Gonna Hear Some People Sing I Guess

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Caraphae's avatar
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...Because Hollywood's tossing us a movie version of the Les Miserable musical this Christmas. I am...interested. I've actually read the book, in its door-stopper entirety, because, well, I like books like that. I'm curious to see what the American movie process makes of Hugo's basic " wow rich people suck but God is on the side of the poor I guess" message.

Also, Hugh Jackman. So that's a plus.

I'm not going to pretend I don't like musicals; I love musicals. I have more soundtracks in my collection than any other kind of music. I have seen musicals about love, gods, and zombies, and I enjoyed them all. But that doesn't mean I love musical *movies*. Musicals, like Shakespeare, are something I almost always love in theaters and only sometimes like onscreen. There's a certain unreality created in live theater that makes the weirdness of sudden singing and dancing more acceptable, somehow. Movies seem to be pushing for an acceptance of story-as-reality that can make anything artificial or even unlikely perversely harder to accept.

I wish I had a term for this viewer-collaboration mindset. Ne-Kulturny that I am, I'm stuck with saying "That thing, like when you're reading a book you don't need to know what the protagonist looks like to live behind their eyes, but in a movie that would be forced, and so audience mindset sort of changes to allow for the limits of the medium but then that very mindset becomes a tool of the medium itself". It's a big mouthful and if anyone knows the proper terminology I would appreciate hearing it.

In related new, two pages today! I would have had one up last week but apparently internet post-election fallout clogged the pipes here on Wednesday morning?!? And I post Wednesdays, not Thursday or later. So here, have two pages, with way more detail added.
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ansuz's avatar
The one thing I like about musical movies is that I can sit people down and finally make them watch the thing and not have to try to explain the entire plot every time we're on a car trip and one of the songs pops up in my shuffle playlist. >.> Without having to drive six hours to NY and actually take them to a show. I am not as attached to Les Mis as I am to, say, Phantom of the Opera (grew up listening to the soundtrack to that one), so we'll see how the movie goes. And I will second the "ugh, Marius and Cosette." Also, your post title wins.