The Soloist

The Soloist is a true story about a reporter, Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) who comes across a homeless man, Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx). The interesting twist is that Ayers was a cello student at Julliard at one point in his life. For those of you not familiar with Julliard, it is the Harvard of music schools. Downey is intrigued to find out how a talented person with that kind of back ground ended up living on the streets. The movie tells the story of Ayers and how he ended up homeless.

This was a good movie. It wasn't particularly enjoyable to watch. Some scenes were actually frustrating and even painful to watch. It kind of felt like doing community service. The message I came away with was more than a particular story. This film created a greater awareness for the issues of mental illness and homelessness.

The performances were good and I was relieved to see Jamie Foxx had his normal hair back while watching the special features afterwards. By the way, how has Downey transformed from a young punk with substance abuse problems who was always in trouble with the law, to a can't miss movie star? Talk about resurrecting your career. I really like him. I also liked the psychedelic Fantasia tribute during one of the concerts and can't believe it went on as long as it did.

If you are looking for a pick me up movie, this is not it, but it is a good movie with an informative message and the makers were successful in creating greater awareness for the plight of the mentally ill and homeless in America. I give it 7.1 stars.

The Impossible Dream

I think this is one of the most inspirational songs ever written.
I put the lyrics below.




To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

Arranged

I have other media piling up in my queue of things to blog about here. But I just finished watching this movie and I liked it so much I have to report NOW!!

I really, really, liked this movie. I pretty much smiled through the whole thing. It's on netflix instant play. Watch it.

The basic story is about a muslim girl and an orthodox jewish girl, both teachers at the same school, who become friends and find they share some of the same concerns associated with being slated for arranged marriages. I won't give away any more of the story but I will tell you why I liked it.

Simplicity-- There's nothing overly hyped or hollywoodized here. Even the script, at times, seems raw. But in a good way. It's unpretentious. But the acting is so phenomenal (especially the performance of Zoe Lister Jones as Rochel) that everything the script leaves out is told by gestures, facial expressions, etc. I believed everything about her character. I love great acting! (ps. another movie with fantastic acting is Moonlight Mile.)

Religious Theme-- In most films coming out these days, religious people are usually portrayed as freakazoids, condemning others and shouting hellfire and damnation. (I'm thinking mostly of Where the Heart Is, but I know there are plenty of other examples. Chaka, help me out here.) I felt so refreshed to see in this film, the obvious antagonist was the school principal who repeatedly pulled the girls aside and told them they need to stop dressing so modestly, join the womens' movement, basically that they need to get with the times and abandon their traditions. I really identified with these ladies and was so happy to see a film that respected and upheld their religious differences. And a film in which the person putting them down was obviously a jerk. (what's the female form of jerk? jerkesse?)

Happy Ending with kind of a little tiny twist-- It's just an all-around good story. I don't know what else to say. Watch it and let me know what you think.

Hello, This is your blog speaking. I am feeling a little neglected lately. No reviews, no comments, no attention. I am sending out a distress signal to the contributing authors. It's a plea for help. If I had to make an analogy it would sound something like "Help me Obi Wan Kenobe, you're my only hope".

I know you are all are watching movies and TV shows, reading books, and listening to music. Don't pretend you are too busy or too good for me. I made you what you are and I can send you back to where you came from. Now let's see some media musings.

Flash of Genius

This movie is about the legal battle between the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper and the big auto makers. Sounds riveting. I can't say I was expecting any court room scenes with people yelling "you can't handle the truth!", but it was still better than expected.

The movie takes place in the mid 60's and continues into the early 70's. Greg Kinnear plays Bob Kearns who is a engineering professor who comes up with the prototype for the intermittent windshield wiper. He tries to market his invention to the big 3 auto makers. Ford sees his design and plans to work with him on production but before they can start the process they pull out and say they are no longer interested. Shortly after they unveil his invention on their newest models. As a result he becomes completely obsessed and paranoid and eventually has a nervous breakdown.

