although, according to the script, it seems they’ve set the Cosette child scene during Christmas, so that may explain the red things Bonham Carter is wearing). Yes, the cinematography looks slightly more colourful than I had imagined (the stage show is a very grey-brown show, which gives a very expressive and appropriate gloomy feeling). And yes, maybe Hooper moves the camera more than needed. But you guys are exaggerating it. Have you seen the stage show? It’s something hyper-kinetic: the stage was a spinning one, for chrissakes. The décor is on wheels, entering and leaving the stage while the floor spins because the interior of a café is being built while the buildings and bridge of a street are still on the stage, disappearing. The story is constantly changing from point of view, from location, characters are constantly entering and leaving… I didn’t expect anything but a constantly moving camera. There’s really little chance. It’s a kinetic spectacle and it’s normal and good Hooper is moving the camera from one character to another. For instance, in the scene in the trailer when they’re firing her, you have three minutes to explain that Fantine works in a factory where a group of workers is jealous of her, that the foreman wants to make sexual advances on her, that she has a child she has to keep on her own, you also have to have Valjean appear and explain how he’s gone from ex-convict to owner of a factory, and at the same time Javert is arriving to the town, while the beggars in the walls of said town sing about their misery, and because Valjean is seeing through a window that Javert is coming, he doesn’t have the time to attend the problem with Fantine, and as a result Fantine is unfairly fired without Valjean realising it. There’s no way but have tons of POV shots in different angles, some of which will obviously be canted (Valjean is one second looking through a window placed above him and looking at the workers placed below him, under the stairs). And yes, the camera will be moving frenzied between all these groups of characters.
The visual horrors Jackson did in the LOTR (none of which you were criticizing guys until I arrived here) had less to do with the constantly moving camera, that was necessary many times, than with the soft focus, the glows, the slo-mo and the genral corn. Yes, some of those helicopter shots filled with garish CGI were ugly too, but I would have never started the crusade against Jackson style I started had those been the only problem. And Hooper here doesn’t use those, anyways.
Also, most of the sweeping camera movements and canted angles we see in the trailer are in the barricades scenes. Look at the 1934 version by Raymond Bernard and you’ll see how an orgy of canted angles looks. This is an epic fight with guns and cannons and barricades and explosions. If a canted angle is going to allow to include in the frame the whole line of rifles pointing in one direction while keeping Marius in close-up, I’m all for it. Diagonal lines in wide-screen compositions in battle scenes always work.
So, really. Are there some Hopperisms that can annoy some? Sure. But let’s not exaggerate and pretend it looks like Luhrman’s The Great Gastby.
Plus, AMPAS (and the industry at large, considering his awards background in TV) certainly isn’t among those bothered by Hopper directorial flourishes, so, what I don’t understand at all, is doubting its Oscar chances after this trailer. This trailer reinforces them, save for Crowe’s. Its first part keeps the intimate emotional punch of the first trailer with Fantine’s plight, and what’s new is the second part, the more epic one, with “One Day More” and “Do You Hear The People Sing”, which seem rendered with all the epic and spectacle that’s needed. This looks even more AMPAS-like than the first one. Artistic quibbles I understand even though I think you’re overstating them. But quibbles about its Oscar potential come only from fans of other Oscar movies that desperately want this to fail, because this looks even better for Oscars than before, giving us Oscar vibes for Seyfried and Redmayne.
I remember now why I hated The King's Speech and why I hated the decision of making Hooper the director of Les Mis.
- so this looks like a dream come true.
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