Not surprisingly about Justin Timberlake. He gave a great performance in Love Guru. Okay, I was surprised too ;) But now I won't be.

Tom Hooper, who just won the Best Director Oscar for The King's Speech is set to direct Les Misérables.

I love Les Miz and would be thrilled to see a good movie version of it, but I have a hard time imagining a studio allowing it to be the proper length.

You can't make a good movie version of it because the good parts of the book are in the things that will never be put in a movie.

The musical is a fine musical as a standalone thing, but it is a faint shadow of the book.

The book is a ponderous tome with entire chapters devoted to expendable material (see the chapter about the convent, for a prime example, the only purpose of which was to say that Jean Valjean worked there, as it bore little bearing on the forward motion of the narrative).

The musical, however, cuts the book down to a mere 3 hours. But a 30-hour musical movie? The industry will never believe that American audiences could handle it.

Sorry, Morri- but I disagree with your assessment of the book. I think perhaps to many people who have become accustomed to soundbites and synopsis it can be considered "ponderous",* but to me every word in that story is where and how it should be- to excise anything from the original story only serves to diminish it. I love the musical, but the original story is one of the greatest novels ever written, second ( imho) only to Flaubert's Madame Bovary.



(* Not directed at you- just at all of us who have had our brains altered by the computer age).

The stage musical has been slowly whittled over its history to where it now runs 2.5 hours, as opposed to its original 3. Two and a half hours is a perfectly normal running time for a big event movie these days, so I don't see any real reason not to keep the musical intact. The real challenge will be dealing with all those gorgeous but motionless ballads. Having an actor stand alone on stage and sing is thrilling in person, and potentially deadly on film, and this show has a lot of that. I imagine there will wind up being many cutaways to illustrative montage during songs like "I Dreamed A Dream" or "Empty Chairs At Empty Tables" to avoid the spectacle of hapless actors lip syncing while looking forlorn for entire songs at a time. I hope it all works out. I adore this show. But it could be a ponderous bore of a movie if not handled carefully.

I hated the musical, never read the book.

* * * * * * *

But last night, I saw a movie I was so intrigued by. It's called "Howl" and stars James Franco as beat-poet Allen Ginsberg, author of the eponymous 1955 poem. Also featuring David Strathairn, Bob Balaban, Jeff Bridges, and Jon Hamm - which wouldn't be unusual for a "Hollywood" movie - but this is more like a documentary - and yet not.

Yes, in that every word spoken by any character in the film was truly spoken by the characters they play. But otherwise, the scenarios were dramatically re-created, and not "reported" on in documentary style. The controversial poem at the center of the piece is rendered wonderfully in two ways - a re-staging of a 1955 Ginsberg reading (by Franco) at an underground club that was, of course, the epitome of the beat poet Go-Daddy-O scene so often lampooned and copied - - - and an animated accompaniment to a less-public-drama reading, also by James Franco, that constantly punctuates the action - which shifts between the censorship / obscenity trial of the poem's publisher, and an extended interview with Ginsberg that deftly illuminates the poem as it unfolds in the aforementioned treatments and at the trial.

It really is an unusual and, imo, an unusually successful format for a film. So I recommend it for that alone. But it's also equally worthwhile for the appreciation of this seminal work of poetry and of Ginsberg as a person that can be gleaned through this oddball, wonderful film.

What did you think of the play VS the subsequent movie verison of Phantom of the Opera?

Caught the first two parts of HBO's Mildred Pierce last night. Production values are fabulous. Costuming spectacularly spot on. Amazing that nothing was shot on the West Coast.

I'm missing the spiffy Warner Brothers dialogue. Overall, an enthusiastic response from me. The first two parts are set up, grittier than Hollywood gloss.

Good quality television and Guy Pearce is just slimey from the get go. Wally is just, ew.

Kate Winslet is very good. I'm not sure if I will like the grown up Veda or not.

As I remember it, the movie version of "Evita" had so many cutaways during numbers I was starting to have seizures.