August Runs: Unless "August Rush" refers to some horrible gastric infection which results in chronic diarrhea, I don't get it.
I already mentioned August Rush once this week but since I've had to go another week without seeing Mama Mia, you're going to have to get the full lecture.
Movie Review #4
AUGUST RUSH - Dianna's Pick (Sorry that I have to pin this one on somebody, but it might as well be Brad's Colombian Princess).
We knew going in that August Rush was supposed to be "a little girly," but when has that ever deterred my taste in movies, music or fashion? Once the movie started though we realized that by "girly" they didn't mean it had Hugh Grant in it or that The Cranberries and Enya supplied over half the soundtrack. What they actually meant by "girly" was that the people who wrote this movie have a much lower IQ than the rest of society.
August Rush is about a boy who can "hear the music" and despite growing up at an orphanage in New York he can "hear" his parents, who since they were so cruelly ripped away from each other by Keri Russell's dad have given up music and moved to San Fransico and Chicago. Not only was the writing atrocious (they actually used the line "run August, run"), but the plot was either under-developed or overdone, like when a baby spends 11 months in the womb. Not only did characters enter and leave the plot without any real explanation (the kid's best friend at the orphanage, the bully, the little black girl, the caseworker), but in the time it took August to be born without his mother's knowledge and age 11 years his parents didn't age a bit. They didn't even change their clothes or get a haircut. Other especially believable moments include: Robinwilliamsinacowboyhat attacking a New York City police officer in the presence of about a dozen other cops and living to tell about it, and a truck driver picking up August outside of NYC, driving him to Times Square, and then leaving him there alone so that the caseworker could pick him up in a couple hours.
The only four characters that made it through the whole movie without mysteriously disappearing were the kid, his parents, and RobinWilliamsinacowboyhat. Now, in your average movie, novel, short story, children's TV show, Johnny Cash song, etc. there is an element called "rising and falling action". This is generally the reason you watch, read, listen to, any given piece of media - it's the plot, the character arc, the heroic rise, the tragic fall, the deus ex machina. In August Rush, however, the plot looked something like this:
As you can see there is no part of this graph that looks at all interesting. The yellow line, representing August, pretty much just slowly goes up as he goes from knowing for sure that his parents love him to leaving the orphanage, becoming a musician, attending Julliard, and finally performing his rhapsody in Central Park. His parents, who haven't aged, changed occupation, or thought about anything but each other in 11 years, yet seem not to have discovered the internet, phonebook or any other way they might contact each other, both, through a series of mundane events, go to New York and find each other and their long lost son. But, that's all to be expected of a Disneyesque movie.RobinWilliamsinacowboyhat, however, had potential. He was there on the night when August's parents met and made their musical little baby (probably why Disney didn't pick this one up), and he was there for August's rise to prominence in the New York City music scene. Something should have happened there. Maybe he was a real jerk because he too was orphaned and August could have showed him hope and taught him something wonderful about the nature of music. Maybe August's playing could have made RobinWilliamsinacowboyhat examine himself and learn to love music the way he did when he was playing his harmonica on that streetcorner 11 years ago. But, RobinWilliamsinacowboyhat had pretty much just as flat of a story arc as anyone else. One time he got mad and one time he was real nice, but that's about it.
Overall the music was pretty good (except the time he played the organ, that was a waste), but there wasn't a single minute of the movie where I didn't want to just stop watching. August earns, and I truly mean earns, a D+ from me.
Wow, that was harsh...
LATER TODAY: CONTEST WINNER!!!!
