The tale of love, redemption and social unrest that unfolds in 19th-century France — whose dialogue, along with such showstopping numbers as On My Own, is completely sung — will feature live performances instead of following the tradition of actors lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track.

Tom Hooper, Oscar-winning director of The King’s Speech, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“If you are miming to a playback, even if the synchronization is done very well, there is a part of you that knows something is off, something is false,” he says. “When it’s live, you believe it so much more. The actors have complete freedom rather than following a recording done three months before.”

Hooper says the results deliver those “spine-tingling moments” he appreciated when he saw the stage show.

(thanks to mikhail) More from the USAToday piece after the cut.

Featured is Anne Hathaway as Cosette’s self-sacrificing mother, Fantine, singing the ballad I Dreamed a Dream. “Anne has been an extraordinary exponent of singing live,” Hooper says. “Her I Dreamed aDream is just jaw-dropping. It is so raw and heartfelt. It’s done in a way you could never do in playback.”

Though the challenges might be greater for actors to sing take after take, the benefits are plentiful. “When you are doing miming, 60% of your energy is just doing it correctly,” says Jackman, who had to lip-sync his way through a 1999 TV film of Oklahoma! “Even though it is your performance, you don’t feel you are in charge of it.”

Seyfried, who mimed her songs in Mamma Mia!, appreciates the different approach in Les Mis. “The cool thing is, no one has been tested this way before. We all are doing something revolutionary.”

But she has to be more disciplined about protecting her voice than she did while dancing giddily on a Greek isle to ABBA pop tunes.

“You have to sing every day,” the classically trained soprano declares. “You can’t abandon it. Seriously, it is a lot of herbs. A lot of singing in the shower. No cigarettes. Very little alcohol if you can deal with it. You’ve got to be careful with cheese. It is intense, living as a singer.”

Seyfried assures that it is worth it to star in the show she fell in love with when she was 11. “I was literally on the edge of my seat the whole time,” she recalls. “My mom says it was the first time she’s ever seen me focus on something for more than a couple minutes. It is hard not to become addicted to the music.”

Producer Debra Hayward just appreciates being treated to what amounts to a concert each day. “It’s not like working on a normal film, when you come in listening to the same tired old lines. Singing is so elevating, it makes you happy.”

Embargo blown. Nothing new. Variety and THR typically play with a disregard for rules that comes from decades of cavalier entitlement. I always feel like an enabler when posting things that “leak” but I think we know by now nothing much happens in Hollywood by accident. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter enjoyed Prometheus a lot more than Justin Chang at Variety. Both agree that Prometheus is no Alien. Shock! It’s probably not a cure for cancer either.

McCarthy:

Be careful what you wish for, especially if it involves figuring out who invented humankind. That’s the warning at the heart of Prometheus, a visual feast of a 3D sci-fi movie that has trouble combining its high-minded notions about the origins of the species and its Alien -based obligation to deliver oozy gross-out moments. Ridley Scott’s third venture into science-fiction, after Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982, won’t become a genre benchmark like those classics despite its equivalent seriousness and ambition, but it does supply enough visual spectacle, tense action and sticky, slithery monster attacks to hit the spot with thrill-seeking audiences worldwide…

Scott doubles his Alien pleasure with not just one but two strong female roles here. Rapace credibly expresses her character’s combined scientific and religious convictions… Blonded up, perfect of diction and elegant of body, Fassbender seems almost alarmingly neutered at first as the ship’s all-purpose valet but excels as he’s allowed to begin injecting droll comedy into his performance. As the captain, Elba has a few strong moments standing up to his “boss,” Theron, while the other actors are mostly cannon fodder…

Technically, Prometheus is magnificent. Shot in 3D but without the director taking the process into account in his conceptions or execution, the film absorbs and uses the process seamlessly. There is nary a false or phony note in the effects supervised by Richard Stammers, which build upon the outstanding production design by Arthur Max. Dariusz Wolski’s graceful and vivid cinematography synthesizes all the elements beautifully in a film that caters too much to imagined audience expectations when a little more adventurous thought might have taken it to some excitingly unsuspected destinations.

