Les Misérables (Tom Hooper, 2012)

When set against the experience of seeing a production of Les Misérables,Tom Hooper’s adaptation single-handedly disproves Chaplin’s notion that life is tragedy in close-up and comedy in long shot. Hooper is so fixated on the musical’s reputation as a tear-jerker that he has no sense for its epic sweep, and his camera is rarely more than inches from an actor’s face as he or she sings. At times, performers even lurch suddenly toward the lens in a disorientingly pop effect, a gesture of spontaneity that sometimes comes across as their way of saying, “Would you back the hell off?”

Based, of course, on Victor Hugo’s epic, social romance novel, Les Misérables is one of the few musicals ripe for the current fetish for “realism” (emphasis on the quotation marks). Hooper always makes sure each face is covered in grime just so, that the stars’ teeth are not sparkling but also not blackened like the extras or significant characters of disrepute. These details make the film seem more fake than a stage show, not less, though the camera does such a fine job of its own on that front that the relatively minor sin of aesthetically arranged grit. One might not even notice this if, again, Hooper could bear to mix up his agonizingly long close-ups with a medium or long shot that lasted more than a second.

Hooper’s awkward framing should be familiar to viewers of the John Adams miniseries, and I almost gave in to hope that the more freewheeling style afforded by the genre might give his distracting direction a stronger foothold to remotely reflect the content. But that reasoning is, of course, flawed: shoddy filmmaking on a vast scale can only be that much worse than the same lack of talent closer to the Earth. The wide-angle lenses, the haphazard editing, and the inability to ever be more than two shots away from a close-up rob nearly every song of its power by turning every performance into a mediocre music video.

And for someone who makes the camera more noticeable and prominent than any of the actors, Hooper also proves infuriatingly literal when it comes to adaptation. Some numbers feel tethered to the stage with too short a leash. Take, for example, the downturn of already low fortunes for Fantine (Anne Hathaway): on stage, the actress playing the character would necessarily have to move from a sewing job to prostitution in one movement to save time. On screen, though, the fast edits that track her descent ironically feel as if they pass in real time more than the unbroken movement of a live production. One makes allowances in suspension of disbelief for a tacitly agreed-upon pass of time in a theater, yet Fantine’s fall appears to occur within the span of, oh, about 90 minutes as Hooper presents it, turning her sad story into something more akin to self-aware comedy.

Even that cannot hold back Hathaway, however. Having already proved the most electrifying and focused aspect of the overstuffed and underwritten Dark Knight Rises, she gives an even better performance in a much worse film. She walks a balancing act as Fantine, mixing the broad naïveté and innocence necessary to give her woeful existence a shade of instant heartbreak with the believable weariness of someone with a much more realistic and frank knowledge of the world. The film peaks early with her showstopping rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” in which she turns Hooper’s banal style to her advantage with the tiniest shifts in her face as her wistful recollection turns slowly to full anguish. The subtleties she loads into her to-the-rafters expression also makes for the only payoff to the much-ballyhooed talk of the cast’s singing being recorded live. All the theoretical ups of this decision are displayed in her performance, where the ragged, low moan that chokes her voice attains a visceral power that elevates the gimmick from an overhyped brag of doing what stage players have done with the musical for decades now.

Sadly, no one else enjoys these benefits, and the actors’ talents are left to the mercy of the careening movement of the camera. Hugh Jackman, for example, can sing, but none of his performances convey anything of Valjean’s redemptive arc. On the other end of the spectrum, Russell Crowe’s dismal singing becomes oddly endearing as he goes one further than the speak-singing everyone employs and instead SHOUT!-sings every single line he has. In a film so drearily serious, a bit of accidental camp is a welcome relief, and his hilarious miscasting entertains more than any of the songs outside of “I Dreamed a Dream.”

That, fundamentally, is the film’s failing. For all Hooper’s irritating incompetence, he might be forgiven had he invested the numbers with any life. Instead, he takes bad songs like “Master of the House” to an all-new nadir and saps all of the energy out of rousing pieces like “Can You Hear the People Sing?” and “One Day More.” As the act-ending centerpiece that collects the melodies and lyrics of most of the songs that came before, “One Day More” is the best song of the production. By virtue of collecting pieces of all of Hooper’s treatment of the other numbers, though, this version stands out as the worst disappointment of the film, its clueless cutting between groups serving only to sever the cast from each other instead of uniting them. Les Misérables climaxes with a doomed revolution, but Hooper’s isolating close-ups leave one wondering how a rebellion ever got off the ground at all.

