Singing and Dancing

While my sister and I were growing up, our parents always wanted us to have a healthy appreciation for the arts and culture. Movies, museums and the theater were visited often, and those trips helped shape me into the man I have become, and continue to guide my perceptions of the world today. One I remember with some clarity was a showing at Boston's Wang Center of Les Miserables, the musical about poverty and revolution, crime and punishment in 1800's France. Even after all this time, I can remember the legendary musical numbers performed live by people who were masters of their craft. On Christmas, the whole country got a chance to see Tom Hooper's vision of that story on the big screen. Hooper, who could have done any project he wanted after scoring big with 2010's The King's Speech, decided to tackle the challenge of turning a story told 98% in song to a cinematic masterpiece. How did he do? Well, let's review.

Les Miserables follows Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) - a man who served 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's children - after he is paroled. While he at first cannot find work due to his reputation as a "dangerous criminal", Valjean eventually catches a break and manages to make some wealth and do some good for the people of France after fleeing parole and taking an assumed name. His nemesis and the man chasing him is Javert (Russell Crowe), an officer of the law who rigidly enforces the law and cracks down on even the smallest infractions. Valjean finds a purpose in life when he attempts to aid the sick and struggling mother Fantine (Anne Hathaway) and adopts her daughter Cosette upon her death. Meanwhile, a revolution is building as the downtrodden common folk take up arms against the oppressive King and bourgeoisie.

Hope you enjoy Hathaway's performance... it's damned short

The good news is, if you love the musical as much as some people I know, you won't have any problems with the big screen rendition of Les Mis. Hooper changes almost nothing about what makes the musical so impressive, from its memorable musical score to its multiple-threaded story full of entertaining characters. He augments only in the tiniest bits, most notably in the addition of a new song for Jackman at the midway point. Like the musical, the actors rarely speak in anything but verse, and the director gets great vocalization from his cast by having had them sing live during filming, rather than recording it in post production. While it takes some effort to get used to, and at a few moments the singing doesn't quite match the music, the result is a largely authentic emotional response from his actors, who really get into their performances as though they were really playing on Broadway.

She dreamed a dream, and then she was gone.

The cast of course is a big reason for why the whole thing turned out nicely, and the main credit for that can be attributed to Jackman and Hathaway. Hathaway especially steals the show, and considering she has MAYBE twenty minutes of screen time in a two-plus hour movie, that says a lot. She's assisted somewhat by Hooper's direction (the fall into degradation of Fantine just happens to be the most masterfully shot sequence in the whole movie), but for the most part she deserves all the credit in the world for taking an important bit part and wringing everything out of it that she could. I didn't even know she could SING, and here she is belting out solos like a veteran vocalist. She's an Oscar guarantee at this point, bringing talents to the role that very few people could have expected. Jackman, however, has a history with song and stage, and so his excellence as Jean Valjean comes as absolutely no surprise. The part plays to the best aspects of his theatrical abilities, and anybody who is used to seeing him play manly men in the X-Men films or Real Steel needs to see his work here. The rest of the cast are a step down, though both Eddie Redmayne and debuting Samantha Barks will completely surprise you with their acting and singing abilities. Both have long, excellent careers ahead of them at this point. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen put on strong performances as secondary villains (when am I going to stop being surprised by Cohen's talents?), and while Amanda Seyfried did not really impress me with her appearances, she was so barely present that it's hard to really give her a hard time. The only dud in casting was Crowe, who sports a fine singing voice but can't seem to loosen up and look natural for the camera. It's especially surprising when you consider what a good job he did in the unspectacular Man with the Iron Fists. Here, he puts on one of his lesser performances, the weakest part of an otherwise great group.

If it wasn't for Hathaway, everybody would be talking about her.

But while Hooper gets a lot out of his cast and puts on some great visuals, his story feels... exactly the same as the musical. At the core, you're getting pretty much the same experience you would on a stage, and while that is pretty impressive it also speaks to a glaring lack of individuality in his vision. The last time I saw a musical theater-turned-theatrical release, it was 2007's Sweeny Todd, which suffered from much the same ailment. There just wasn't enough to make it feel like more than they filmed a stage play. While Hooper's Les Mis is a far superior experience than Tim Burton's production, at times the director could have mixed things up a bit to make up for the play's... melodramatics, especially in the final act. The final ten minutes are largely underwhelming, shoehorning an obscene amount of plot into a few minutes of film, and the closing scene is almost as bad as Titanic's "applause" finale. So why did this make the final cut? Because it was that way in the musical, that's why.

And he's STILL the manliest man in Hollywood.

There are people who absolutely LOVE the stage version of Les Miserables. Usually when adaptations such as this are made, they alienate fans of the original by completely changing elements that made the original experience unique, whether major or minor. But fans of the stage Les Mis will have no such issues, as few changes and an excellent voice cast guarantee that diehards will walk out of the theater crying and sure they have just seen a masterpiece. For the rest of us, this musical is great, but doesn't live up to that impossible superlative. Keep Jackman and Hathaway earmarked for their exquisite performances, but otherwise this is "just" a great, deeply encompassing good time at the movies, not one of 2012's absolute best.

Follow the Supreme Leader

When I first saw the trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen's latest farcical satire, The Dictator, I definitely had high hopes. While on the surface it looked dumber than dirt, the movie nonetheless showed a bit of the charm and humor that made Cohen's previous films Borat and Bruno worldwide hits. The Dictator became one of my more anticipated summer releases, as more and more viewings of the trailer cemented itself into my good graces. Then the second trailer was released. While in some ways funnier than the first, I couldn't help but feel a little let down. Instead of being another in the series of mockumentaries that made Cohen the star that he is today, this latest entry turns out to be a story-driven comedy, featuring Cohen as a North African ruler dethroned and forced to actually work for his next meal. Add Ben Kingsley as his chief of staff and Anna Faris as a resident New Yorker who takes the former despot under her wing, and you have a film that goes far out of its way to be nowhere close to what I expected. Still, it had the potential to out-funny 21 Jump Street, and I always have more fun watching R-rated comedies than I think I would going in. They always seem to surprise me in some way, and while Seth MacFarlane's Ted looks great, I was betting on The Dictator to be the summer's best adult comedy.

