Butler's Cinema Scene

“LES MISERABLES” My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Christmas Day)

157 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I’ll wasn’t all that eager to see the new film version of the worldwide stage triumph “Les Miserables.”

As a working theater critic I saw the Victor Hugo-inspired stage musical too many times. And whenever I flip to  my local PBS station it seems like there’s a concert version of the show being aired as a fund raiser.

I found much to admire in “Les Miz.” But I never fell in love with it. And, frankly,  I was feeling pretty mizzed out.

Now we have a massive, near-three-hour film version directed by Tom Hooper (the Englishman who burst upon the world cinema scene two years ago with “The King’s Speech”) and starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter and Eddie Redmayne.

Well, I won’t say I’m now in love. But Hooper’s “Les Miz” is filled with deeply moving moments, stirring music and several terrific performances that transcend the superficiality of the characters and the improbabilities of the plot.

In short, I cannot imagine a better screen version of this work.

Spanning something like 40 years in the early 19^th century, this is the story of Jean Valjean, who is imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread and who violates his parole by assuming a false identity and becoming not only a wealthy pillar of society, but a genuinely virtuous man. He adopts the orphaned daughter of one of his factory workers and gets involved in one of France’s periodic political uprisings.

Through all this Valjean is pursued by the relentless policeman Javert, a compassionless ideologue who believes that once a criminal, always a criminal.

So it’s a big, epic, sprawling yarn. And as fashioned by the stage show’s original creators — Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil (with Herbert Kretzmer  providing the English lyrics) – it’s practically nonstop music.  Virtually every word is sung.

The trick, then, is to make audiences who are perhaps not that familiar with musicals – much less one that feels an awful lot like grand opera – accept the essential unreality of the setup.

Hooper has found what I consider a nearly-ideal approach to this dilemma.  Most film musicals first record the music and vocals, then have the players lip sync during filming. Here the cast members’ vocals are recorded live on the set (the players were fed an instrumental track through a tiny earplug).

For the most part this works brilliantly, particularly in hugely emotional solo numbers like Jackman’s rendition of Valjean’s “What Have I Done?” and especially “I Dreamed a Dream,” sung by Hathaway as the dying factory-girl-turned-prostitute Fantine.

By eliminating that barrier between what the actor is actually feeling and his/her recorded vocal performance, many of the film’s musical numbers have an intimacy and power that is nearly overwhelming. Under these circumstances an unplanned pause in delivery, a spontaneous gasp or groan draws us in in ways rarely before experienced in film musicals.

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“CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: WORLDS AWAY” My rating: B- (Opening wide on Dec. 21)

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Worlds Away” is Cirque du Soleil’s version of a Greatest Hits album.

This 3-D production takes signature moments from a handful of current Cirque du Soleil stage extravaganzas and links them together with the flimsiest of “plots.”

The results are not unpleasant;  at the very least the film does a fine job of highlighting the high and low points of the Cirque style.

Written and directed by Andrew Adamson, whose resume includes two of the animated “Shrek” films and two of the live-action “Narnia” entries, “Worlds Away” begins at night on the midway of a traveling circus. An unspeaking young woman (Erica Linz) wanders among the side show oddities and grotesque clowns, soaking it all up with an odd smile.

Don’t expect any county fair charm from this big top assembly. We’re talking a three-way mating of “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Todd Browning’s “Freaks” and the Jim Rose Circus. It’s all rather creepy, the sort of stuff to leave impressionable kids with nightmares.

Anyway, the girl finds herself drawn to a handsome aerialist (Igor Zaripov). When he falls from the trapeze and is sucked into a sawdust vortex that forms below, the girl dives in after him.

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“JACK REACHER” My rating: C (Opens wide on Dec. 21)

130 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Jack Reacher” introduces Tom Cruise as the title character of Lee Child’s hugely popular series of crime thrillers about a former military cop who drops off the grid, surfacing every once in a while to solve some particularly egregious crime, and then vanishing once more.

Already some fans of Child’s books are in an uproar, since the Reacher of the novels stands well over six feet and weighs in at the low 200s…and Cruise is notoriously short and trim.

Never having read any of the Reacher mysteries, I find that argument about as interesting as the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But having seen the film, I think there’s a real question of whether we’ll ever see another Jack Reacher movie.

It’s not that the picture  — written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (he wrote “Valkyrie” for Cruise and will direct him in the next “Mission: Impossible” entry) – is awful. It just isn’t much of anything at all.

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Martin Freeman (center) as Bilbo

“THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY” My rating: C (Opens wide on Dec. 14)

169 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I can’t decide if the motivating force behind Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is hubris or greed.

It’s hubris if Jackson assumed we’d buy anything he threw at us after the worldwide success of his three three-hour-long installments of “Lord of the Rings.”

It’s greed if he decided that there was way more money to be made by stretching J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel for children (just 300 pages, compared to “LOTR’s” 1,200) to an elephantine nine hours of screen time instead of a single three-hour (or even two-hour) movie. (“An Unexpected Journey” is only the first of three “Hobbit” films to arrive on successive Christmases.)

By now you may have gathered that I’m not particularly enamored of Jackson’s “Hobbit.”  In fact, I consider it the year’s biggest letdown (largely because my expectations were so high).

Oh, you’ve got movie technology piled atop movie technology, plus the gimmick of 48-frames-per-second projection in select theaters. (More about that later on).

The costuming, f/x, props and cinematography are state of the art.

But nobody’s home.

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