Les Miserables, Django Unchained and Lincon

I cannot remember a more harrowing experience at the cinema. This is my surprising verdict on Les Miserables, especially as I found the stage version so much more uplifting. In the theatre we were, perhaps, insulated from the darkness of the story. Detached from the action on the stage, engrossed in the singing, the orchestra (no comparison between live music and that on film), the performances and the occasional fun, I thought this was an intelligent and fulfilling musical. But on film, the story drew me in, and seemed unremittingly savage. Here the action is far more vivid and explicit. The director, Tom Hooper, has brought us up close and personal to the main characters,  most of whom are deeply troubled souls. So we are completely devoid of wit or humour. Even the comic "Master of the House" turns into a quite nasty scene. There are prolonged close ups of the stars when they are singing, probably a by product of them singing live. I also felt that here we had actors singing, rather than singers who can act. I was never able to think of them as the characters they played, but as Russell, Hugh, Ann etc performing. Therefore, only the fairly unknown Samantha Barks as Eponine was totally convincing. Don't get me wrong, this is still a highly memorable movie. There are some great cinematic moments. And when you think we were paying under £10 a ticket and the theatre was £60, it was certainly value for money.

You can always rely on Quintin Tarantino to be original and outrageous. Django Unchained is a western Jim,  but not as we know it. This is a highly uncomfortable picture of slavery in the southern states of America. A reminder that the horrors for the negros transported from Africa did not stop on the ship. The 13th Amendment is still some way off. Is Tarantino the Shakespeare of our time? Who else writes new stuff that is popular and intelligent at the same time. If Shakespeare lived today, his work for cinema would be just as bloody. Perhaps Tarantino lacks the subtlety of the bard, but his references to early movies (this time the spaghetti western) is not unlike how Shakespeare raided old stories of his time. Back to Django. The dialogue is as enthralling as anything Tarantino has done before. The story is exciting and shocking. The acting is first class. Jamie Foxx, Christolph Walz  are superb, but are surprisingly topped by an almost unrecognisable Samuel L Jackson as the horrible Uncle Tom. An Oscar waiting to happen. There is a lot of violence, and I mean a lot. That is probably why Tarantino was not nominated for best director, when he should himself have been close to the Oscar.

What I wanted to say about Lincoln has already been said. This is the review in The Daily Mail. Thank goodness someone thought the same as me about everything. A worthy movie, but one that is interesting more than involving. I liked the man in Lincoln's cabinet who walked out when he started on another of his interminable stories. A boring man, completely untrustworthy, but a big political manipulator. Daniel Day-Lewis does a good job, but am I the only one who thought his high pitch did nothing for his character. For once, the score by John Williams did nothing for the movie.

Steven Spielberg has admitted Lincoln is the first film he’s directed wearing a tie.
So respectful and stodgily solemn is his Oscar-nominated film it looks as if Spielberg directed it in a 19th-century frock coat with white kid gloves, and on bended knee.
It’s not all bad. The film offers a minutely detailed account of the political wrangles leading up to the adoption by Congress of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery across America.

It succeeds in showing Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) as a political fixer, not above bribery and being economical with the truth.
If you’re gripped by the minutiae of 19th-century American politics, it’s moderately enjoyable.
Its message for today is partly about the importance of idealism with regard to racial equality, but it’s also — very topically, in the light of Barack Obama’s tribulations — about the need for compromise.This is most powerfully dramatised in the reluctant decision of Lincoln’s ally, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) to tone down his radical, racially egalitarian beliefs in order not to scare off the Right. Jones’s moments of light relief and irreverence — though far too crude for the historical context — steal the picture, and will probably win him Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars.
James Spader’s portrait of W. N. Bilbo, a cheery rogue who did much of Lincoln’s dirty work, is also watchable. Sally Field, as Lincoln’s neurotic wife Mary, has a thanklessly nagging part, but does at least manage to reveal a side of Honest Abe that was slightly human.
Day-Lewis looks the part and supplies plenty of gravitas, with welcome traces of a dry sense of humour. He remains, however, a mythic, super-heroic icon of leadership, speaking in wise parables and high-flown rhetoric.

Loyal: Sally Field stars as First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln

The sad truth is that Spielberg and his writer Tony Kushner are offering a phoney, sanitised version of Lincoln. Most modern re-evaluations of the Republican President suggest that he was not the liberal that present-day Democrats would like him to have been.
The real Lincoln believed in whites’ superiority over blacks, condemned miscegenation and was keen to ship black slaves off to overseas plantations after the abolition of slavery.
You’d never know it from Spielberg’s film, but the anti-slavery 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign by early feminists called the Women’s National Loyal League. The film wildly exaggerates the President’s role in ending slavery and virtually ignores black people’s contribution.
The most prominent abolitionists included newspaper editor William Garrison, heiress Angelina Grimke, novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and the freed slave Frederick Douglass. Not one of these is mentioned in Lincoln.
The film most culpably leaves out the fact that, while events in this picture were occurring, southern slaves were already rebelling and seizing the land where they worked.
Nowhere in the film is any mention by Lincoln or any of his allies of the strategic advantages of ruining the slave-based southern economy, and freeing millions of slaves behind enemy lines, many of whom would then fight for the Yankee army.
This is high-minded hagiography, and too much of it resembles a Disneyfied waxworks show with an animatronic version of Daniel Day-Lewis intoning speeches by the great man in a reedy tenor, while John Williams’s sub-Aaron Copland score strains for sonorous solemnity.
Spielberg ends the film with Lincoln’s assassination, but here again the director’s decision to show the event from the point of view of Lincoln’s young son has the effect of infantilising history.
The murder by John Wilkes Booth was not as Spielberg portrays it, an isolated event, but part of a political coup, with two other assassination attempts plotted simultaneously against Lincoln’s vice-president and secretary of state.
Spielberg is always a professional, and the film is never less than well-crafted. Though some will find it a tedious talkathon, it’s quite a bit more enjoyable than his last venture into similar territory, Amistad. But I don’t see it doing well on this side of the Atlantic.
There’s none of the flair, fun or originality that mark Spielberg’s finest work. It was a patriotic inevitability that this very American film would receive multiple Oscar nominations, but if it does win at the Academy Awards it will be more for worthiness than for artistic or historical merit.