A few weeks ago we peeped a grainy video of what appeared to be a teaser trailer for the upcoming Les Misérables movie musical in which Anne Hathaway singing featured prominently. And we didn't like it!

She sounded warbly and strained singing one of the show's bigger numbers, the bombastic lament "I Dreamed a Dream," but mostly, the technical aspects aside, it was simply the sheer Anne Hathaway-ness of it all that bothered, the squishy presence of that needy and kinda pretentious theater kid quality that she tends to exude in, well, most of her roles. It didn't sit right, it was irksome.

Well now we have the full, ungrainy version of the teaser and, well, OK. Obviously this being better quality than the last video, Hathaway doesn't sound so dire. So we will mea culpa for our perhaps harsh initial reaction. But, like the students on the barricade, we won't back down too much.

There's still something off about her singing, the thin kid-playing-dress-up faux classiness of it. Plus, it's just really hard to buy Anne Hathaway as a dying 19th century French prostitute. That is a bit of a stretch for this undercover Rachel Berry. That said! The camerawork looks lovely and so does Eddie Redmayne, and we are more than intrigued to see/hear Russell Crowe, playing dogged policeman Javert, bust out "Stars." So we're not exactly un-bullish on this movie, not yet anyway, and we do take back some of the stronger objections we had to Hathaway's Fantine fiasco, but we still want the movie to know that they're on notice. We're watching you, Les Misérables! Well, like, yeah, we're totally watching you when you come out, because come on it's musical theater's most elegant slice of cheese in movie form, but we're watching you the other way too. 

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at rlawson at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Richard Lawson