Last movie you watched......

Eponine was played by Samantha Barks, reprising her role from the London stage performance. She's the only actor from the stage version to appear in the movie.

Tom Hooper used a preponderance of close-ups in order to drive home the fact that the characters were singing live -- no looping of pre-recorded songs, lip-synched style.

 

Speaking of movies that are way too long, went to the Hobbit with the family yesterday. That movie is about an hour too long, just absurd that this is going to be a three part series. Between the movie, the previews and the "special" 10 minute first glimpse of Star Trek 2 that we got to see, we were in the theatre for about three and a half hours. The Hobbit looks pretty but really didn't do much for me in way of story or characters.

 

Waste your money, actually its not a waste of money. Its a well done movie, Samantha Barks, Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne are very very good, especially Ms Barks, stunning performance actually. See IMDb for the actresses who auditioned for the part. The fact they gave it to the only real unknown in the cast says alot. Sasha Baron Cohen and Helen Bonham Carter are perfect. Amanda Seyfried is good but actually gets very little screen time considering the length of the film. The story is timeless and well told, you will get emotional. I have a wonderful home sound system, I can get the glasses to rattle 2 rooms away when watching Armageddon, but this movie you'll want to HEAR in a theater and you'll want to see the open sequence and most of Cohen and Carter's performances in a movie theater.

As for the criticism that the close-ups detract from the movie and make it play-like performance, that's wrong and so what. Do you know what it would cost to see this cast perform this play live in a 400 person theater? About $800/ticket, in le mezzanine. I would love to see Les Mis on Broadway, but I also need to buy medicine.

Crowe is decent but miscast, his singing is quite good for an actor, and his acting is quite good for a singer. I don't know why they needed him or wanted him. He is the weak link but his performance doesn't make the movie unwatchable or even bad.
Hugh Jackman's performance is uneven. In this movie his singing is excellent, his acting is excellent but for some reason I didn't feel the enormous presence that one would expect in this part. He's better than good, but his is not the dominant performance in the movie. That goes Hathaway and Banks. Hathaway's I Dreamed a Dream is so well done, poignant and personal that hearing her do it is to hear it almost for the first time. It's not operatic and see's not trying to reach the old lady in the last row of the balcony.

See it. It's worth the time, it's worth the price of admission, and it's worth it to watch true stars and professional working hard at their craft and mostly succeeding.

 

"The Trouble With the Curve."

Brutally awful. If you went to a ninth-grader and said, "Write me the dialogue to go along wit the following plot ..." this is what he would come up with. Every plot development is telegraphed 20 minutes before it happens. Every character is a complete caricature. The film creators clearly knew nothing about: a) baseball; b) law firms; c) how human beings interact with one another. The problem is that the movie purports to be about all three.

You can't get away with this shit on a stick in the post-FNL world. Just a wretched baseball movie that might have flown in 1949, but not today. Fuck this movie.

 

Zero Dark Thirty. Intense. Intense. Intense. And amazing. A lot of debate about the torture scenes. I don't think the movie says torture led to finding Bin Laden. It seemed like just another thing that failed to yield an answer.

Interesting Post story on the real-life CIA agent played by Chastain.

http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty-heroine-isnt-popular-at-cia.html

 

Well that's disappointing. I wanted to see this; Clint Eastwood and Baseball. Yes!

 

Took the kids to see Rise of the Guardians... Was pleasantly surprised...

Saw "Perks of Being a Wallflower" which was very well done.

 

RotG, from what I hear, is pretty good. But from a movie industry perspective, it could have at least earned back its $145 million budget (currently, it sits at about $90 million) IF it had only marketed the whole childhood-fairies-as-The-Avengers concept (Santa+Tooth Fairy+ Easter Bunny+ Jack Frost, etc) and IF it had only gone with a more traditional look for Santa. Instead, to most casual observers, it just looks weird.

 

Yeah, the tattooed Santa is a bit creepy for kids... That was a pretty strange decision. Good movie though... I had to take my kids to is because my wife wanted to wrap presents without the kids in the house and there were limited kid-friendly options... Good movie otherwise...

 

Saw Lincoln this afternoon. There are stretches of that are extraordarily well-done . . . but it lags in spots . . .you better be really hip on the history, going in . . . and believe that when we look back on it in 3-4 years, it's going to look like another Best Picture mistake, if it gets there. D D_L was marvelous, but that's a given.

 

I wasn't as fond of it as everyone else seems to be, but why do you say that?

 

"Trouble with the Curve" was lousy. Clint Eastwood plays a cranky old man who hates technology and anything younger than Methuselah, for the 26th movie straight. It's just tired. The rest of the movie is contrived.

"Premium Rush" was a nice little chase movie set in the world of NYC bike messengers. It doesn't try to be anything more than the 90-minute light action fare that it is, and that's part of the appeal. The chase sequences are pretty good, and they're a bit more tense than the average chase scene on the premise that a bike rider is more prone to serious injury, without the relative safety of a modern car. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who was in every movie of 2012) was a likable lead, and Michael Shannon chewed the scenery as a corrupt cop. It got lost in the mess of blockbuster movies this summer, but it's definitely worth a rental.