The Music Never Stopped

Music is a powerful thing. The right song can make you feel happy, sad, pumped, or relaxed, but is there more to it than that?What effects can music actually have on the brain? What connections does it form to our memories? This is the question explored in Jim Kohlberg's directorial debut, “The Music Never Stopped”.

Set in the 1980's, the film opens with a phone call. To Helen (Cara Seymour: “The Notorious Bettie Page”) and Henry Sawyer (J.K. Simmons: “Oz” “Spider-Man”); their son, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci), whom they have not seen in a very long time, is in the hospital. It turns out that Gabriel has a large brain tumor, and while it can be removed safely, it has caused a significant amount of permanent damage to his brain.

Gabriel's Doctor (Scott Adsit: “30 Rock”) explains to the Sawyers that Gabriel may never be himself again, and that, amongst the other damaged parts of his brain, he has lost the part that allows him to remember new information. In fact, for the most part, Gabriel is in a near vegetative state most of the time. Then one night when he shocks the hell out of all the nurses by starting to play his old trumpet after listening to a song on the radio.

Helen and Henry are excited by this, but the doctor assures them that it doesn't mean anything. Henry is still curious though, and while doing research on brain injuries he comes across an article by therapist Dianne Daley (Julia Ormond: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) about a connection between music and the brain.

Daley is interested in Gabriel's case, and starts playing music for him; first what he was playing on the trumpet, and then songs that Henry played for him as a child. There's a definite reaction, but it doesn't bring him back like whatever he heard on the radio did. One night, quite by accident, Daley realizes what the problem is. The music that stirs him is not the music his father exposed him to as a child, but the music he loved in his teenage years. Unfortunately it is that very music that led to the split between Gabriel and his father in the first place, or at least that's how Henry sees it.

“The Music Never Stopped” is based on the essay “The Last Hippie” by Dr. Oliver Sacks. If that name sparks any familiarity with you at all, it is possibly because his writing was also the basis of 1990's Oscar nominated “Awakenings”. The two films share a similar subject matter, a sense of bittersweet hope, and a good dose of dark humour, but are otherwise both quite different. “Awakenings” feels like it has a strong sense of forward motion throughout, as where this movie just flows in whatever direction the music happens to take it.

Ultimately it's the music that is the heart and soul of this film, from the the music Gabriel's father exposed him to as a child, like Peggy Lee and Count Basie, to the music he came to love in his teenage years, like The Beatles, Steppenwolf, and especially The Grateful Dead. Music is as much of a character in this film as any of the actors, and it is easily what moves the rather meandering tale forward. The film's soundtrack triggers flashbacks to explain how Gabriel came to love music to begin with, how he split off from his parents, and ultimately it becomes Henry's only hope of ever truly re-connecting with his injured son.

I said that the movie meanders, and it does. It's never dull, but at times it does seem aimless as it paints a picture of Gabriel's life before he left home and after he returns. It doesn't help that there are characters like Celia (Mia Masestro: “Alias”), a serving girl at the hospital cafeteria, and Tamara (Tammy Blanchard: “Guiding Light”), Gabriel's high school girlfriend, who seem like they should be really important characters, but ultimately have little or no real effect on the story. It's almost as if the screenwriters didn't know where they wanted the story to actually end until about two thirds of the way through which creates something which is not exactly a shaggy dog story, but has subplots which could easily be described as such.

The cast is an interesting choice. For me, this is the first time seeing J.K. Simmons in a real leading role, and he carries it off well; maybe after this I will be able to look at him and not immediately think of him as Vern Schillinger (probably not though). Ormond and Seymour bring their characters to life well, and it was very interesting to see Scott Adsit in a serious role, but it's the choice Lou Taylor Pucci as Gabriel that is most interesting.

Pucci plays Gabriel as both a teenager and an adult, and while he easily looks the part of a high school senior, making him look like someone who should be in the latter half of their thirties is a little more difficult (Pucci himself is still in his mid-twenties). In order to try and create a big difference in appearance between his teen self and his adult self, they have him in this rather ridiculous looking beard; I don't know if it was fake or not, but it sure looked fake. Between his youthful physical appearance, and the fact that due to his injury he still acts like a teenager, I had to repeatedly remind myself how old he is supposed to be. His performance as Gabriel feels spot on, but perhaps they could have put the beginnings of some gray into his hair to make him look like someone within spitting distance of their 40's.

While this is not necessarily one of those movies you should rush out and see right away, it is certainly one that you should see at some point in your life. It's well acted, has a really strong soundtrack, and manages to be funny and uplifting at the same time as being sad. It will try to make you cry, but it will try to make you laugh a lot more. So why not go see something with a little actual value? At the very least when someone asks what movies you've seen lately, you'll be able to come up with a better answer than “Hall Pass”.

“The Music Never Stopped” is in limited release now.

Limitless

You've heard it said before that the average human only uses about twenty percent of his brain's total potential. If you believe this, then that means even the smartest amongst us could be so much more if only we could figure out how to access the rest of our brainpower. Now what if someone offered you a pill that could make you the best you that you could possibly be? What if you could exceed the current boundaries of your mental capacity? What if you could become “Limitless”?

