Oh, readers. I’ve done that thing again. I’ve gone and seen Les Miserables without having seen the musical or read the book and now I’m writing about it without the massive burning swollen bladder of fandom that everyone else seems to have about it, and as such, will probably sound a bit naive. I had literally no idea what it was about. Well, apart from “France” and “revolution” and some presumably rather miserable people and – something that was used to successfully sell the whole thing to me – pretty young men draped attractively about the place in military uniform, covered in blood. Oh, and Hugh Jackman singing. He apparently does lots of musicals in Australia, and I was curious to know what that was like, since I know him primarily as the not-very-musical-ready Wolverine.

Maybe I should just hand in my human card at the desk.

Did I like it? Well… yes. I think? Sort of. There was a lot that I found either directly unappealing or straight-up baffling, but overall, there was sufficient stuff in there to make me want to see it onstage. And, well, I’m a sucker for musicals.

The main thing about this film is that it suffers from being a film. There are things that you can only do in the magical reality of the stage, and this particular production (directed by Tom Hooper) tries on the whole gritty reality thing (except with people singing all the time) and therefore can’t get away with similar tricks and tactics. This is most glaringly obvious in how they depict (or not) the passage of time. There were some bits that were completely confusing because I just couldn’t tell whether or not time was meant to have passed or not. For example, on stage, as my stage-show-fan friend tells me, Fantine (Anne Hathaway) can waft in and out of the set to show many days passing between her selling her hair and her teeth before eventually being forced by circumstance into becoming a sex worker. In the film, it looked like she’d lost her job, and then immediately sold everything in her face and became a sex worker.

I was like, wow that’s a terrible afternoon.

It happened again after Cosette’s (Amanda Seyfried) wedding. “I can never tell my adopted daughter that I’m an ex-con!,” Valjean howls, sheathing his Adamantium talons and fleeing for the hills, where he staggers into a convent and casually dies in the corner. I assumed he’d had an ill-publicised heart attack in the carriage on the way over.

The next problem I had with Les Mis was the way Valjean was so suffused with his role as apparently French Ex-Con Jesus that for me he ended up being completely impossible to identify with. I found his motives and decisions inexplicable to the point of being hilarious. I wanted to have the film retitled “Jean Valjean’s Baffling Sequence Of Life Choices” because in this rendition at least, he comes off as too saintly, too self-righteous and too… incongruously self-sacrificial for me to see him as a real person and empathise with him. Ever.

“Also I have to dive out of this window now lol bye” “YOU BAFFLING SCOUNDREL”

And what on earth was going on with the cinematography when anyone was having a solo? With a stage show, if someone has a solo, you’ve got them as a figure in context with the set, the extras, all embalmed in live music. So you can empathise with them properly because there’s this whole holistic musical experience going on. Not so with the film, where the director has decided that the best way to make you empathise with the solo singer is to have a VERY TIGHT CLOSE-UP of the singer’s face, slightly off-centre, while they cry and sing at the same time. This is not how you make your audience empathise with anyone or anything. I found myself wondering how they’d done Anne Hathaway’s makeup while the rest of the cinema sobbed around me.

Has now sported this look in about 32,412 films, but is working it

Right, time to talk about Javert. As my more long-term readers will know, I’m a villainsexual creep, and my darling friend who kindly dragged me from my Doom Fortress to see this flick accurately predicted that I’d have the hots for Javert. She was not wrong. I have never before fancied Russell Crowe in anything ever (in fact, quite the opposite) but I honestly found Javert the only character that I empathised with and found engaging and explicable. Plus, he’s got an attractive array of uniforms and shiny boots. In fact, that was a great way to tell – in the absence of any bloody thing else – the passage of time. It had to be later on: Javert had MOAR BRAID. I’m okay with that. Time-keeping through the medium of men in uniform? I’m deleting my phone’s clock app this afternoon.

I actually quite enjoyed the fatalistic pointlessness of barricade-building rich white boys¹ harping on about no longer being slaves and changing the world and then being run over with cannons. That was grand. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a structures-of-oppression-ruining bloody revolution, but this is a film, and I’m a bloodthirsty little boy with the need for something hard and horrible to counteract Valjean’s large-overcoated saintliness, so I was overwhelmed with the beauty of their cataclysmic failure. So beautiful. So horrible. So… uh.

Deserves better than Marius, period. In fact, deserves own, better-orchestrated revolution not being led by Marius & co.

Now, Eponine (Samantha Barks). Eponine is meant to be an empathic, sadface-inducing character, and she’s sweet and earnest and I rather liked her. But Marius, the guy she’s in love with, is so boring. I just wanted her to get over it and find someone interesting who doesn’t apparently fall madly in love with people when he glimpses their hats from a distance through a crowd.

It’s always nice to see Helena Bonham-Carter reprising her timeless role of “Cackling Woman With Hair” (I don’t think they even give her a costume, do they? That’s all just her wardrobe), too. And I sincerely hope that after playing Signor Pirelli in Sweeney Todd, Sasha Baron-Cohen is typecast as Musical Skeevy Comic Relief for the rest of his life and never plays another vaguely-veiled bigoted stereotype ever again.

Overall, it really wasn’t as miserable as I was expecting. Valjean lives a long and successful life, Cosette and the boring Marius (the gorgeous Eddie Redmayne) get married, Fantine’s wishes are vindicated, all that stuff, and everyone dies happily ever after with a rousing song about sticking it to the man. All this talk about how much sobbing it elicits from people generally makes me wonder if someone’s snuck into my room at night and glued my tearducts shut. It struck me as generally rather uplifting and “Oh well! Songs and Christian Love!” rather than “DESPAIR AND CHIPS FOR EVERYONE”.