In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011)

It almost pains me to dismiss an Andrew Niccol film, as I think he should be encouraged. He takes the notion of "high concept" to heart, even if those concepts lead to inconsistent and oversimplifying conclusions. In Time may be his simplest yet, a film that takes its social commentary to such a ludicrous endpoint that even this liberal was howling at some of its conclusions about the rich.

You see, in the future, babies are genetically engineered not to physically age past age 25 but to die a year later unless more time is bought. As such, time is literally money in this society, where the rich can live for centuries while the poor give a whole new meaning to "living from paycheck to paycheck." (I apologize, but the time puns are endless.) The problem with In Time is not that it unfairly posits extreme wealth as soaked in the blood of the poor—that's been true forever. It's that the metaphor barely extends to the hour mark, and the film subsequently falls into a muddied action thriller that prevents Niccol from playing to his strengths.

In Time follows ghetto rat Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), who lives with his 50-year-old mother (Olivia Wilde) struggling to pay the bills with never more than a few hours to spare. One night while drinking with friends, Will comes across a man named Henry Hamilton, a man in the wrong zone with more than a century on his clock. Weary of having lived too long and too meaninglessly, Hamilton decides to give the remainder of his time to Will, leaving only a message telling him not to waste it.

And then, In Time promptly goes nowhere fast. As someone who has always had to make every second count, Will runs everywhere even after he scores enough time to get into the wealthiest zones. Niccol does not match that sense of urgency, even when Will finds himself hunted by authorities. Instead, the film abruptly grinds to a halt, Will heading to ultra-rich area New Greenwich and lolly-gagging around gambling and exchanging Significant Looks with Sylvia Wies (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of one of the richest, most powerful men in the world (Vincent Kartheiser, delightfully insufferable as always). Even the authorities, with the exception of head Timekeeper Raymond Léon (Cillian Murphy), move lethargically.

This pacing would work if Niccol built the entire film around an immersion into this society, as he did with his flawed but marvelous Gattaca. But even when In Time suspends its plot, it merely stops for some sickly pretty shots of industrial yellow glows of the ghetto. Well-composed as they are, these shots don't generate the same atmosphere and visual storytelling as Gattaca's overwhelming, suffocating feeling of being watched. We know that Will and, when she joins up with him, Sylvia are being monitored, but they escape so easily one wonders whether half the CCTV cameras are even working.

Furthermore, Niccol speaks too many of his ideas rather than merely showing them. Shots of timed-out corpses on the street as desensitized poor shuffle past speak volumes more than the mood-spoiling, Big Theme dialogue that they elicit. Likewise, seeing every rich person flanked by a body guard and living in safe little shells to ensure an accident or a violent act doesn't spoil their chance at immortality humanizes their own plight in this system more than Sylvia's dejected ruminations. By stiffly voicing his themes, Niccol robs In Time of the undercurrent of sadness and anger that never successfully rises to the surface.

And these are the film's best moments. Elsewhere, it turns into a disjointed Bonnie and Clyde, Sylvia disgusted and galvanized by the effects of the class system when confronted with the poor. She elects to take down her father's empire with Will, and the two eventually flood the ghetto with so much time that society itself might collapse from sudden shifts in stratification. Not once does anyone at one of these banks even try to stop them, despite the fact that no two other people on the A-list right now look less imposing than Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. Even a rent-a-cop at small-town bank would break their teeth with a nightstick if they tried to start something. Of course, it would help if the guns they wield weren't so huge that our stars resemble children having dangerously stumbled across dad's .45.

Appropriately for a film about the importance of each second, Niccol's film could not have come out at a better time. With economic tensions in the United States higher than they have perhaps ever been, In Time could appeal to those who recognize that extreme, unchecked wealth truly does effect the lives of the poor. But Niccol's film is so clumsy, so awkward, and so easily sidetracked that what might have been a suggestive, chilling view of how massive wealth requires the suffering and even death of others finally emerges as a lifeless thriller. Watching people's lives literally tick away should be compelling. Instead, I spent most of the time looking at my own clock.

