She picked "Les Mis."
I was underwhelmed. I read the book back when I was young and immortal and didn't have to worry about dying before I finished it. Since, we've seen it on stage almost as many times as I have fingers and thumbs, and I thought, well, all right, for the One and Only. Bearing it all in good grace, I drove us to the mega-flik-plex snarfing and snarling at the stupid drivers who chose to come out onto my dad-burned highways the same time I wanted to use them, which causes her to pat my hand, which takes a major chunk out of my ability to bear it with good grace.
We get seated ten minutes early and I read the screen which says to turn off my cell phone, which I do but no one else does, which is why they show the message a half million times I guess. Then above the popcorn commercial playing at ten db above the threshold of pain, I hear the rumble of major death and destruction playing in the theater next door. It's got to be the new "Die Hard." My sigh drowned out the popcorn commercial too.
Eventually, they roll the flik, and I gotta tell you, that opening scene grabbed the crap out of my attention. Whoa, right out of the chute, a major monumental visual.
Before I saw that I really only had one movie scene in the category "Majorly Monumental Movie Scene," and that was in "The Heat of the Night" where Sydney gets slapped on the face in the orchid green-house of the white grandfatherly aristocrat dude, and Sydney slaps him back. Man! That is all time, in my humble opinion. In the musical "Les Mis" I have always thought the scene where the priest tells 24601 to take the candle sticks also is monumental, but in a soft, feel in the belly of your soul subtle sort of monumental. That scene came across in the movie about how I stored it in memory from the plays.
Throughout movie, I was impressed with how vivid the story was with the things a movie can do that a musical can't. Now the "filling up the sausages with this and that" scene, I found myself hankering for the musical version which is limited to the power of suggestion, rather than the visual which could gag a maggot inured by viewing countless autopsy scenes in CSI shows.
My major disappointment was with the "Master of the 'Ouse." Through no fault of the actors, I saw a perfect MOT(silent)H on stage in London. Just perfect and he got stuck in my head. The movie dude didn't have a chance. The only other thing was that in the musical, there are a number of times where on stage, actors sing different songs simultaneously. It comes across just fine on stage in my humble opinion. They goobered that up near the end of the movie where an old dude is singing on a staircase, JVJ is on ground floor singing, and away from him but on the ground floor too, Marius and Cossette are singing. The way they cut visually from singer(s) to singer(s) was klutzed up, still I'm grateful they didn't try a screen-in-screen. Maybe ESPN has that copyrighted.
Anyway, "Les Mis" the movie. Majorly worth it, I don't care what any detractors say. I went through my three pieces of Kleenex, the Squeeze's pocket pack from her purse, and was glad it was winter and I had on a long-sleeved shirt.