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keith-lofstrom
Reviews
Les Misérables (1998)
Mindless Hollywood Rewrite
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is a complex novel, describing the development of complex people shaping and shaped by history. This movie takes away all of that - the actors portray characters stripped of internal complexity.
This gets a 4 because the actors seem to have recited the lines invented by the screenwriter as typed, but they were given lifeless, insincere pap to recite. The actors did a job, but I have more respect for the actors and writers who walked away and did not participate.
I am not a "musical" person, but the Cameron Mackintosh musical and the 2012 movie made from it delve deeply into Victor Hugo's complex ideas, while this movie cuts all that away. Gratuitous Hollywood rewrite, fueled by nose candy, sold by star recognition, and filmed in low-cost Eastern Europe still recovering from ideological damage. You can almost smell the bean counters telling Yeglesias what expensive parts to omit.
For example, the character of Eponine, the woman who loved Marius so much that she died in support of his love for Cosette, is entirely missing. Eponine's wrenching internal struggle, and the internal struggles of Fantine and Javert and Valjean, could have been portrayed by capable actors like Thurman and Rush and Neeson, but they would have needed months to prepare and many takes to get right. Too expensive.
If you want undemanding entertainment that will consume two hours of your empty life without improving it, this movie do the job. Perhaps it will help you get a job doing the same kind of "review stuffing" that made this movie come out at 7.5; when all the IMDb reviews for both sexes all ages come out so statistically uniform, it is either heavily skewed by software robots, or by people paid to act like them.
If you dislike musicals, the 1935 movie version, with Charles Laughton as Javert, portrays Victor Hugo's emotional story and character development more accurately. Laughton can say more in with a quivering lip in black and white than a minute of 1998 color film. It will be hard to find - I found this 1998 version in the bargain bin for 50 cents.
Predestination (2014)
Heinlein done right
For me, this movie is a 10, but most won't like it, and I don't want high ratings to disappoint others.
This is a small set movie, filmed in re-purposed locations in Australia. No breathtaking outside shots, mostly indoor and nighttime. Low budget, tightly focused on telling Heinlein's puzzling story visually. Many details added that were not detailed in Robert Heinlein's short-short, replacing exposition with action, but Heinlein's best dialog remains.
Two major roles, one minor role, many small parts, hundreds of actors. I imagine most worked for screen credit.
The movie portrays the world Heinlein predicted from 1958 (like major space travel), not the world that actually happened. I've never before seen a movie take that kind of risk to remain true to the original story. Given the few screenings in the United States, this faithfulness cost the producers millions in revenue. Don't expect to see such courage in a major film production ever again.
I'm glad I lived to see a production of a Heinlein story that respected his storytelling. In a couple of decades, small budget productions will use computers and artificial intelligence to translate text directly to screen, without thousands of people involved, and this kind of faithful rendition will be commonplace, indeed, the cheapest way to produce a coherent movie. Predestination, set in a "past future", may be a harbinger of things to come.
Few American moviegoers will like this movie. I do not recommend it to everyone, not even to sophisticated viewers with developed notions of what a movie should be. GLBT science fiction fans will have strong feelings about it, both ways. This film is a good introduction to Heinlein's brave explorations of gender, written when Ozzie and Harriet was Hollywood's view of things. My deepest respect to the filmmakers for showcasing uncommon thoughts from that time, and my thanks to the Australian citizens whose tax dollars paid to bring a deeply US-American author to the screen.
The Lightkeepers (2009)
No captions or subtitles, useless for the hard of hearing
I would love to have watched this movie and given it a high rating - I'm fond of Dreyfuss, Danner, and movies set in this period. I am their target audience ... except that I am hard of hearing, and rely on closed captions or subtitles, which the DVD does not provide. Many people with normal hearing may enjoy the New England brogue that Dreyfuss uses here, but I can't decipher what he is saying, or even read lips given the facial hair.
Since 15% of all Americans are hard of hearing (closer to 50% for the older population who might love this movie), Dreyfuss (as producer and presumably financier) was poorly advised on how he spent his money producing this DVD. I hope he has enough money left to remaster and release a DVD with subtitles (French and Spanish also), so he can reach the other half of his audience.
I rated it 5, not because it was bad or good, but because that was the rating for my sex and age group when I wrote this. If I'm required to vote in order to write this review, I don't want to change the outcome.
3 Idiots (2009)
Fun!
I love Chetan Bhagat's novels. I work with many engineers who immigrated to the US from India. Bhagat's novels (especially "2 States") help me appreciate the land they came from, that schooled them, and is still attached to their souls.
Both "Five Point Someone" and "3 Idiots" tell about students suffering through college and the transformation to adulthood. Both stories are engaging, cleverly constructed and funny as hell, but they show different things, at a different pace. Novels show internal transformation, while movies show the transformation of relationships. Neither story is biographical. Neither story depicts "reality". Both stories work as fiction and frivolous entertainment. Both are respectful of their characters.
If you want great art, read Tolstoy. To learn How Things Work, read Darwin. If you like the Marx Brothers, and you want to laugh your ass off, watch "3 Idiots". This is not a movie to make you think (Of COURSE universities in developing countries are lethally competitive) but to bombard you with the unexpected. Which for this westerner included the jarring Bollywood "let's stop the plot and dance", though in this case it is "let's use dance to fire-hose a different set of sight gags at the viewers". One part of your laughing brain can rest while another takes over. This movie will definitely engage all your humor muscles, including engineer and college nostalgia humor muscles if you have them. If you enjoy "funny machines", there are plenty of those, too.
Some parts were beyond me - Silencer's idiosyncratic Hindi becomes mere word-substitution jokes in subtitle, and I'm left to imagine how his non-standard pronunciation and mannerisms are 2/3 of the humor Still, even Silencer and Virus were treated with respect - all the characters were victims of a situation created by colonialism, poverty, desperation, and ambition displacing love. You can cry or you can laugh - choose your movies accordingly. If you want to cry about abused students, watch "Dark Matter" (2007). If you don't like fart jokes, don't watch this movie, or read Benjamin Franklin, either.
India turns out a lot of films. I'm sure all the elements of this movie are borrowed from others, and if you've watched a thousand movies you won't see much new stuff here. Good artists plagiarize, great artists steal, and these artists robbed the entire film vault. They pasted their swag together pretty well, and in some surprising (to me) ways.
IMHO, a 170 minute movie is too long, which is why I give it a 9. But if they edited it down to 90 minutes, and kept all the best humor, I might have died laughing. It was never plodding, though it slowed from manic to almost sane in places.
I'm buying 4 copies for Christmas presents - I have some godchildren that need their humor centers stretched. This ought to do it.