Red Riding Hood

Walking out of Red Riding Hood, I felt a total emptiness in my soul. I could not rage at the absurdity of the story, the effrontery of its capitalization on the Twilight craze or the stupefying lack of direction, nor could I even mock anything. Cobbled together out of cribbed notes from someone's time-traveling Twilight slashfic, Red Riding Hood splashes its milky shots about in shuddering, arrhythmic spurts. In other words, it's an ejaculation, though to call it one would erroneously give the impression that at least one person involved had fun.

Opening with the same computer-animated "helicopter" shots of chilled, remote landscapes pockmarked with medieval villages and fortifications, Red Riding Hood clearly bears the runny, hastily applied stamp of its incompetent auteur, Catherine Hardwicke, who also helmed the first Twilight. Hardwicke brings the same sleepy tedium to this film, maintaining her sped-up yet monotonously droning montage of trees, snow-covered mountains and streams for the whole of the opening credits, devoting minutes to these repetitive, unengaging shots before finally starting in flashback on a young village girl running around the woods with her friend Peter. The two trap a rabbit in a cage, and the girl eagerly pulls out a knife to cut the bunny's throat, eliciting from myself and my two accompanying friends a simultaneous, involuntary cry of "What?!" before the scene jerks away to a calmer shot and a "Ten Years Later" title appears on-screen over yet more damn shots of more damn trees. It was the Surprise Symphony of crap.

The girl, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried, inspiring hordes of lazy "My, what big eyes you have" jokes), is now grown-up but still playful, ignoring propriety to slink around the woods all day and tease Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), now a woodcutter (guess. Just guess). Apparently, slitting an animal's throat with relish did not send Peter running for the hills, and he does everything short of getting into Valerie's smock in full view of the town despite her being betrothed to another. (But not to fear, later they cross that thin line in an obvious location begging to be caught.) I did not know that medieval apothecaries made some kind of hair gel, but Peter has clearly found something to perk up his oh-so-gentled messed hair, and for someone who should be working all day with the other villagers, Peter certainly does manage to get away with quite a bit of downtime in which to stare broodingly. Even the men cannot help but be mesmerized by those eyes, it seems.

I've used the term "medieval" twice now, but I may be setting myself up for embarrassment. Red Riding Hood does not fit neatly into an identifiable time period, incorporating modern idioms into generic folk-tale settings as if a live-action Shrek. These crossbow-wielding, log-chopping peasants have "crushes" on people and worry about who in town is richest despite the clear irrelevance of coins in this barter society. The remote hamlet of Daggerhorn operates in feudal fashion but does not seem to have any overseeing lord. In fact, they lack any clear leader at all, operating in such collective "harrumphing" that one's mind drifts to the erudite socialist serf in Monty Python and the Holy Grail explaining the place to any travelers who might happen upon the village.

Bonding the townspeople together is the fear of a werewolf that terrorizes them, though no one has seen it in years. Only when the old rituals of animal sacrifices and boarded-up houses slack with comfort does the beast suddenly return, harshing Valerie's plans to run off with Peter -- seriously, where? You are tucked away in an empty forest that even the Holy Roman Emperor does not want to control -- by killing her sister. So it goes. The townspeople, whipped into a frenzy by Col. Saul Tigh Michael Hogan, head to a nearby cave to hunt the werewolf and come back with what is so obviously an average, everyday wolf that one must choke back laughter. How have these people dealt with a werewolf for generations and learned all the superstitious methods of killing it without having any idea what a werewolf actually is?

To set them straight on their magnificent ignorance, along comes the witch-hunting priest Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) to gently explain to them that a werewolf turns back into a person and lives among people. Hence, y'know, werewolf. Honestly, this is the one time you can't blame Oldman for yelling at people. Flanked by what appears to be a crossover ad with Benetton and Medieval Times, Solomon and his warriors soon take over the town with their accents. Everyone else in the film speaks unabashedly in an American accent, including England-born Max Irons, who plays Valerie's intended husband Henry and always looks as if on the verge of tears. But Oldman sports a vaguely Transylvanian accent left over from his time as Dracula; taken with his dress -- not robe, dress -- made out of purple velvet, Oldman's mad voice pulled me from the dreariness of the film for a moment before the undertow of the movie's relentless slog yanked him out to sea.

