Django, Les Mis, and Lincoln.

So I've seen the big three, spent seven hours and twelve minutes in the dark, and what have I learned? 

Django.  A deeply moral film I thought.  Wonderful performances. Wonderful to look at. Artfully structured, sometimes tight, sometimes sprawling, sometimes almost clumsy, but at no point can you take your eyes away.  Except I could.  Couldn't watch some of the scenes. Wondered behind closed eyes if the sound effects wouldn't have had as great an impact.  Loved the humour.  Loved the way our need for humanity and love is expressed by an amoral bounty hunter. Loved the disjoint of material and form.  Loved the way I was unsettled throughout, when you think it's this, the rug is pulled away and it's suddenly that.  Loved the fact that it a film as much about the present as the past.  Loved the pastiche, the way genres were turned on their heads, but the scene with the Klan, although hysterical, felt more like a Mel Brooks out take than an homage. In the right hands, you can say more with humour and flash than you can with reverence as long as what seems excess is based on intelligence, passion, and a desire to tell the truth.  I'll be returning to the South later this year, driving past the white mansions on River Road, graphically aware whose backs they were built on.

Les Mis.  I never saw it on stage. I never wanted to. I went because I wondered if I'd been unfair, snobbish in my assertion that nothing on earth would ever drag me to The Glums.
And I still don't get it.  I don't get how Nunn, Caird, MacKintosh et al saw that this could be a success. The music is monotonous, the lyrics banal, the story repetitive.  I can see, as someone who was bowled over by the RSC Nicholas Nickleby that by bringing that style of early eighties upfront RSC energy to a piece like Les Mis some of the audience would be seeing something they'd never seen before in a theatre. But most of all I didn't care, about any of them, I just wanted them to stop so I could go home.  And, I know, it all comes down to taste. Some will like, some will loath. 
But there was one exception, a mini master class, a performance that jumped off the screen, Colm Wilkinson. The original Jean Valjean nipped in to play, God, I think, and showed how it should be done. In his few minutes there was more intensity and honesty than in the rest of snot - ridden, tear - sodden two hours and thirty seven long minutes.
I saw Colm Wilkinson when in another life I took a party of kids from Doncaster to see Jesus Christ Superstar. A Saturday matinee, well into the run, he was playing Judas. The opening minutes were very lack lustre, from where I sat in the stalls I could see the cast on the ramps either side of the stage were more interested in chatting than the audience. And then Mr Wilkinson took charge. His performance was incredible. A huge talent, totally in control, he shook the place up, and if I could lip read I'd be able to tell you what he said when he whirled around and laid into those cast members who were happy to cruise though a lazy Saturday afternoon.  If you're going to do something, do it, and don't give short change. A great man.

Lincoln.  I went to see it because I'd read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin - a wonderful book, and because I hoped that it was going to be more than God Bless America.  And it was. Like Django it is concerned with the present as well as the past. Excellent performances all round.  Day-Lewis is amazing. It's a performance that is restrained, it doesn't seek to dominate, this Lincoln can exasperate with his endless tales but he can listen too.  Like Django It doesn't let us off easy. This story isn't about the past. The battle isn't over. Complacency and prejudice are still as strong. The same mistakes are being made.  Lincoln fought the battle with his weapons in his time, but his victories were only a step on the way.  The final moments of the film flash back to Lincoln giving his second inaugural speech which reaches out as a rallying call for us to continue to be vigilant.
And the Oscar goes to .....?