THANK YOU.
I feel terrible writing bad things about this film because I love music more than anything. I'm happy for those that this movie carried away through music and hate to be a wet blanket. But. (sigh)
But for me, as a musician myself, I guess what I found most offensive here was the (um) "fairy tale" that music does not need to be learned, music is easy, music is a breath on the breeze, which... sometimes melodically, or vocally, in a perfect world, sure -- but not the way the film presented it, not even if I stretched really far and tried desperately to like it.
Music is amazing, wonderful, and yes, transporting. But it is also hard WORK. Even Mozart worked at his musicianship, despite all the popular belief he just wrote sonatas at age 4 because he felt like it. He had been trained from the cradle. He knew how to play a keyboard and violin virtuosically. He knew the language of music notation and theory even at 4 and used that knowledge to write, and evolved rapidly into operas by 8 or 9 -- onward.
No pixie dust. No bashing guitar strings out of the blue (I guess because Freddie Highmore couldn't really be taught to play the guitar?!). No boring-pseudo-triumphant-film-music-compositions (he used traffic noises! how daring is that? NOT!) to end things on a laughable musical note (GOD that final piece.... worse even than the one in Mr. Holland's Opus, and that's saying something.)
Wanna know a secret? Music? Is TOUGH. I'm a trained singer, cellist and composer who began as a scholarship coloratura soprano and cellist from childhood, then pursued composition and lyric-writing in my 20s, about the same time I also took a few years to pick up jazz theory as well as guitar, which I've continued to this day. (this is just to give a general background on me as far as techincal merit -- not because I'm awesome or the best ever, because I'm totally not). I'm competent. But I've known some brilliant folks and this movie is insulting to musicians on a very subliminal yet real level. AND drove me nuts for that reason.
Music is one of the treasures of our world. But it also involves hours and hours of dedication, practice, and training. Music is about interaction and collaboration, about listening, about doing more than just swaying and listening to wind chimes and looking vaguely blissed out. It's about being willing to practice until the muscles know every note by heart so that the real virtuosity can follow. In composition, it's about studying music theory until you know the keys, the tabulature, the chord progressions, the possibilities, to music. Even if you're a rebel. You need the structure to begin, even if you're gonna break that structure or discover new or different instrumentation, even if you want to find a new sound.
What got me about this movie -- where I began to be angry at it, I mean, really really angry watching it -- was the scene when August meets the little girl, and at this point it would have taken less than 60 seconds of vital screen time for us to see her truly introducing him to musical notation, to the piano in the room, in a way that was believable (and this would have gone a long way toward alleviating my hatred of the film -- at least somewhat). Instead, the movie goes out of the way to show us August doesn't need any of that and has somehow divined everything he needed while she was gone for a few hours, so that he now knows and writes in advanced theory and musical notation with no introduction at all to those concepts. It's beyond savantism and into ... aghghghghism. Sorry, it's insulting. It's exactly as insulting as a fictional little scientist inventing his own perfect Table of Elements instead of realistically learning them and building from there (and which would be just as cool or inspiring, and best of all, believable).
In short, the reason perhaps many find this movie laughable and insulting is that -- in addition to the overall terrible writing and the bad, cardboard-cutout character characterizations especially among the meanies -- Daddy, bandmates, Robin Williams, etc. -- it says music isn't really all about any of those things, it's about fairy dust and abandoned babies and wimpy abused girls (and bad, bad actors and actresses). And crappy crappy feel-good endings defying all logic or story or writing ability.
Which, nope.
Not for me, and from reading this board? Not for many others. God, what an awful and upsetting movie. I hated it so much it made me sick.
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