I’m pretty much just skimming past the middle parts of both these reviews because I don’t even want to dialogue quoted, much less read a condensed version of the plot. You know where to find more if your idea of fun is hearing about somebody else’s orgasm or their failure to achieve one. Variety’s review, after the cut, along with the most interesting of all the overnight reviews, from Mark Adams at ScreenDaily.

Chang:

A mission to uncover the origins of human life yields familiar images of death and devastation in “Prometheus.” Elaborately conceived from a visual standpoint, Ridley Scott’s first sci-fier in the three decades since “Blade Runner” remains earthbound in narrative terms, forever hinting at the existence of a higher intelligence without evincing much of its own.

a key difference between this film and its predecessor is one of volume. Incongruously backed by an orchestral surge of a score, the film conspicuously lacks the long, drawn-out silences and sense of menace in close quarters that made “Alien” so elegantly unnerving. Prometheus is one chatty vessel, populated by stock wise-guy types who spout tired one-liners when they’re not either cynically debunking or earnestly defending belief in a superior power. The picture’s very structure serves to disperse rather than build tension, cross-cutting regularly between the underground chamber, where two geologists meet an ugly end, and the ship, where efforts to contain the threat are thwarted by the increasingly uncertain chain of command.

Scott and his production crew compensate to some degree with an intricate, immersive visual design that doesn’t skimp on futuristic eye-candy or prosthetic splatter… Also providing flickers of engagement are the semi-provocative ideas embedded in Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof’s screenplay. The continual discussions of creation vs. creator, and the attitude of one toward the other, supply the film with a philosophical dimension that its straightforward space-opera template doesn’t have the bandwidth to fully explore.

Adams:

There were once plans to script a formal prequel to Alien, but the project evolved into Prometheus, which, while its climax offers tantalising answers in terms of the acid-for-blood alien creatures and the space craft they are first discovered in the original film, is very much a stand-alone film…albeit one that is very aware of the place it takes in the mythology of the Alien series of films.

Ridley Scott is a master when it comes to visualisation of the environment his stories are set against, and it is clear from the majestic opening scenes of Prometheus as his camera traverses an alien planet (in truth a blend of Icelandic vistas with more than a little CGI) and a magnificently muscled white skinned alien ingests something that causes him to melt away and genetically mix with the make-up of the world itself.

One thing that Prometheus isn’t is an Alien-clone. Alien – despite that it may feel slowly-paced set against current editing styles – was a film that embraced its horror-in-space format, and after a slow-burn set up and magnificent central gore moment as the mini-alien bursts from John Hurt’s chest settled into a brilliantly shot monster movie before Sigourney Weaver’s final memorable battle. While Prometheus has some striking chilling moments it never plays the all-out horror card, instead developing the science alongside the action and punctuating the film with moments that jolt and amaze.

…Alienfans will be on the look out for horror scenes that are variations on the theme of the ‘chest-buster’ or ‘face-hugger’ in the original film, and while in Prometheus things are never played for pure horror, there are some brilliantly staged scenes that will make audiences jump and squirm, and yes beasties do find their way into human bodies in nasty ways…and want to make their way out in an equally unpleasant manner.

The effects are brilliantly woven into Scott’s film, with cinematographer Dariusz Wolksi delivering some beautiful moments (the 3D is also very easy on the eye, and never too dark), while the production design from Arthur Max and Janty Yates’s costumes help give the film that real sense of a sci-fi epic. A Ridley Scott film is always perfectly shot, intelligently edited and easy on the eye, and Prometheus is no different.

New featurette takes us on a tour of the space ship Prometheus.

Emma Watson leads a relatively unknown cast in The Bling Ring, Sophia Coppola’s new film based on the real life escapades of the “Hollywood Hills Burglars.” In 2008 and 2009 a group of teenagers raided the home of several celebrities making off with as much as $3 million in cash and booty before they were nabbed, most of it from Paris Hilton, whose house was burglarized several times. The best account of the burglaries is by Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair, who called the crime spree “completely unprecedented in the history of Hollywood.” The heists have been fodder for hundreds of lurid cover stories for many months. Here’s the questionable segue Maxim chose.