Well, this made the Gay Pride Parade a bit awkward...

Admiral General Aladeen (Cohen) is the racist, sexist, anti-western and antisemitic ruler of Wadiya, a rogue North African nation that would be rich off the sales off its oil reserves, were Aladeen's numerous human rights violations and rumors of nuclear weapons development not the cause of numerous United Nations sanctions and threats of military actions from the world's leaders. Threatened by attack, Aladeen and his entourage visit New York City to lie to the UN about their nuclear program, only for the leader of Wadiya to be betrayed by his uncle and second in command, Tamir (Ben Kingsley). Replaced by an easily-manipulated double, stripped of his trademark beard and stranded in the slums of NYC, Aladeen must partner with former political prisoner Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas) in order to infiltrate the UN, reclaim his position of power and prevent the ultimate evil from descending upon his native Wadiya: Democracy. And he might even get lucky with feminist vegan human rights activist Zoey (Anna Faris) while he's at it.

"You don't understand... I like to be in Amer-i-ca!"

Right from the start you can tell how ridiculous the whole thing is going to be, as the film opens with a dedication to the memory of North Korea's former leader Kim Jong-il. From there, it is a constant barrage of political satire, wildly inappropriate humor, and more wrong than a week's worth of Fox News broadcasts.Cohen obviously had a lot of inspiration in creating the model for his Wadiyan dictator, from  Saddam Hussein to Libya's Muammar Qaddafi (complete with Amazonian Guard) and just about anyone with political clout in Iran. Considering the atrocities those leaders had amassed in just the past decade, let alone the entirety of their reigns, you can imagine how difficult it is to create something borne from them that could actually be funny. Cohen's response to that is to act just as outrageously as humanly possible, and for the most part his approach actually works. The Dictator at its best features no direct involvement with the plot, but is in the gratuitous asides that cause you to shriek with unexpected laughter at the trials of the idiotic deposed ruler. Whether it is the flashbacks of ordering the executions of his people for inane reasons, asking a police officer how much he charges for assassinations or the efforts of his "work" at an organic food store, the film is absolutely at its best when little is actually happening, and Cohen is allowed to go buck wild and let us enjoy his efforts.

Which one is more used to working on their back, I wonder?

It's the story that unfortunately derails the whole process, and makes you wonder just why Cohen and director Larry Charles steered clear of the mockumentary style that had served them so well in their previous efforts. If The Dictator had simply been a faux documentary about Aladeen's trip to America, I'm sure the humor overall would have carried the hour and a half it took to watch this movie. As it stands, the plot is silly (in a bad way), forcing our hero (yeah, I'm using the term loosely) into a character growth spurt that can't possibly be sustained in any way, and for the sake of entertaining the audience, it isn't. I guess since Cohen did so well in Scorcese's Hugo, he thought he could take some of those elements and make The Dictator even better than Borat. While I genuinely loved Hugo, and by extension Cohen's work in it, he and Charles combined are no Scorcese. Even worse is the love story, which somehow conspires to pair Aladeen with a women who represents everything he hates... and then makes it work! I don't usually get uber-political, but there is no way a vegan, feminist, organic-consuming, human rights activist would ever have anything to do with Aladeen, who hates everything and generally views women as sex objects. Zoey is also apparently business-inept, as it is the intervention of Aladeen that ultimately saves her fortunes. Faris' character is the perfect example of what is wrong with women in film, and it doesn't help that the perpetually-disappointing actress is unable to keep up with Cohen on a humor level to balance out the dynamic.

Ah, this is the Kingsley role I had gotten used to. I was worried after he was actually GOOD in Hugo.

The Dictator has some great moments, and a speech at the end in which Aladeen tells the UN what is so great about his brand of rule (best lines include 1% of people having all the wealth, "free press" actually owned by one family, and nobody complaining when you place excessively numerous members of a particular race in prison) is truly inspired, as is a helicopter tour over the city of New York, and the brief shot of the Wadiyan Olympic Games (sadly plopped in at the very beginning). The soundtrack also charms, with Middle Eastern music artists remixing tracks like Dr. Dre's 'Next Episode', R.E.M.'s 'Everybody Hurts', and Dolly Parton's '9 to 5', translating them into foreign speech. Ultimately, though, this is the type of comedy you feel bad about laughing at, especially when you consider just how many rape jokes the script features (I stopped counting after the first dozen). It is Cohen's excellent delivery and timing that make up 99% of the laughs you'll get out of The Dictator, and they are all definitely earned. Still, in a world where a Hollywood film makes most of its revenue from foreign markets, it's difficult to imagine Cohen and Charles' latest effort getting out of the United States without causing a holy war, even if you tightly regulated the releases. This film features one of the world's top satirists definitely off his game, and that's a shame, as a better story might have forced its way into the Top 10. Instead it will settle somewhere in the pack, disappointing not only Cohen's fans, but anyone who hoped for an R-Rated comedy in the same league as 21 Jump Street. The Dictator goes out of its way to offend everybody, but if you're a woman, Jewish, Korean, feminist, Middle Eastern, a New Yorker, a parent, or in any way liberal, you'd be right to think that you've been singularly targeted, and might wish to stay away.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a Wadiyan warlord to evade.

"I am Admiral General Aladeen, and I do not approve of this message."