Posts tagged student
“The Soloist” Could Have Been Better
May 14th
Could Have Been Better
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE SOLOIST is based on a true story, and yet it comes across as if the filmmakers weren’t exactly sure where they wanted the focus to be.
It stars Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Lopez, two men whose lives change dramatically when they meet each other and become friends.
Lopez is a columnist for THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, and one day he encounters Ayers in a park playing beautiful music on a violin that has only two strings.
Lopez thinks that Ayers could be the subject of an interesting column, writing “violin guy” in his notebook for ideas, and he begins finding out all he can about this homeless man with amazing musical talent.
He learns that Ayers had been a student at the Juilliard School of Music, but had dropped out before graduating. And when he tracks down the sister of Ayers in Cleveland, she asks him why he is interested in her brother, and Lopez says, “Everyone has a story, and it’s interesting.”
The sister tells Lopez that Nathaniel had become fascinated with music when he was a young boy and after that there was no more football, no more baseball, just music. She says, “That was all he did, just music.”
We see flashbacks to when Ayers was a kid that show his fascination and also to when he arrived in New York City to attend Juilliard, which also give us an indication as to why he dropped out before graduating.
Lopez begins writing some columns about Ayers, which cause one reader to send him a cello that she can’t play anymore to give to Ayers, because the cello was his first instrument of choice.
Lopez involves himself even more into the homeless man’s life, managing to obtain an apartment for Ayers, cello lessons for the first time in three decades, and even to arrange for Ayers to attend a rehearsal for a Beethoven concert.
However, things don’t always go the way Lopez plans them, and the relationship between Ayers and Lopez takes a turn for the worse.
Because we see so many details of Lopez’s life at home and at the office, we begin to wonder if the filmmakers wanted to tell the story about Lopez or about Ayers.
THE SOLOIST is good, but could have been better.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Knowing – Movie Trailer
Mar 20th
A time capsule containing a cryptic message about the coming apocalypse sends a concerned father on a race to prevent the horrific events from unfolding as predicted in this sci-fi thriller directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City) and starring Nicolas Cage. 1958: As the dedication ceremony for a newly constructed elementary school gets under way, a time capsule containing student drawings of the future is buried on the grounds and scheduled to be unearthed on the school’s 50th anniversary. Instead of submitting a drawing, however, one little girl scribbles a series of seemingly random numbers on her paper before it is buried. Fifty years later, the time capsule is unearthed for a new generation of students to examine. Young Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) is one of those students. The mysterious sequence of numbers falling into his possession, Caleb takes the paper to his father, Professor John Koestler (Cage), for examination. Studying the numbers, Professor Koestler soon discovers that they aren’t random at all, but an encoded message containing the precise dates, death tolls, and coordinates of every major disaster since the time capsule was buried. Not only that, but the document also indicates that there will be three more such events, the last of which indicates a doomsday scenario that appears directly tied to Professor Koestler and Caleb. His desperate plea to authorities falling on deaf ears, Professor Koestler realizes that his only hope for preventing more lives from being lost is to take personal action. Though the author of the prophecies is no longer living, Professor Koestler is eventually able to track down her daughter Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), and granddaughter Abby, who reluctantly agree to aid in the investigation. As the final date on the list draws near, Professor Koestler enters into a frantic race against time to prevent destruction on a global scale, in the process realizing that in order to save millions of lives, he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.