Time was, the Manson family haunted these hills, striking fear into the hearts of the rich and photogenic. Forty years later, Hollywood was once again being simultaneously terrorized and captivated. But the culprits this time were just a knuckleheaded crew of errant teenagers enraptured by the glitz and glamour of Hollywood’s cult of celebrity. They would pick out the jewelry and designer clothes from the pages of fashion magazines, target the celebrities who had what they wanted, and then track their locations and movements using online sites like TMZ and celebrityaddressaerial.com (a kind of map to the stars’ homes using helicopter photography). From there it was easy: Hop a fence, open a window, and rummage through enough closets until they found what they were looking for. Call it the Home Invasion Shopping Network.

In one short year of operation, from October 2008 to their arrest in October 2009, the crew’s hit list of brand-name marks—Paris Hilton, Lohan, The Hills’ Audrina Patridge, The O.C.’s Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Brian Austin Green, and Ashley Tisdale of High School Musical—netted them a reported $3 million in cash and swag. The same magazines and Web sites they fetishized ate it up. TMZ dubbed them the Burglar Bunch. The Los Angeles Times went with the Bling Ring. Media blog Gawker made their pitch for the Beverly Hills Bandits. Whatever you called them, it was apparently a story tailor-made for Hollywood, especially when the culprits—young, wealthy, and attractive—were finally collared. (Maxim)

It was always going to be a mere matter of weeks (days, minutes) before Hollywood adapted its own investigation, so I suppose we’re lucky Sophia Coppola got her hands on the case before the Lifetime Channel trampled the evidence. Oh, too late.

Hugh Jackman is looking very Oscar-worthy, I must say. By “Oscar-worthy” that should read, Oscar-baity.  But you know, either way Jackman is probably due for some recognition.  The other interesting thing about Les Mis is that it plays right into the frustrations of Americans now, as the rich are so plainly and obviously getting richer and the poor, well, the poor shop at Walmart.

USA Today’s Susan Wloszczya went to London to talk about the production and here is what director Tom Hooper had to say:

 After winning the Oscar for 2010′s The King’s Speech, he had his pick of projects and went for Les Mis. “I wanted to take a risk on something,” he says. “I was interested to find material that worked on a very visceral, emotional level. What would be better than a musical?”

Hooper also appreciated the timing of such a politically charged piece. “We are living in a moment of particular anger and discontent about inequality and iniquity in society. It has come to a head as the result of the recent crash. And Les Mis, in its way, is the great cry of the dispossessed and suggests there is hope for meaningful change.”

Pics after the jump.

Nothing in this film speaks for its mastery more decisively than its depiction of that war. Given all the time and detail lavished on that depiction, it’s clear that the film’s creators—director Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”) and writers Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner—were betting on its power. A very good bet it was, too. Scene after wonderfully crowded scene evokes the color and tone of this bitterly ideological struggle, as do the militant songs—the choruses of “Viva La Quince Brigada” that come rumbling along, irresistible accompaniment to the battle scenes.

The Hollywood Reporter agrees, “the film looks rich and resplendent, perhaps at times even too spiffy and pristine. Geoffrey Kirkland’s production design and Ruth Myers’ costume design are nothing if not resourceful and evocative, with Rogier Stoffers’ cinematography enhancing all their color and atmospheric detail.”

Quite apart from its dramatic and visual qualities, the first thing to be noted about this kaleidoscopic biographical study is the way Kidman looks. The first image you see is of a strikingly beautiful older woman, 70ish, smoking and cementing viewer connection with her brilliant blue eyes as she scorns love and asserts her hunger for “what’s happening on the outside. Action!” She does resemble Kidman but looks too authentically old to actually be her. The question occurs: Did they get someone of the correct age — Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Vanessa Redgrave — to play these interview scenes?

[If you want to see how Kidman looks octogenarianized in the opening shot, check her out.]

There are negative reviews too. Seek them out at Metacritic. Right now the thing itself is on the screen in the room with me, so I’m going to un-pause the DVR and find out for myself.