To summarise! YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The music is genuinely brilliant. Believe the hype.
• Everyone plays really, really well. Flawless performances from Anne Hathaway (in particular), Wolverine, and even Russell “Are You Not Entertained?” Crowe, who has a spectacularly grizzly, stoic turn as Javert
• It really does look exceedingly good

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• I’m not sure how many of the characters feel like real people, honestly
• It suffers from its own medium in a few glaringly obvious and immersion-breaking ways
• It feels pretty obnoxiously long, but that might just have been me and my bladder having a disagreement
• People do sing pretty much all the time and you might be allergic to musicals, but if you’re allergic to musicals WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SEE LES MISERABLES

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: are they meant to be an underclass? Despite Eddie Redmayne being a Rather Cut-Glass Etonian ;). Anyone read Hugo/able to verify how they’re meant to come across?!

Repeat readers of my contributions will know that when we’re dealing with things that could potentially be spoilered, I tend to engage vagaries and nonspecifics to try and save people the pain.  This won’t be any different, but just in case, here it is:

THE SPOILER WARNING.

There.

Boobs

Overall, Nolan hasn’t done too badly.  Anne Hathaway seems a good choice, and there isn’t any in-yer-face cleavage or suspicious anti-gravity trickery.

Unlike in Arkham City.

+1 to Dark Knight Rises

Though she did have some cool moves, those boobs never seemed affected by the basic laws of physics.

Bums

Catwoman does have a black, skintight suit, but so does Batman – some compensation, I guess? – and there are only a couple of unfortunate shots of her bum as she rides the bat-bike.  This is however; a) a big improvement on Arkham City‘s near constant sexy-butt-wiggling right in centre-camera, and b) offset by her being awesome on that bike.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Backstory

It’s important to remember that the game and the film encounter Selina/Catwoman at different points in her story and her relationship with Bruce/the Bat.  Despite this, both mediums do quite well in demonstrating her motivations and character.  The film, however, does marginally better as it manages to do this while advancing, generally, a bit more respectful portrayal of her as a woman.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Bitch

The most disappointing Catwoman scene of the whole thing. “You dumb bitch!” snarls the guy she’s fighting.“No-one’s ever accused me of being dumb before,” says she. Now, Selina ignoring the b-word could either be a) because she’s showing that its intended purpose (as an insult) doesn’t affect her, therefore suck it, or b) it’s such a commonplace piece of vocabulary she doesn’t see why it’s so excruciatingly wrong. I hope, and like to believe (based on Hathaway’s facial expression on-screen), that it’s the former.  I was midway through writing this at the time, so I’m extremely disappointed it was there at all.  Seeing as we’re comparing the movie to the game, however, having one instance of “bitch” in the whole film is 1000x better than hearing it every other second, like you do in Arkham City.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Boots

YES THEY’RE TOTALLY PRACTICAL.

Also in that “bitch” scene is the sudden appearance of Selina’s massive metal stilettos. Why?! No one can be that gymnastic in 5″ fucking heels. As you may note, this hacked me off considerably. The film tries to justify these ridiculous boots by having the inside of the heel sharpened like a serrated blade (check out the poster image, right) – but that seems to me like a poor token to try and throw off the fact they’re pure decoration and only there for prettifying Catwoman. She doesn’t need them! They aren’t practical, even if there’s a Swiss Army Knife in those heels, it’s just… no.

The second attempt to validate them comes as a baddie asks her if they hurt (implied: to walk in) to which she responds, “I don’t know, do they?” and kicks him with one. Fun retort, maybe, but they’re still unnecessary, and all the credibility the film gained by not focussing on her boobs is lost as they just use those heels to return her to unrealistic pin-up status. Game-Catwoman has similarly stupid shoes so there’s no betterment to be found here.

+0 to Dark Knight Rises

To sum up…

Nolan & Hathaway’s Catwoman does better than Arkham City‘s, but there remains a lot of space to improve.  The age-old issue of practical footwear is the big one for me –  after making such an effort to cover up cleavage, making the top half of her outfit much more practical, what exactly was the point in contradicting that by forcing her to don stilettos?

The ‘bitch’ thing also irked me quite a lot, but it was much better than in Arkham City, which was almost unplayable in places for the amount of churning rage brought about by being called a Catbitch so often (I mean, aside from the fact a female cat can be called a ‘molly’, ‘queen’ or ‘dam’ where a bitch is a female canine, of course).

Film Catwoman has the common sense to tuck the boobs away so they don’t lollop around as she beats up baddies

As I said, film-Catwoman’s body isn’t made nearly as much of a focal point as it is in the game.  There’s no cleavage to ogle, lots of close-ups on her face, and when her body is in view, it’s often as hidden as Batman’s is by varying descriptions of black attire.  Downfall is a bit a of bum-shot while she’s on the batbike, but this is nowhere near as big a negative point as Catwoman’s near-constant sexy wiggling in Arkham City.¹

On the whole, film-Catwoman does much better than game-Catwoman for all the above reasons and many more I daren’t go into here for fear of lolspoilers.  The film on the whole is pretty awesome, and the female characters are integral to the story: despite what the trailers may suggest, it is not simply Bat vs. Bane with a bit of eye candy on the side.  I won’t say more because that’ll give too much away, but go see it and decide for yourselves.  I enjoyed it immensely and will probably be seeing it again in the not-too-distant future.

1. NB: Yes, I know about the portrayal of Catwoman in many of the comics and blah blah fidelity, but this is the 21st century, not 1940… so, surely, we can update her just a little to move with the times after 70+ years?  And I don’t mean revealing more skin.