"Les Misérables" - a wonderfully emotional, spiritual melodrama and a really great film
I saw "Les Misérables" a week last Thurs. night with old family friend Bernard Weaver. I blubbed like a baby through much of it, I hate to admit, which is weird because when I saw it on stage about 20 yrs. ago in London and it had nowhere near the same effect on me. I've got to know many of the individual songs over the years, but I think the main reasons for its effect on me came from the casting of very good actors who can sing a bit rather than the opposite, thus enhancing the dramatic power of the story/words, and the intimacy of the camerawork during the solo numbers which afforded the cast the chance to focus on the emotional truth of what they were singing - or at times speech-singing, such as during Anne Hathway's truly breath-taking "I Dreamed A Dream" - without the need to keep the decibel level near the max so as to reach row z of a theatre's Upper Circle. As a result, I found that the meaning of the lyrics hit home much more forcefully. I und...