“Limitless” is the new film from director Neil Burger (“The Illusionist”) starring Bradley Cooper (“The Hangover”) as Eddie Morra, a writer struggling with a combination of writer's block and his natural tendency for self-sabotage. Eddie is not having a good time of things, his girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish: “Sucker Punch”), has finally grown tired of his crap and dumped him, he's behind on the rent, and he has a deadline rushing towards him without a single word written.

In the depths of his despair he meets up with his ex-wife's brother, Vernon (Johnny Whitworth: “CSI: Miami”), who at first mistakes him for a homeless man. After listening to a brief, but frank, description of Eddie's situation, Vernon offers him a small, transparent pill that he promises will turn things around for him. Deciding that things could hardly get worse, Eddie takes the pill.

Within moments, Eddie realizes that he can access the memories of anything he's ever seen; he can learn languages in hours, he can motivate himself to stop being a complete slob, he can even get past his writer's block and finish his novel with speed that would make Stephen King jealous (it certainly makes me jealous). It basically turns him into a combination of Chuck Bartowski and Shawn Spencer, but without the silliness that you might expect from either. Eddie is amazed at what he can do when he doesn't get in his way.

As with all drugs, there are drawbacks. The drug wears off in less than a day, returning Eddie to his slobby, stupid self. It turns out that intelligence is addictive, and he wants more. Unfortunately the side effects can be much worse than just becoming stupid again. Before he knows it, Eddie is trying to juggle finding a steady supply of the drug, dealing with a Russian loan shark (Andrew Howard: “Revolver”), working with a business mogul (Robert De Niro), and figuring out what to do about the creepy guy who is suddenly following him everywhere he goes.

The visual style of “Limitless” is fantastic. The movie uses some interesting visual effects when Eddie gets into his writing groove, and when he starts to experience some of the drug's side effects, but the best effects for me were simply what happened whenever Eddie would take the pill. As the pill kicks in the world around him visibly brightens and the colour grown warm to help the audience see the clarity with which he now sees the world.

De Niro's role in the film, though smaller than the trailers would have you believe (not that you should ever trust trailers anyway), is still a good example of him playing exactly the sort of pompous character he is good at; even when he is smiling and laughing, it's obvious that you are never more than one stupid move away from being on his excrement list. Cooper and De Niro have a great on-screen chemistry as they play back and forth with Carl Van Loon's thin veneer of joviality over ruthless greed and Morra's slick, but naive, self-confidence. It is a lot of fun to see them on the screen together.

This is an easy movie to enjoy, but there are some pretty big issues with it. First of all, for someone who maybe the smartest man on Earth, Morra misjudges or overlooks a lot of things that I, with my normal dumb brain, saw almost immediately. Now maybe he's just not very genre savvy, but some of the things he screws up on seem more like plot-hole issues than something his character would really not think of. The other thing, and this may not really be an issue, is that many, but not all, of the film's twists are easy to predict if you are paying attention. While the movie is a lot more subtle about foreshadowing than, say, “Red Riding Hood” was, it still was a little annoying to me to be able to spot these things before the super-genius did. That said, the overall movie is more than enjoyable enough for me to forgive it its flaws.

“Limitless” is a fun, stylish, well done film with a strong cast, a decent soundtrack, and what is probably the best use of a small child as a weapon that you will ever see. It's not likely to go down as a modern classic, but it is a very enjoyable drama with a strong sense of humour, and an interesting science fiction concept. If you're heading out to the theaters this weekend and you want to see something that will appeal to your higher brain functions, then I strongly suggest you check out this film.

“Limitless” is in theaters now.

Red Riding Hood

It seems that Hollywood is no longer content with just crapping on my generation's childhood with new takes on “The Smurfs”, “Transformers”, and “G.I. Joe”, and have now moved on to going after the childhoods of many generations with films like “Beastly”, “Snow White”, and this movie, “Red Riding Hood”. These are not your normal sugar-coated, Disneyfied re-tellings though; these are dark, gritty, sexy, but still only PG-13 takes aimed squarely at the Twilighters out there.

Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”), directs this version of the classic tale of the little girl who finds herself running afoul of the big, bad wolf on her way to grandmother's house, only this girl isn't so little, it's living anime character, Amanda Seyfried (“Jennifer's Body”). Seyfried plays Valerie, daughter of a woodcutter, Cesaire (Billy Burke: “Twilight”, “Drive Angry 3D”) and Suzette (Virginia Madsen: “The Haunting in Conneticut”). Valerie lives an angsty medieval life; she is in love with Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), a young woodcutter who has been her friend since childhood, but she has been promised the Henry (Max Irons), a kind and talented young blacksmith who would much more easily give her the lifestyle her mother wants her to have. Oh whatever is she to do?

Valerie's boy troubles are only slightly overshadowed by the fact that her village (located somewhere in the kingdom of Southern California if the accents are any indication) is terrorized every full moon by a werewolf. For many years this has not been a problem; the townspeople merely leave some livestock out as a sacrifice and hide themselves away. This changes when the wolf claims the life of one of the townspeople.

