Here's a quick summary: the French criminal system sucks and the poor are oppressed. Love and generosity and forgiveness are more important than justice or legitimacy. Also, it sucks to be a street kid.

[link]

In more detail:

a French ex-con goes undercover when he realizes that keeping his own name means he can never get a paying job. One of his employees, a dying former prostitute, begs him to care for her illegitimate daughter. He raises her as his own, always aware that the police are after him, and hiding in plain sight as a successful man of business.

When the girl is full-grown, there is a populist uprising in the streets of Paris. The girl falls in love with one of the ringleaders; meanwhile the obsessive policeman is still searching for the ex-con.

The finale is a pitched battle in the streets between the poor and the forces of authority. The ex-con saves the life of the young man, and spares the life of the obsessive policeman, who kills himself in shame and outrage. Then he dies just as his adopted daughter marries her political activist, and the cast sings the tearjerking final songs.

It's quite melodramatic, but very sympathetic to the plight of the poor, and Javert & Valjean have a fascinating relationship.

Also, high-class people sing with a "genteel British" accent even though are French, and poor people sing with a Cockney accent, even though they, too, are French.

(I love it.)

I probably won't see The Hobbit OR Les Miz in the theater, but I might work it out. Holidays mean family means babysitters, so here's hoping.

I really need to finally read the whole book.

Fascinating fact: The barricade in the film was built when the cast were given 10 minutes to construct one from the furniture in the set houses. They were surprised to realize the next day it would be their actual set.

Yeah, we are totally counting on the grandparents to let us get out to at least one movie, which if I get my choice will be The Hobbit for sure.

Huh. I've never seen or heard Les Miz. I guess I should fix that some day.

I really need to finally read the whole book.

The movie made me want to reread it. Maybe this time I'll actually read the Waterloo bit without skipping. (Convent digression? Yes. Paris sewer digression? Hell yes! Waterloo....ugh. It's like Moby Dick's catalog of whales only WITHOUT THE INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT WHALES.)

Waterloo was my Waterloo.

Hugo is already a difficult author because of his ginormous vocabulary, the Waterloo chapter was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. (Or rather "the drop of water that made the vase overflow" as they say in French.)

We were supposed to read it in French in my senior year French class in high school. I think I got through two pages.