Anne Hathaway

Les Miserables: Now I’m miserable, too

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Let’s get this out of the way first – having neither seen nor desired to see the Broadway musical Les Miserables, I am not the target audience for this movie.  I don’t care for melodramas – and Les Mis is two melodramas in one – the story of the saintly Jean Valjean being chased for decades by the monomaniacal Javert and a romance between two kids.  So I was mostly bored.  If, however, you love Les Mis, you’ll probably enjoy this long, long, lavish all-star effort from director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, The Damned United, John Adams).

The cast is mostly excellent.  Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn), Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit are all excellent singers and give outstanding performances.  Redmayne is exceptional.  Sasha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are very funny in the comic roles (the highlight of the movie for lowbrow me). The other lead is Russell Crowe, who really can’t match the singing ability of the other actors, which is a distraction.

Hooper has made the costumes and make-up very realistic for the filthy and scabby period.  This, for me, was jarring when juxtaposed against the artificiality of the characters breaking into song and some very cheesy CGI sets.

Now here’s one of my pet peeves – movies that should be over but linger like an unwanted guest.  Here, both of the plot threads (the chase and the romance) are resolved, yet the movie goes on for three more songs, including a death scene and the stirring finale.  Aaaack.

The Dark Knight Rises: Unfortunately, over 2 hours when Catwoman is not on the screen

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Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back. First, the good news about The Dark Knight Rises.  Anne Hathaway excels as the best Catwoman ever, and the banter between her and Batman crackles.  There are some exceptional CGI effects of Manhattan’s partial destruction. There’s a cool personal hovercraft, the Bat, and an equally cool combo motorcycle/cannon, the Batpod.

Unfortunately, that’s all the good stuff in director Christopher Nolan’s newest chapter of the Batman saga.  The problem is the screenplay, dotted with the corniest of dialogue and laden with pretentious Batman mythology.  When Catwoman tells him “you don’t owe these people any more! You’ve given them everything!”, Batman solemnly replies, “Not everything. Not yet.”

The plot simply exists to transition from action set piece to action set piece.  There are too many times, when a good guy is in peril, that another good guy pops up utterly randomly and just in the nick of time – too many even for a comic book movie.

With her bright wit and lithe sexiness, Hathaway fares far better than her colleagues.   Christian Bale continues his odd husky growl as Batman.   As the villain, an uber buffed Tom Hardy glowers from behind a fearsome mask.  The hackneyed screenplay wastes the rest of the extremely talented cast:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman.  We barely glimpse Liam Neeson.  The captivating Juno Temple is apparently dropped into the story just enough to set her up for the sequel with Gordon-Levitt.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, which worked well for the long shots of NYC and made the fight scenes more chaotic.

Love and Other Drugs

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Love and Other Drugs has the advantage of two winning leads and lots of sex.  Anne Hathaway gives a profoundly deep and textured performance as a smart and horny woman urgently living life to the fullest in a desperate race with Parkinson’s Disease.  Jake Gyllenhaal nails the role of a charismatic and relentless serial seducer. And the two of them have lots of sex.  Fully naked sex.

Unfortunately, Love and Other Drugs peters out into a Disease-of-the-Week movie, albeit pretty good for that forlorn genre.

One moment in particular illustrates how much better this film could have been.  Hathaway emerges from a Parkinson’s support group uplifted and empowered, while Gyllenhaal has just received an unvarnished description of living with Parkinson’s from the husband of a later stage patient.  We see what she doesn’t – that the two are no longer on the same page.  Peter Friedman plays the patient’s husband with an authenticity that will be recognized by anyone who has experienced caregiver fatigue.  It’s a great scene – but then the movie turns sappy.

Sadly, the overly broad comic relief attempted by Josh Gad as Gyllenhaal’s little brother merely distracts from the story.  So does the sappy score – beware soulful piano in the third act. And when a movie climaxes by having the boy race to catch the girl in the nick of time, it’s as much of a cliché to catch up to the bus as it is to pant up to an airport loading gate.