Shortly after Ford offers him a settlement but he rejects it and insists on suing them. The case is held up in court for years and his relentless obsession for justice causes his family to fall apart. He ends up representing himself in court as he attempts to prove that they stole his invention. Kinnear gives a great performance and the movie has an authentic feel for the time period it takes place in. At times it is uncomfortable to watch the pain he brings on himself and his family as a result of his stubborn quest for justice. Flash of Genius may not feature the most exciting subject matter, but I give it 7.0 stars.

Taken

In the movie Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills who is a retired special ops agent who's daughter is kidnapped by a human trafficking and prostitution ring while she is visiting Paris. He is forced to put his skills into action as he attempts to locate and rescue her before a 96 hour window closes. Since much of this movie takes place in France it has the same European feel as the Bourne series. I also could have sworn it had the exact same sound track during the many action scenes.

If you like seeing middle aged men beat the crap out of bad guys then this movie is for you. It is very intense and violent and it has been quite a while since I found myself so riveted to a movie. This was written by Luc Beeson but has a much more realistic feel to it than his Transporter movies. There is the obligatory inability of bad guys to shoot the hero at close range with machine guns, but I have given up on this criticism since almost every action movie I have ever seen if guilty of it.

Maggie Grace was very convincing as the clueless 17 year old daughter, but Liam Neeson steals the show. During some moments he is cool headed and calm as Quigon Jin, but at other times he unleashes his fury in a precise and controlled fashion. The main thing I learned from watching this movie is that you don't mess with Liam Neeson's daughter. I could relate to his vengeful anger. He gives John McClane, Jason Bourne, and Jack Bauer, a run for their money This was one of the better movies I have seen in a while. I give it 8.2 out of 10 stars.

Old Movie Review: “Jaws”

(Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a Peter Benchley novel)

I saw the movie “Jaws” a couple of nights ago. It was the first time I’d watched it beginning to end in years. The first time I saw it I was in 1975. I was 9 years old and I stood in a line with my folks and 7-year-old brother that stretched around the block of the theater. It was the movie everyone saw that summer and everyone talked about, and it spawned the summer blockbuster. (Caution: more fish metaphors ahead.)

Even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know the plot: a 25-foot great white shark menaces a New England island resort during the peak fourth-of-July tourist season. (Are you sure you want to go to the beach this summer?) You probably also know the iconic scene of fisherman Quint (played by Richard Shaw) scraping his fingernails across the chalkboard to get the attention of the squabbling town folk and the unforgettable duh-dun duh-dun dudududu music that cues the shark.

It doesn’t take much for director Steven Spielberg to hook the audience on the story and reel them in. Suspending disbelief is easy because everyone knows that sharks do, on occasion, attack ocean swimmers and surfers. (Hey, what was that touching your leg in the water? A rope of seaweed? A jellyfish? A shark fin?)

The story is more than a two-hour feeding frenzy. A new sheriff fresh from New York City confronts an entrenched town council more concerned with making money over the July 4th holiday than the safety of the mainland tourists descending on the island. Trying to do the right thing when you are a fish out of water isn’t easy. Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) is swimming upstream; the mayor wants to keep the shark attacks quiet; no one wants to starve in the winter because the tourists stayed away all summer.

Yet Brody persists and Spielberg builds the suspense. Brody calls in a nerdy shark specialist, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and hires Quint to track down the shark and kill it. During the voyage, and while the shark stalks the three men, Quint captivates Brody and Hooper with his gruesome, first-hand account of sharks devouring his crewmates of the sinking U.S.S. Indianapolis, the ship that delivered parts for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. It is as spooky as any ghost story you’ve ever heard and all the more frightening because it is true.

Stomach-churning gore is kept to a minimum. Spielberg accomplishes the storytelling mostly by hinting at the shark’s location and through the controlled terror of Brody, Hooper, and Quint struggling to keep a leaky boat operational long enough to kill the monstrous predator before it kills them.

I’m sure part of why I like the movie is remembering the experience of seeing it for the first time, but if you like suspense or Spielberg, you’ll likely enjoy it, too. Put it in your cue, if you’ve got one, or find it on HBO during the month of February 2009.

The Christmas Sweater by Glenn Beck

Just a little warning that this is a SPOILER REVIEW!

If you think there is any remote possibility that you will ever, at any point in your life, read this book, please stop reading IMMEDIATELY!

