New releases on the South African circuit on January 18, 2013.

Les Misérables

By Joseph McAleer, Catholic News Service

If your wish list includes a lavish, big-budget musical crafted in the classic Hollywood manner, then “Les Misérables”  is just the ticket.

This rousing entertainment offers something for everyone: soaring anthems, tear-jerking romance, thrilling drama – and a positive portrayal of the Catholic faith.

In fact, this faithful adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel, which was transformed into a worldwide stage sensation by impresario Cameron Mackintosh, is a deeply moral story. Characters rise and fall calling on God for grace and mercy, seeking personal redemption while trying to better the lives of others.

As the central character, ex-convict Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), comes to realize, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) paints with an enormous brush and “Les Misérables” is staged on an epic scale, overstuffed with grand set pieces and hundreds of extras. Hooper’s fondness for extreme close-ups heightens the emotional wallop, and will likely send some viewers scrambling for tissues.

The labyrinthine story spans two decades in post-revolutionary France and revolves around three characters: Valjean, who breaks his probation and seeks a fresh start; Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), obsessed with finding Valjean and bringing him to justice; and the doomed Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who sacrifices everything for the care of her out-of-wedlock daughter, Cosette (Isabelle Allen).

The kindness of a Catholic bishop (Colm Wilkinson) convinces Valjean to amend his life. Over time, he changes his identity, becoming the benevolent mayor of a village and a factory owner. When Fantine is unjustly fired from his factory and forced into a life of prostitution, Valjean steps in, promising the now-dying woman that he will raise Cosette as his own.

Cosette has been living with the Thenardiers (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter), wicked tavern owners and professional pickpockets. Their collusion with Javert makes for a narrow escape for Valjean.

Years pass, and Cosette has blossomed into a refined young woman (Amanda Seyfried). On a Paris street she meets a young revolutionary, Marius (Eddie Redmayne). It’s love at first sight, much to the chagrin of fellow rebel Eponine (Samantha Barks), who happens to be the Thenardiers’ daughter.

Can Cosette and Marius’ love survive the rising tensions of the mob, as streets are barricaded and weapons drawn? Is Javert closing in on Valjean at long last? “Les Misérables” barrels along to a satisfying climax that is profound in its endorsement of the power of faith.

With little spoken dialogue and 50 songs from composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, and lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, “Les Misérables” is more opera than musical. Fortunately the actors’ pipes are up to the challenge, especially Hathaway, whose heartbreaking rendition of the signature tune, “I Dreamed a Dream”, is sensational.

The film contains scenes of bloody violence, a prostitution theme, and nongraphic nonmarital sexual activity. Adults.

 

Django Unchained

By Kurt Jensen, Catholic News Service

A hyper-violent Quentin Tarantino revenge film, “Django Unchained”  seems ill-timed at best in the wake of the December 14 massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut. But here it is all the same.

As in most movies that Tarantino both writes and directs, the violence is by rote. Characters die by a single gunshot with a little splatter, their demise as tightly choreographed – with the help of computer-generated special effects – as a routine by the Radio City Rockettes.

Tarantino also takes great pains to construct his story of pre-Civil War slavery so that only those participating in, and profiting from, that evil enterprise are killed.

Jamie Foxx plays the titular character, a brutalized victim of America’s “peculiar institution.” Django’s fortunes take a turn for the better when he is bought — and eventually freed – by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German-born dentist who has found more profit in bounty hunting.

Schultz is a crack shot, and always has the court orders he needs to immunise his violence. The reward money for the criminals he pursues is in the thousands of dollars. And, since the bounties are offered on a “dead or alive” basis, he always brings his captives back as corpses.

Schultz is touched to find that Django has a wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was sold away from him. She’s named after the German mythological goddess Brunhilde, and speaks German as well.

Together, Django and Schultz conspire to rescue Broomhilda from her current owner, Mississippi planter Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). But Candie learns what the two are planning through the treachery of his obsequious, foul-mouthed butler, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).

Tarantino unleashes the same over-the-top attacks against Candie and his ilk as he previously launched against Nazis in his 2009 historical wish-fulfillment fantasy “Inglourious Basterds.” Incongruously, though, he also incorporates satiric shtick reminiscent of Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy “Blazing Saddles”.

Thus, at one point, Django and Schultz are pursued by hooded men on horseback who form a crypto-Ku Klux Klan. But the chase quickly loses momentum when the disguised men complain that they can’t see well out of their eyeholes.

Tarantino also evidently finds it quite funny when 19th-century characters swear, and do so with contemporary expressions. The use of the N-word in the dialogue has been clocked at 110 appearances. But at that frequency, it loses all impact.

Explosives as well as bullets are deployed, apparently in homage to the dynamite tossed by John Wayne’s character in “Rio Bravo,” a 1959 Western Tarantino has long identified as his favorite film.