Oldman's arrival leads to the proper introduction of the film's broad, blatant themes on female repression and sexual assault. The religious Solomon searches for any sign of witchcraft, his accurate opinion that the werewolf lives among the townsfolk leads to zealous invasion of privacy for the sake of bringing out the devil in the town. Through a series of events, Valerie finds herself targeted, partially because of the flowing red cloak she wears ("the Devil's color," adds Solomon, having inherited none of his namesake's wisdom). Tacitly, her open sexuality with Peter comes back to bite her as the village turns on her instantly, branding her a witch and leaving her out for sacrifice. They've practically watched her eat up her man in public; what's the difference in seeing her eaten*?

The sad truth of suspense movies where truly anyone can be the monster among the rest is that eventually no one cares who the monster actually is. Everyone gets to act either menacingly -- Peter, Valerie's grandmother (Julie Christie) -- or unilaterally weak -- Valerie's alcoholic father (Billy Burke, who, judging from his career, might have brought his own booze), the town priest (Lukas Haas). They're all trying so hard to be both the red herring and the Person You Least Expect that the climactic reveal lacks any weight. Perhaps if anyone looked natural in this environment, I might have bothered to study them more closely, but everyone acts so transparently as if on a set: you can practically smell how artificially clean this muddy, livestock-filled village is, and not even snowstorms can get some of these people out of short-sleeved shirts and flimsy cloth pants.

Meanwhile, Hardwicke continues to fumble tying her sexual symbolism into her murky, monotonous mise-en-scène. If she has captured anything relating to sex in her two fantastical virgin allegories, it's the somnambulant thrusting of Ambien intercourse. So many shots in the film are so out-of-focus I questioned whether the studio hired the cinematographer from The Room. The obvious metaphor of the flowing red cloak flowing behind Valerie at all times, to say nothing of the sexual connotations of a blood-flushed "hood," pops up so often I would expect even prepubescents to say "We get it!" by the end of the film. At least Hardwicke shows young people willing to have sex in this film, proving that even tucked-away Catholics in the Dark Ages were more psychologically and sexually stable than Stephenie Meyer. Yet once again, we get the mysterious, potentially hazardous bad boy wooing the doe-eyed (or bug-eyed, as the case may be) virgin into supernatural passion, and when my friend joked at the end that they set up "Red Riding Hood 2," she may not have been far off the filmmakers' intentions. Too bad the film makes the bloodless anti-chemistry of Bella and Edward look like the timeless romance for which some have taken it.

Red Riding Hood does not even work as good trash. It certainly has the seriousness required of any so-bad-it's-good romp worth its salt; everyone speaks with such gravity and verve that one almost forgives them all for speaking with American accents in their tucked-away European hamlet. Comedy works the same way as tragedy: just as the audience cries more when the characters don't allow themselves to shed tears, so too does comedy come more naturally when everyone acts sternly and does not turn to wink at the camera. And with such lines as "Lock him up in the elephant!" (don't ask) and eye-rolling suggestive phrases like "I could eat you up," the cast deserves credit for managing at least one take where they all didn't burst into gales of laughter, if for no other reason than to ward off tears. But the plot is so dull, so endlessly plodding, so flagrantly stitched together, that this unwarranted gravitas never elevates the film to the best of the worst.

My friends and I emerged from the screening in a daze. Normally, we discuss the film, gushing over the details of movies we loved or cracking jokes about the bad ones. Yet all we could do was look around, awkward and bewildered, unable to say anything without devolving into stutters or silence. There's nothing to Red Riding Hood, no sensuality in its animal lust, no joy in its deadpan tedium, no pleasure in seeing its talented lead actress continue to waste her potential on projects that do not utilize her strengths. Then again, considering that practically every movie Seyfried makes does not tap into her potential, perhaps I and others of my mindset are simply projecting the thought of talent onto her, willing her to be worthy of whatever aura we see around her. Perhaps my glasses prescription still has not fully fixed my eyes.

This movie is an insult to folk tales that have entertained and scared children for centuries, to the very idea of a fable, even to the experimental film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, from which I guess this film's protagonist got her name. That 1970 Czech movie is a riot, a surrealist depiction of the stress of pubescent womanhood on a confused, repressed girl. Red Riding Hood is itself confused and repressed, too stupid to rise above and navigate the moral waters in which it wades. The entire project feels like nothing more than an excuse for Hardwicke to get back to her roots as a production designer. Her chief artistic contribution to the set design? Putting spikes on trees. Would that I could have run my throat into one of them.


*Probably should have phrased that differently.