Les Miserables

This is what happened to my soul in the two hours and thirty eight minutes that I endured, like a  prisoner in Guantanamo, sitting in a theater with nothing but darkness coming from the screen. My soul ran for its life and hid in a remote, safe place where the asphyxiating ugliness of this movie could not strangle it.
I sat there trying to shield myself from the ineptitude, the dreariness, the forced bathos, the insincerity, the repetitiveness; from the costly futility of the entire doomed enterprise. Some doomed enterprises, like Cloud Atlas, have a shred of vitality fanned by their own belief in their ridiculous convictions. You can tell everybody involved knows it's a major dud, but they soldier on. This movie doesn't even have that. It is exhausted and exhausting and it has the energy of a funeral procession for someone deeply unloved. People in it behave like they are going to the gallows, everything is a last gasp. Hence all that crying, I assume. There is no joy, no fun and no life in it.
I could feel nothing but dread (and lethal boredom). Dread at the thought of Hugh Jackman opening his mouth to sing in a register that threatened to break his vocal chords, and my ears. Ordinarily, Jackman is a charming, talented performer, but this movie has the dubious distinction of making you loathe him. It also has the distinction of making you never want to read Victor Hugo's original novel. It is unfathomable to see this film and infer that the source material is any good. This is how criminally bad this movie is. The writers-composers took what is known to be a good story, and turned it into dreck. Tom Hooper's bizarre clumsiness as a director delivers the coup de grace. It murders the story.
I felt dread and pity at the sight of Russell Crowe, looking like he'd rather be waterboarded with piss, than stand once more in that stupid parapet with his tiny little nothing of a voice, and have to sing those dreadful songs. Russell Crowe singing is like "Garbo Talks!"; not a good idea. Whatever macho mystique the man had has been vanquished by his participation in this movie. If I were him, I'd be throwing phones at the producers.
I felt dread at the effluvia of snot and tears coming of Anne Hathaway's face as she sang, or rather as she heaved, with an unseemly, vulgar, and totally unprofessional lack of control, through that fucking song from hell (they are all the same, and they are all infernal).
When the miraculous face of Eddie Redmayne appeared, I almost fainted with relief. Soon he was crying rivers too, though he can sing. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, the official Victorian wench of filmdom, were charged with bringing enforced jollity, and they tried, but even their efforts seemed leaden.
Les Miserables is a horror movie from which there is no escape. It is like the cult hit The Room, but with money and stars. That is, it is the un-cinema; everything that a movie should not be. It seems to have been made by someone who doesn't know how to frame a shot, how to light a scene, how to make people move in space; let alone choose people who can sing. For some amateurish reason, Tom Hooper, a man who apparently is deaf and blind, decided to frame all the characters in extreme close up. This is a movie with no backdrops. You can't see anything beyond anyone's nostrils. Paris looks like a mound of gray turds.
The music is like an interminable barn dance but in a heroic key. Yet it has the gall to treat itself like an opera, so instead of talking between "songs", there is recitative. This is the one instance in which I was praying for the action scenes to happen, for bayonets to pierce bodies and cannons to explode, so that people would stop singing, and put us, Les Miserables in the audience, out of our misery.

Cloud Atlas

If a reviewer falls asleep and then wakes up and can’t take it anymore and leaves half way through the movie, can they still write about it? Hells, yeah!  

This is what happened to me while attempting to wrap my head around Cloud Atlas, possibly the most expensive, unnecessary B-movie ever made. No matter in what era of humanity we were supposed to be, no matter what egregious make up the characters were wearing, every single word they uttered was gibberish. It was like listening to kids when they pretend to speak a language.

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, is right. William Shakespeare, film reviewer. 

My recollections are as disjointed as the movie, hence I will render them here as such:

What does it matter if the characters are in San Francisco in the seventies, or Seoul in the future or Flinstoneland in some weird age, if we have no idea of who they are nor do we care? We never spend enough time in each of their storylines to give a rat’s ass about them, past or present.

I loathe stories of interconnection, be it through continents or ages. If a yurt falls in Mongolia and a gaucho sneezes in Patagonia, I could care less.

This is the worst piece of casting in the history, not of movies, but of mankind. Every single actor, except perhaps for Jim Broadbent and Ben Whishaw, is spectacularly wrong for the parts. This may be because all the parts are wrong for all actors, unless they were played by Martin Short, or Mel Brooks. Then this movie might have been a hoot. It did, at times, remind me of Spaceballs and not in a good way. It's Spaceballs with money. 

Let’s start with Tom Hanks. Always a trooper, he shows up with his customary bonhomie, despite wearing calamitous wigs and preposterous make up. He is, as always, working hard to be likable. But Tom Hanks is not the man for a period piece, let alone many periods. He is not the man for costumes or disguises. Giving him protheses of any kind will only make him look ridiculous. He is Everyman USA and he should stay this way. At least he tries to have fun. Everybody else seems to be walking on burning coals.

Halle Berry may be gorgeous, but she is as interesting as a plastic bag. When they give her a yellow wig and a reverse nose job and claim she is a Jew, we are on Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory. In fact, I propose that a full episode of that splendid series be devoted to this film. It’s the only way to endure it.

I could watch Susan Sarandon pad away in her pajamas all day long, but this wonderful actress is a thoroughly modern dame. She is no good as a cavewoman witch in the pastfuture. She seems to be crying out for a martini.

And don’t get me started about Hugh Grant, who should never, ever, for any reason, leave Notting Hill. He fares worst of all, at some point looking like Gene Simmons from Kiss. 

By insisting on having the same actors play myriad characters and plastering them with varying degrees of bad make up, the directors (the Wachovski siblings and Tom Twyker) actually undermine the thesis of their unwieldy contraption, which is that humans reincarnate or live through the centuries or some such crap. So when they try to turn sweet Jim Sturgess into a Korean man, a Japanese actress into a blond, blue eyed cave dweller, or Hugo Weaving into a busty woman, even though in their bleeding hearts they think that we are all humans and we are all equal, they actually undermine this by making all the characters into grotesque freaks. All they are doing is taking away from their humanity and spiraling into kitsch. Kitsch is the opposite of culture. Just sayin'.

Nice production design, for sure. It is everything that the make up is not. 

When I said to my movie companions that this is the kind of movie that could impress a 13 year-old with zits and a metaphysical bent, they told me that even such a creature would be bored out of their wits. As always, the cardinal sin in movies is boredom. One could withstand such an assault on common sense if it were nimble and had a sense of humor. It's supposed to be some big philosophical new agey mumbo jumbo, which translates into a cheesy, obvious, inane, bloated film, too full of itself to have a funny bone. 

My friend Orlando Leal has a term for creative enterprises that everybody knows are doomed from inception, but people nevertheless drink the kool-aid and soldier on, uselessly trying to whip them into a coherent shape. He calls the sad result an inventicide: a suicidal invention. Cloud Atlas is this.