Hacker Cinema
Les Misérables
2012 · Film · 158 min
Directed by Tom Hooper
An adaptation of the successful stage musical based on Victor Hugo's classic novel set in 19th-century France. Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread, must flee a relentless policeman named Javert. The pursuit consumes both men's lives, and soon Valjean finds himself in the midst of the student revolutions in France.
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12 comments on Hacker News
Gathering all the metaphors (I know) here for reference:
- "All toupées look fake. I've never seen one that I couldn't tell was fake." [1] - All CGI in movies looks fake. It jumps out at me every time I see it." - All WebView apps suck. Every one I've seen has a bad obviously-web-derived UI. re: that last one though -- I'd at least acknowledge that WebView apps are roughly at the end of the early-2000's era of CGI: not exactly "The Rock in The Scorpion King" bad, but generally not at the level of Avatar or Les Misérables.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250878
I feel like it’s pretty easy to disprove. I mentioned Humane AI in another comment, so here I’ll use a different and more flamboyant example: the 2019 movie Cats.
After putting $85-110M into the production of the movie, Universal released a trailer that went super viral and had every person on the internet talking about how terrible it looked. When the movie actually came out there was a second viral wave of gawking. Did this drive tons of people to the theater so they revel in the movie’s epic badness for themselves? No, the movie (which had over a dozen stars and was based on a hit musical that is popular around the world) failed to make back its budget at the box office. For reference (in case someone tries to pull the “maybe it would’ve made less money without the negative publicity” card) Tom Hooper’s previous movie musical Les Miserables earned $442M on a $61M budget.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(2019_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables_(2012_film)
The problem is that 'identity' is context specific. You're right that it is an artifact of consensus - but it is actually consensus in different groups for different reasons and at different points in time.
An interesting study on identity is the (book/play/film) Les Misérables. At various points in the story, the protagonist is a prisoner (#24601), a Frenchman (Jean Valjean), a factory owner (Monsieur Madeleine), and a community leader (Monsieur le Maire). The main antagonist in the story, Javert, is so strongly biased in his rigid system of classifying people, that he is unable to accept Valjean's identity as anything other than a criminal - prisoner 24601. The internal dissonance this creates when Valjean continues to defy this categorization eventually results in Javert's demise.
At the beginning of the story, the protagonist's identity _is_ prisoner 24601. At the end of the story, it is not. Identity changes with time, context and circumstances, and how that identity is asserted will also vary from group to group.
distorsion. poor people being exploited has been a common trope for centuries. Les Miserables anyone?
Ultimately the movie industry in Korea is made of very wealthy people parading like friends of the poor. very amusing.
Les Miserables (2012) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1707386/
Okuribito (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/
The director, Tom Hooper, has made better movies in the past, notably The King's Speech (big winner at the Oscars in its year) and Les Miserables (got at least decent reviews).
It could have turned out perfectly fine if they just used cats for the characters. Like, CGI cats that look like actual members of felis catus, instead of humans who accidentally drank a polyjuice potion with cat hair in it.
Alas, Tom Hooper has a habit of retaining stage musical-like elements when he makes movies based on stage musicals. He shot many scenes in Les Miserables in a way that felt more like a stage production than a cinematic one; the difference is stark if you compare it with, say, The Greatest Showman -- which is a movie about a stage production! But Les Miz wasn't too bad, it was just a bit awkward. This time it seems Hooper has gone one step too far, though.
I'm not going to claim to be a connoisseur of literature, so perhaps I've just overlooked the greatness. The point I was trying to make is that the book takes a great many pages to advance the plot relatively little. If you're familiar with the musical adaptation and are expecting a more plot-driven novel, you probably won't find that the book meets those expectations. I have not seen any of the movie adaptations, and cannot comment on them; on the basis of your recommendation, I probably will not.
As I recall, structurally, the novel is somewhat like The Grapes of Wrath, with expository sections interspersed with sections that directly advance the plot. I quite liked that about the Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure if I take issue with the exposition/advancement ratio in Les Miserable, or if I feel less of a connection with the period Les Miserables is set in.
For children or not, I certainly won't hold The Princess Bride up as example of greatness. I would claim that the fact that it works as a send-up of a genre, including the alleged abridgement, is illustrative of something.
The article would better be titled, "How Les Misérables changed the world." Its impact is sadly lost in generations since who would rather view the film or musical at the expense of reading the novel.
I'm not surprised it's also the most adapted novel of all time as it is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever written and a monument to what literature can be. But I definitely worry that its impact will be more and more limited by alternatives to simply reading the original.
The past few times I've been to the movies it's been to Cinemark theaters since they added the cupholder-based captioning devices to almost all of their theaters a few years ago. They work well, but as the article noted, they're a pain because they're out of the line of sight and often don't want to sit still in the cupholder. When my fiancee and I went to see Les Miserables I spent pretty much the entire movie holding onto the captioning device with one hand to keep it positioned where I want it.
We have a couple of Regal theaters near us, so I'm definitely looking forward to trying this system out as well.
As for the comments on Glass -- yes, a real-time captioning device using Glass would be a killer app for me, and if it worked at all well it would be a "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" sort of thing. There would be some challenges to deal with (noisy environments, better speech recognition still -- Youtube's automatic captions still aren't there) but if they can surmount those, I'd be extremely interested.
I just watched "Les Miserables" and I thought it was great.
I'm usually mostly a Sci-fi and action adventure fan, and I didn't have high expectations, but it was one of the best movies I've seen this year. I think it deserves to win several Academy Awards.
I would imagine that the article about how atheists experience and connect with religion-inspired works would be relevant to someone trying to design a marketing strategy for a movie based on the Christian musical Les Miserables.