A Les Miserables TV spot ran this morning on MSNBC. Vivid, special — it woke me up. The finely textured 19th Century atmosphere and the exquisite, carefully composed, grimy-beautiful visual scheme is clearly top-of-the-line, but the emotional atmosphere seems to be (duhh) largely about pain, anguish and affliction more than anything else. Which isn’t necessarily what the film finally is, or what it will finally feel like.

It was observed three weeks ago that the Les Miserables material is familiar and classic and not exactly thrilling in and of itself, and that the stage musical is over 25 years old and quite traditional and retro-defaulty by today’s standards, and that Tom Hooper‘s innovation of having the actors sing live on the set is (this was a Glenn Kenny riff) doesn’t necessarily mean that the film will work splendidly. Live singing may seem to some like an exciting new approach to shooting movie musicals, but what will finally matter is whether or not Les Miserables works altogether…whether the entire working mechanism harmonizes in a way that inspires “wow, that was truly exceptional!” or “that was an entirely respectable rendering of a classic musical that was all the rage in London and Broadway back in the ’80s.”

If the latter impression dominates and Les Miserables becomes merely one of the Best Picture contenders then we’ll have an uncertain and perhaps even mysterious Best Picture race on your hands — an egalitarian race without a frontrunner or heavyweight contender, a competition among jacks and knaves and outliers without a big gorilla (or gorillas) that everyone’s looking to beat.

Yesterday Bleeding Cool‘s Brendon Connelly posted a list of 91 Regal theatres in the U.S. that will be Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbitt in HFR 3D — i.e., 48 frame-per-second and in the best-looking 3D your eyes have ever beheld — trust me. Regal is the first cinema chain to so announce.

The only L.A. location I’m spotting is downtown’s LA Live.

I’ve seen three of the four major titles opening over Thanksgiving weekend (Silver Linings Playbook, Life of Pi, Red Dawn, Rise of the Guardians), and there’s no question that SLP delivers the most in the way of robust, live-wire, audience-friendly satisfaction. But tracking stats indicate that the awareness levels aren’t there yet, hence the Weinstein Co.’s decision to open SLP limited on 11.16 to get the buzz going.

One rule-of-thumb is that total awareness needs to be above 50 if a film is going to make more than $10 million over the Thanksgiving weekend. Right now or very recently total awareness for Life of Pi is/was at 57, Red Dawn is/was at 58, and Rise of the Guardians is/was at 58. Silver Linings Playbook is (or was very recently) at 30. Everything will turn around once it opens and the word spreads, but right now Joe and Jane Popcorn are looking at that obviously referenced and complex-sounding title and going “wait…what’s that again?”

Right now Pi, Dawn and Guardians are first-choice picks ahead of SLP, but awareness is the key problem.

I haven’t seen Red Dawn but I’m not hearing many good things. Paramount’s Rise of the Guardians is a highly spirited, razzle-dazzle animated family flick. Life of Pi is Ang Lee‘s visually ravishing, somewhat meditative, prestige-level adaptation with a spiritual current or after-glow. Silver Linings Playbook is one of the best date movies I’ve ever seen in my life and a guaranteed Best Picture contender.

A semi-intimate screening of a major Thanksgiving release has been arranged for next Monday night (11.12) at a very high-end Santa Monica location, and I’m looking for a few highly movie-literate, alive-on-the-planet-earth HE readers to attend. You’ll be expected to bang out two or three graphs the next day so I can post some reactions. Food and drink will be served. Ample parking. I have to know today. Email me at gruver1@gmail.com. I can’t guarantee that everyone who responds will be invited but I need a good selection of sharp tools to attend, and where better to find these than among the HE community? Include your HE nom de plume when you respond.

Hollywood Elsewhere loyalist & contributor Jett Wells voted this morning a block or two from his BedStuy abode. I’m heading out in a few (it’s now 6:44 am) to my nearby polling place. This is the day, now is the time. Shame to all shirkers.

I’m sorry but I can’t see how this old-guy version of The Hangover can escape mediocrity with a script by the dreaded Dan Fogelman, who will live in infamy forever for having written Stupid Crazy Love, and the likelihood of rote, by-the-numbers direction by Jon Turtletaub, who gave us National Treasure and Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Straight paycheck work for Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and supporting players.

Michael Douglas, who presumably plays the older guy who’s about to get married, looks terrific.

Prediction: Gaiety, booze, hookers, madness…and one of them croaks.

Hats off to Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted and Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott for successfully cutting back on early voting in their states and thereby creating long agonizing voting lines and suppressing the Democratic vote as much as possible. The rightwing view these days is that you do what you need to do is help your guy win. Echoes of South American generals and goon squads favoring the oligarchs.

For the 179th time, George Lucas has spoken about how he plans to one day make his “own little personal films.” He conveyed this intention, which he has voiced for many years without actually doing making any small personal films, while attending Ebony magazine’s Power 100 Gala last Friday night. Lucas said that his last film, Red Tails, “barely got into theatres [but] I’m going to go further out than that. The [films] I’m working on now will never get into the theaters.”

It’s not Romney’s silence in response to the “End Climate Silence” guy asking about the connection beteen climate change and Hurricane Sandy. And it’s not his idiotic Ken Doll expression when the crowd boos the questioner. It’s the “USA! USA! USA!” chanting in response to the climate-change guy. It’s un-American and un-patriotic, in short, to warn about climate change because it’ll get in the way of job growth. Reducing greenhouse gases is a metrosexual European thing. We’re Americans, and we drive muscle cars!

A thought hit me during Sunday night’s dinner at Bouchon for Beyond The Hills and Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days director Cristian Mungiu that he could be in the Terrence Malick business if he wanted it. His rep as a woman-friendly, deep-focus, introspective helmer is such he could make indie-fashioned pics in this country with any in-demand actress in the business. They’d all work with him at the drop of a hat, Meryl Streep on down, because he’s a celebrated, Bresson-like perfectionist.

Beyond The Hills director Cristian Mungiu at Bouchon — Sunday, 11.4, 10:07 pm.

I asked Mungiu about this and he said that he’s heard from more than a few American actresses, all saying they’d love to work with him. But he really is a Bressonian in that he prefers (or has so far preferred) to work with non-actresses. He also says there’s something about the aura of an established or famous actress that might impose itself upon his process…maybe. But he’s open to the right thing if it seems right, he said, so no doors are firmly closed. He said he recently got an email from director William Friedkin about wanting to meet, partly because they’ve both shot films about exorcisms. But he’s leaving Los Angeles tomorrow with no plans to return anytime soon.

Mungiu, dp Svetlana Cvetko — Sunday, 11.4, 10:10 pm.