...Because Hollywood's tossing us a movie version of the Les Miserable musical this Christmas. I am...interested. I've actually read the book, in its door-stopper entirety, because, well, I like books like that. I'm curious to see what the American movie process makes of Hugo's basic " wow rich people suck but God is on the side of the poor I guess" message.
Also, Hugh Jackman. So that's a plus.
I'm not going to pretend I don't like musicals; I love musicals. I have more soundtracks in my collection than any other kind of music. I have seen musicals about love, gods, and zombies, and I enjoyed them all. But that doesn't mean I love musical *movies*. Musicals, like Shakespeare, are something I almost always love in theaters and only sometimes like onscreen. There's a certain unreality created in live theater that makes the weirdness of sudden singing and dancing more acceptable, somehow. Movies seem to be pushing for an acceptance of story-as-reality that can make anything artificial or even unlikely perversely harder to accept.
I wish I had a term for this viewer-collaboration mindset. Ne-Kulturny that I am, I'm stuck with saying "That thing, like when you're reading a book you don't need to know what the protagonist looks like to live behind their eyes, but in a movie that would be forced, and so audience mindset sort of changes to allow for the limits of the medium but then that very mindset becomes a tool of the medium itself". It's a big mouthful and if anyone knows the proper terminology I would appreciate hearing it.
In related new, two pages today! I would have had one up last week but apparently internet post-election fallout clogged the pipes here on Wednesday morning?!? And I post Wednesdays, not Thursday or later. So here, have two pages, with way more detail added.