The long-awaited film adaptation of Les Misérables had a huge Christmas opening, raking in over $30 million since Christmas day and generating a considerable amount of Oscar buzz. One aspect of the film that has created a lot of curiosity is the fact that the singing by the film’s actors (which includes Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe) was recorded live as the film was shot instead of the more traditional method of recording the vocals in a studio, then having the actors lip-synch it on camera.
With only a few exceptions, the lip-synching aspect of movie musicals has always annoyed me, so I had high hopes for this new technique, which involved the actors wearing tiny wireless earpieces so they could sing along with a piano player performing the music beyond earshot of filming. However, it seems that filming and recording singing this way resulted in a shooting style that made me feel like I was being attacked by giants trying to deafen me. Watch my ReThink Review of Les Misérables below (transcript following).
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