Les Misérables
2012155 minutes
rated PG-13
by Scott Mendelson
The harshest thing I can say about Tom Hooper's Les Misérables (teaser/trailer) is that I can only imagine those who have not seen the original show wondering what the fuss has been all about. The film is painfully faithful, but film is a wholly different medium than live theater and the translation doesn't quite work. The picture is full of fine performances, almost too good in fact. The film's much-discussed live on-set singing pretty much works, but it only yields inherently different results in a few occasions. But still, the overall production feels akin to seeing the show for the first time, and that's not a good thing. What perhaps felt epic on stage comes off onscreen like a rushed and overstuffed story with occasionally inexplicable narrative choices and occasionally misplaced character emphasis. It comes off feeling less like one of the great epics of Broadway and more like a simplified and audience-pleasing version of the original Victor Hugo novel.
With the first glimpse of Star Trek Into Darkness, most of the discussion centered around how the second Star Trek 2.0 picture seemed to be channeling Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight to an almost embarrassing degree. But to be fair, a trailer is a piece of marketing seemingly separate from the film itself. And moreover, even if the new Star Trek does end up going along the lines of 'lone agent of chaos upends the simple morality of Star Trek and makes Kirk/Spock question their ideals while causing destruction and killing off a major character or two', I would argue it's less about overtly ripping off The Dark Knight and more about simply following the sequel playbook. In short, most sequels go darker, a trend that goes back to at least The Godfather part II. And most sequels question the somewhat simplistic morality of the first film, as seen in the likes of The Matrix Revolutions and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. But rather than dissect the sequel template (because 
