Why Les Miserables (the film) is brilliant #2: The Sweep! The Scale!

| by Lou | 3.55pm UK time |

After a lifetime of being confined to the stage, it is wonderful to see Les Miserables come alive at such an epic sweeping scale.

This was particularly swoon-worthy in the first half hour, from the opening shot through to the ripped pieces of Valjean's past flying over the countryside of France.



I salute Tom Hooper for approaching it with such ambition... and perhaps even more so for resisting the urge to apply it to the whole story, particularly in paring back the battle to portray it as the minor (relative to history) skirmish that it was.

Oooh I'm just making myself want to go see it again...



 

Why Les Miserables (the film) is brilliant #1: Colm Wilkinson

| by Lou | 6.25pm UK time |


As a lifelong Les Miserables fan who fucking LOVES the new film, I'm taking the liberty of giving you my Top 5 reasons why it's fucking AWESOME.

Colm Wilkinson as The Priest

There is a special place in the heart of every Les Miserables fan for Colm Wilkinson, the original (and forever the best) Jean Valjean. One of the highlights of my life was being at the O2 for the 25th Anniversary concert when, after the main show was over, the original cast came out and Colm stepped forward to the microphone to deliver his ubiquitous line "God on high...", prompting a spontaneous mass eye-watering/geekgasm.

So when his face appeared on screen to sing "Come in Sir, for you are weary..." it felt like a very warm nod from the filmmakers to the Les Miserables geeks of this world.


(Of course, this also had its down-points, such as my utter inability to retain any sense of composure in the film's finale as Colm joins Hugh and Anne in giving the greatest of all final lines.)

Unemployment Part 3

| by Lou | 10.55am UK time |

Hi everyone! It's me! I'm back! And for the third time in three years, I'm an unemployed bum engaging in all the soul-searching and self-pitying that that entails.


For reasons I can't put into a public forum, I ended up with some money in my bank account after a (very personally unpleasant, but professionally successful) one-year stint at a major studio working as an Analyst. And I was like "This will be easy! I'll find a new job no trouble! It took two-and-a-bit months to find that job, but this time will be different!"

Nope.

Well, yes actually - it will be different...Because three months later I'm like WHAT THE FUCK.


I've gotten an interview for one role, for which I was told I had too much experience (I did, so that was fine, it was at the very beginning when I was just testing the water).

I've since had absolutely no response to any job applications, even those for which I am perfectly (and, I assume, reasonably uniquely) qualified.

Oh, except for one where the agent replied to say that the job was too junior for me. (I then directly submitted a CV to the company itself, making myself appear slightly younger and slightly less experienced, and got no interest from that either.)

Contrarily, anything more senior and I don't even get a phonecall, let alone an interview, let alone the job.

What the fuck is going on??!

I've read probably literally hundreds of job-hunting blogs/ advice columns/ tips/ motivators.

I've refined my CV over and over.

I've kept in touch with every agency in town that handles media and entertainment.

I've scoured every jobs board, every day, and signed up to every job alert email.

I've written custom cover letters and custom refined my CV for every application, always applying within a day or two of the job ad appearing.


And NOTHING.

Okay, so you're thinking: Well, there's a recession on. The job market is rammed with people, and lacking in jobs. In fact, people are in much worse positions.

But it's London! And I'm highly qualified, highly experienced, and looking at jobs of all levels... including ones at about where I was six years ago when I left New Zealand.

In fact, after six years of working my way up again from nothing, having already established a career in New Zealand, now is when I should be leveraging all that to land a great job that actually increases my salary for the first time since 2008, not desperately scrambling about for anything.

And I think what's really, really bothering me is that I genuinely think that a lot of the people I've worked with are incompetent, disinterested, and lazy. Yet their careers seem to have happened so easily for them. And additionally, it seemed to me like a lot of the people I worked with in a film studio didn't even particularly like films. So I'm like "how come they have a job, and I don't?" But the secret is that they all got in on permanent jobs, while I've been stuck with contract positions, which are of course the easiest and quickest to cut (and thanks to the Tories, getting ever easier to cut). 

So... any ideas? New careers I could try out that it's easy to move sideways into...?? Any magic positive thought manifestos out there to help keep someone like me motivated......???

Because I'm very quickly descending into sitting-on-the-sofa-watching-tv-for-the-rest-of-my-life mode.