Good insights into the big Christmas movie...
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/12/30/Les-Miz-Age-Of-Obama
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/12/30/Les-Miz-Age-Of-Obama
The most important thing for a filmgoer to understand when viewing "Les Miz" is to realize that Jean Valjean and only Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is the hero of this story. Do not get fooled by the heroic depiction of the mindlessly earnest students screaming for revolution and building barricades in the streets as a futile attempt to rally the people of France to their side. Watch Valjean's reaction to them as they choose to face certain annihilation as a symbolic gesture. Watch how he values life over their depraved narcissism and ends up making a real difference, not a symbolic one.
The students' cries for justice and freedom are not completely lost on a conservative viewer, however. They are protesting an out of touch and bloated federal government that is unresponsive to the people's wishes and uninterested in hearing any dissent from the rabble. Replace those red flags with Gadsen flags and you can see some important parallels in the struggle. But once they take to the streets and build junk-heap barricades they end up as selfish, ineffective and destructive as Occupy protesters and they get the end-game they deserve.
In Obama's America the government has all the answers, the people are pitted against the "wealthy" and a sense of hopeless doom permeates daily life. So many Americans feel like the best days of our nation are behind us, and Obama has begun the slow and inevitable decline of our society with taxation crippling the successful producers and multitudes enjoying government handouts with a sense of entitlement and even contempt for those who provide the tax money to pay for them.
It is in this spirit that one should view "Les Misérables" and draw a very important lesson. Jean Valjean was at the lowest possible place a person can be. He was a desperate, angry criminal willing to let his rage at society destroy him. Instead, after being touched by faith in God, he brings himself up from the gutter and becomes wildly successful. He is constantly driven by his responsibility to his fellow man, his workers who rely on him and his determination to right wrongs and seek justice, not through government action but by his own efforts. And over the decades, he continues to succeed and help those around him while the government prattles on making things worse and never able to do anything effective at all.
Jean Valjean should be a model for all of us. It is too easy to be downhearted and angry over the direction our leaders are taking us. But we conservatives are not the ones who threaten to leave the country if an election doesn't go our way. We don't throw up our hands in surrender because our guy didn't win. If we stake everything in a four-year election cycle we are doing it all wrong. We need to focus on our lives, our faith and our families.