There.  Now I don’t have to feel guilty.  You’ve been adequately warned.

 Let me just start by saying that this was my first exposure to Glenn Beck.  I’m not even really sure what I’ve heard about him, except that he seems to appeal, on purpose, to LDS audiences.  I got the book for Christmas and thought it looked like something I might actually make it to the end of, so I read it.

First of all, there are about 500 blurbs all over the book that tell you what it’s going to be about.  Eddie wants a bike for Christmas.  Eddie gets an ugly sweater instead.  Eddie is mad and his life is somehow changed forever.  So, the fact that I was told this scenario 500 times before I started reading made the first….oh, about 50 pages really boring.  It wasn’t until after he got the sweater that I actually became somewhat interested in what happens next.

Second observation: Glenn Beck’s writing style is really repetitive.  There is a flashback on every page.  No, that’s not an exaggeration.  Granted, he’s trying to tell a story by describing what Eddie’s life was like before THE CHRISTMAS SWEATER.  But, I’m pretty sure that a mark of a good writer (which I do not claim to be) is to vary the style or at least write in a way that is not a distraction.  I was distracted many times by the constant flashbacks.

 Then there was the resolution.  

Excuse me while I flashback here for a minute.  Any time I start to read a book, my husband, Weston, finds it and reads it all the way through before I do.  He read this one in about an hour.

When I got about three-fourths of the way through I started to wonder how this story was possibly going to resolve in any satisfying way.  I don’t like sad endings.  Neither, I suppose, does Glenn Beck’s audience at large.  I wondered out loud to Weston: 

“How is he going to resolve this?”

This was followed by my husband trying to tell me that Eddie gets involved with drugs.  And he reiterated the fact that the book is intended to be something of an autobiography, and Mr. Beck was apparently involved with drugs.  I didn’t believe him.  And he was totally lying, anyway.

Then I said, with sarcasm oozing out of every breath:

“I suppose he’ll get to the end and wake up and realize it was all just a bad dream.”

Silence from Weston.  But he gave me enough of an unassuming smile that he didn’t give away the fact that I was right.

I WAS RIGHT!!!!

I was totally kidding.  To me, that is the archetypical cop-out ending.  You just DON’T write a story and have it resolve with the main character waking up from a bad dream.  You just don’t.

Well, I guess it’s not so bad when you read the epilogue and realize that the entire book was written for the purpose of Mr. Beck trying to find another outlet to describe a vivid dream he once had.

Still…..anyone want a copy of The Christmas Sweater?

The Transporter 3

I liked the first Transporter movie. The second one was almost like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Within the first few minutes I realized I would have to suspend my sense of reality and turn off my "that's totally fake" meter if I was going to enjoy the movie. I had to accept the fact that wooden doors can shield you against close range machine guns, and if a speeding jet crashes into the ocean you will only get wet. Once I made these adjustments I was able to enjoy it as a fun and mindless action movie. The third movie continued with this same trend as the second.

I was anticipating a movie full of totally fake stunts and I was right. Even Stratham's car window healed itself after he did a flying dragon jump through the glass and kicks a bad guy out the other side of the car. I'm not going to pick apart all the goofs in this movie, I understand it is stylized and has Luc Beeson written all over it so I will stop criticizing the fakeness of it now and move onto different criticisms.

I like Jason Stratham, but is he trying to overtake Matthew McConaughey's coveted position as king of the shirtless scenes? There were four or five scenes where he took his shirt off in the movie. Oh that's right, he has to out of necessity, because he uses his shirt as a weapon when he fights. My bad. Another pattern I've noticed is that he keeps getting put with unknown female leads or newcomers in these movies. The Ukranian chick in this movie played by Natalya Rudakova bugged me. There are plenty of beautiful women in the world to choose from, so why was she picked? She reminded me of Jar Jar Binks each time she'd open her mouth. I was seriously just waiting for her to say "Meessa luva you" at some point.

This movie has an exciting premise and I enjoyed the action, but I missed the humor of the prior movies. I only give it 5.9 out of 10 stars since it was the weakest of the three in the series. If you are a woman you can go ahead and take 2 more points off that rating. That being said, if The Transporter 4 ever comes out I will gladly go see it at the dollar theater with the guys.

