An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Joe Wright.
Cast: Robert Downey Jr, Jamie Foxx, Catherine Keener, Stephen Root, Tom Hollander, Lisa Gay Hamilton
Description: Steve Lopez is a columnist on the Los Angeles Times, reflecting different aspects of metropolitan life through his daily missives. Always looking for that one, great story to dazzle his readers, Steve finds it down Skid Row: a homeless man called Nathaniel Ayers and his battered, two-string violin. Nathaniel claims to be a student at Juilliard and when Steve checks, this tall tale turns out to be the truth.
Country: US/UK. 2008. 117mins
Lost souls: Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr
Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice and Atonement marked him out as a British director who could hold his own in Hollywood.
And he does that here in his first American feature with this fictionalised version of how an LA Times columnist found an ex-Juilliard musician — once a classmate of Yo-Yo Ma — playing a clapped-out violin among the many homeless of the city.
The film is smartly, perhaps too smartly, made and tries hard not to go for the clichés of the impoverished genius genre. It has good performances from Robert Downey Jr as Steve Lopez, the columnist who eventually wrote a book about the schizophrenic musician he tried to help, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, the lost soul himself.
Wright frames it with the music of Beethoven, which apparently obsessed Ayers, and it is used with some sensitivity even though a soaring bird in the skies of LA is used to illustrate it at one point. If this was unwise, and one doubts whether the real columnist was much like the fidgeting, nervously cynical Downey, the rest of the film keeps mostly to the truth of the storyline — which is that you can’t cure mental disorders that easily, however hard you try.
When, for instance, Ayers is persuaded to give a recital in front of an audience, he doesn’t play like an angel and get an ovation, as he might in your average Hollywood film, but leaves the stage, trembling, without playing a note. In the end, Lopez has to give up, realising that Ayers has possibly humanised him more than he has made a ‘‘normal’’ man out of Ayers.
Film Trailers by Filmtrailer.com
Foxx, trailing his supermarket trolley full of possessions and never looking Lopez squarely in the eye, aptly suggests that the musician’s undoubted passion for music and his craft will remain however much his failure as a human being condemns him to living in doorways. And Wright adds to the film’s sense of actuality by peering almost obsessively at the detritus of humanity who inhabit the streets.
They are the real thing, recruited as extras. This alone makes it a brave film even if there is also something about it that doesn’t quite ring true. A little too smart for comfort, perhaps.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Morning:
13°c