In pre-emptive justification of his protagonist’s rampage, Tarantino depicts the horrific physical degradations of chattel slavery with careful attention to historical detail — and without much prurience.

The inhumanities depicted include whippings, the use of chains and other restraining devices, the branding of escapees, confinement in outdoor “hot boxes” and threats of castration. Worst of all, perhaps, is the fate of a slave torn apart by dogs.

While it thus offers a stark reminder of the sins wrought by racism, this is not a picture for the casual moviegoer or the easily jarred.

The film contains a revenge theme, pervasive and explicit bloody violence, a glimpse of full male nudity, fleeting upper female nudity, frequent profanity as well as constant rough language and racial slurs.  Limited adult audience (films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling).

 

Gangster Squad

By John Mulderig, Catholic News Service

Early on in the stylish but excessively violent cops-and-robbers tale “Gangster Squad” , the villain of the piece – a reptilian gangster played by Sean Penn – has a rival chained to two cars which drive off in opposite directions, tearing the victim in half.

That’s a fair tipoff of the mayhem to come which, taken together with the film’s murky morality, makes this fact-based drama, directed by Ruben Fleischer, suitable only for the most stalwart adult viewers.

Penn’s baddie, Mickey Cohen, is a Brooklyn-bred ex-boxer intent on making 1940s Los Angeles his own. Out to stop him, by any means necessary, is the metropolis’ police chief, William Parker (Nick Nolte).

Parker commissions idealistic World War II veteran Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) to form the team of the title. Made up, most prominently, of slickster and fellow Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), tough African-American officer Coleman Harris (Anthony Mackie) and electronics expert Conwell Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi), the squad will operate outside the law to break Cohen’s power.

Along the way to a conclusive shootout that seems to reap as many casualties as a small-scale military operation, Wooters secretly romances — and straightforwardly seduces — Cohen’s good-hearted moll Grace Faraday (Emma Stone).

O’Mara and company occasionally express second thoughts about their methods. But screenwriter Will Beall’s script, adapted from Paul Lieberman’s eponymous book, presents their illegal actions as the only practical solution open to them.

Given Cohen’s ruthlessness – he eventually orders a machine-gun attack on O’Mara’s home, endangering the upright sergeant’s pregnant wife, Connie (Mireille Enos) – the audience is invited to react as viscerally as the characters to his seemingly unstoppable reign of terror. Moviegoers will require maturity and prudence to work through the tangled ethics of the situation – and a strong stomach to endure the wild gunplay and interludes of brutality.

The film contains a vigilantism theme, scenes of gruesome, bloody violence, a premarital situation, brief partial nudity, numerous uses of profanity and much rough and crude language.  Limited adult audience (films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling).

 

Playing for Keeps

By John Mulderig, Catholic News Service

Viewers who frequent romantic comedies will have noticed the genre’s drift toward the sordid.

Last year alone saw the release of “What’s Your Number?” with its promiscuous heroine, and “Friends With Benefits”, a film whose slang-based title aptly captured the misguided values its script took for granted. Throw the duo of “Sex and the City” movies into the mix, and the evidence for this tendency seems hard to miss.

The good news about “Playing for Keeps” is that director Gabriele Muccino and screenwriter Robbie Fox buck this unwelcome trend. The bad news is that, while their sports-themed project sees family values taking the field, the result, when the final whistle blows, is respectable – but not especially compelling – entertainment.

There’s something static about the proceedings, which focus on the personal travails of washed-up British football star George (Gerard Butler).

Conscious of his shortcomings as a flawed husband to his American ex-wife, Stacie (Jessica Biel), and as an absentee dad to their son, Lewis (Noah Lomax), George has recently moved to suburban Virginia, where Stacie had relocated, in an effort to play a larger role in the boy’s life. With the same goal in mind, he agrees to coach Lewis’ youth soccer team, teaching them the finer points of the beautiful game as part of his efforts at reform and repair.

Hunky jock George soon has a succession of soccer moms throwing themselves at him. This breathless bevy of admirers includes emotionally unstable divorcee Barb (Judy Greer), sophisticated, also divorced sports announcer Denise (Catherine Zeta-Jones) – whose broadcasting connections could prove helpful to George – and Patti (Uma Thurman), the wayward wife of the squad’s boisterous financial backer Carl (Dennis Quaid).

George, however, continues to dream of reconciliation with Stacie. So, a single, off-screen sexual escapade aside, he shows unusual discretion for a male movie character by consistently turning down opportunities for immoral gratification.

George is adamant, for instance, in refusing Patti’s adulterous advances, all the more so since giving in to them would represent a betrayal of Carl, whom George has come to regard as a friend.

Low-key and mostly amiable, “Playing for Keeps” makes a positive impression but not a very deep or lasting one.

The film contains an implied nonmarital encounter, brief nongraphic sexual activity, fleeting gory images and some crude and crass language. Adults.