Coldplay "Glass of Water"

This is a great song. I don't think I could ever get sick of it. The lyrics might not make perfect literal sense when you read through them, but that's great because then they might mean something different to you each time you listen to it. Actually, maybe you shouldn't read the lyrics the first time you listen to it.

Also (speaking as a musician, or a musical snob as my hubby likes to call us) I think this song is musically stimulating. More so than...a lot of songs. (You know how some pop/rock songs make you want to bang your head against a wall because they're so repetitive and numbing? Okay, so maybe that doesn't happen to you.) Anyway, you've got to check this song out. It's on the player to the right. Great lyrics, great music.... love it.

Glass of Water Lyrics:
Scared of losing all the time
He wrote it in a letter
He was a friend of mine

He heard you could see your future
Inside a glass of water
The ripples and the lines
And he asked
Would I see heaven in mine?

That is just the way it was
Nothing could be better
And nothing ever was

Oh they say you can see your future
Inside a glass of water
The riddles and the rhymes
Will I see heaven in mine?
Oh Oh Oh Oh I

Son, don't ask
Neither half full or empty is the glass
Cling to the mast
Spend your whole life living in the past
Going nowhere fast

So he wrote it on a wall
The hollowest of halos
Is no halo at all
Televisions selling plastic figurines of leaders
Saying nothing at all
And you chime
Stars in heaven align
Ohhhhhhhh I

Son, don't ask
Neither half full or empty is the glass
Cling to the mast
Spend your whole life living in the past
Going nowhere fast

What are we drinking when we’re done?
Glasses of water

John Adams

There were a lot of things to like about this film.  

First of all, the music.  Original score by Robert Lane.  It is very reminiscent of the soundtrack to Last of the Mohicans.  Weston was trying to convince me that it was indeed the same music as Last of the Mohicans.  But turns out it wasn't even the same composer.  Just the same key and similar fiddle action.  I actually liked this soundtrack a little better.

Next, the acting.  Paul Giamatti was great and so was Laura Linney as Abigail Adams.  Dimples and all.  It was actually the dimples that gave her away as Truman Burbank's wife and so occasionally I found myself thinking about the Truman Show instead of American History.  And along those lines, tonight we watched Fred Clause and I just couldn't let go of Giamatti as John Adams.  

There was apparently a goodly amount of artistic license incorporated in the retelling of John Adam's life.  I'm mostly thinking of the relationship he had with his son George who died at an early age of alcoholism.  In the movie he renounces his son for his wild and drunken behavior and won't forgive him, even after he is dead.  However, historians on wikkipedia have contradicted that depiction saying that's not really how it was.  How was it really, then?  Who knows. In fact, Adams was pretty harsh with all of his children in the film, not having been around to raise them. I'd like to believe that wasn't an accurate depiction, either.

That brings us to a major theme of the latter part of the movie....historical inaccuracy.  At one point, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson discuss: "who is going to tell the story of our revolution?" They conclude that no one will.  Well, at least no one will be able to tell it accurately. The history books will all be written by people who didn't experience it themselves.  

Am I the only one who thinks this is ironic?  A retelling of a historical event making the argument that retellings of historical events can't possibly be accurate?  Hmmm....was it the chicken or the egg that came first?

Okay, so there was a lot to like.  I suppose there may have been plenty to dislike also if I had been looking for it.  Problem is, there wasn't much I could see beyond that GOSH DARN SHAKY CAMERA!  It drove me crazy.  I can understand that the competitive world of filmmaking induces directors and cameramen alike to implement a variety of filming techniques so they can make a pretense of being artsy and in vogue.

But, for the love of all that's good in the universe....could you just put that thing on a tripod every once-in-a-while?  Or at least during the quiet or tender scenes when John and Abigail are talking to each other after having lived apart from each other for nearly a decade?  I think a mark of good filmmaking is that the process and techniques used in making the film don't distract the audience from the story.   I just wanted to enjoy and learn from the story and appreciate the film as a whole.  Not to wonder every once-in-a-while if watching much more of this would make me throw up.