Suddenly the town is in a panic, and while Father Auguste (Lukas Haas: “Inception”) sends for a famous witch-hunter and wolf-slayer, many of the town's men go out to hunt the werewolf, and kill it once and for all. They think their efforts are successful, but when the witch-smeller, Father Solomon (Gary Oldman: “The Book of Eli”) arrives, he warns them that what they killed was not the werewolf at all. Fear not,though, because he and his multicultural private army will sniff out the true wolf and slay it.

If you get a “Twilight”-y kind of feel from this movie's trailers, there's a good reason for it. Not only did Hardwicke direct the first film in that series, and Billy Burke act in it, but many other characters feel directly lifted from it too. Valerie is very much an expy for Bella Swan, but without the fear of aging. Peter is a combination of Edward and Jacob, but without all the creepy stalker behaviour and glitter, and Henry feels an awful lot like Mike Newton. In some ways this movie almost feels like a sort of “Twilight” fan-fic.

I mentioned before that the medieval townsfolk all talk like they are from Los Angeles, and while this may have been a wise directorial decision (All of them trying to fake any type of European accent would likely have been a mess), it makes the one character who does have a strong accent stand out even more. Gary Oldman's portrayal of Solomon is a perfect example of why sometimes not trying is better than trying too hard. At first he sounds like he is supposed to be German, but from there it just goes to crap as his accent wanders all over the place. This is not a slight on his portrayal, as his character was one of the best in the film, but an entire film of people doing this would have been incredibly annoying.

The film was pretty much what I expected it to be for about the first two thirds. Crazed overacting and lip-biting angst broken up by some fairly decent action sequences (featuring fairly dodgy special effects) while Valerie tries to not only choose which man she should go with, but tries to figure out who the wolf is. The film tries to keep you guessing about these two things as well.

There is no attempt to subtly hint at who you should suspect for wolfhood either. The movie bludgeons you over the head with red herring after red herring trying to make you suspect different people. Is it Grandma? Peter? Prudence? Henry? I will say, and this is one of the major things that keeps this movie from being completely awful, I did not correctly guess who the wolf was. My wife says she suspected the correct person, so I may just be dense, but it is the thing I found most satisfying about the film.

I'm sure you're wondering how one goes about stretching a story that most people tell in fifteen minutes into a one hundred minute movie? The answer is to spend the first hour completely ignoring that story. The first hour of the film is all about Valerie and her two suitors with some wolf attacks and the occasional steamy, but still PG-13, kissing scene thrown in for flavour. It's only in about the last twenty minutes of the film that they manage to cram in something like the traditional story of “Little Red Riding Hood”, complete with the “What big eyes you have” scene (and Amanda Seyfried commenting on the largeness of anyone's eyes was enough to make me laugh). It feels a little rushed after the slow pace of the first three quarters of the movie, but the ending is more satisfying than I was expecting.

I know it sounds like I liked parts of this movie, and I did in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way, but that doesn't mean I would recommend it to anyone. This is a movie for hardcore Twilighters only, and even then only for the ones that liked the movies. The acting ranges from wooden to narmy, and while the action sequences are well choreographed (even if the effects look a little dated) there simply are not enough of them to save the movie from itself. The only possible reason to see this in a theater, assuming you're not one of the aforementioned hardcore Twilighters, is for the fun of trying to guess who the wolf is, but you know what? You can do that for a lot less at home when it comes out on DVD.

“Red Riding Hood” wanders out of the forest and into theaters March 11th.

The Social Network

I love social networks; without them there are a number of people who I almost certainly would have lost track of over the years. Heck, you probably found the link to this review through Twitter... or Buzz, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Myspace, or the current big daddy, Facebook, so I guess that maybe you like them too.

“The Social Network” is the new film by director David Fincher (“Fight Club”), based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich, about the birth of Facebook, and the controversy about who really created it.. As if having Fincher directing was not enough, the screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”, “Sports Night”); with names like that in charge I went into this film with some pretty high expectations.

The story is told through a series of legal depositions where Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg - “Zombieland”, “Adventureland”) is being sued by his former best friend, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) as well as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence), whose idea for a Harvard-only social network seemingly inspired what would become Facebook. As the parties in the two depositions are questioned the movie gives us flashbacks to the incidents they are describing.

Lets speak plainly here, this movie does not portray Mark Zuckerberg as a nice guy; a genius certainly, but also a complete horse's arse. From the opening scene where he gets dumped by his girlfriend for implying that he is doing her future a favour by dating her, Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg as someone who is either truly incapable of interfacing with live people, or as someone who suffers from a mental handicap. He's rude, a jerk, insecure, and completely incapable of going more than thirty seconds without insulting someone, but he's also easily manipulated in the right hands.

The right hands belong to Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the creator of Napster. Parker is everything Zuckerberg wants to be; he's smart, popular with women, people respect him, and he can do pretty much whatever he wants. Parker can see the potential in what Zuckerberg and Saverin are doing, but he thinks he knows how to make it go even bigger. Saverin is completely against Parker's ideas, and this puts Zuckerberg in a position of choosing between someone he respects and the only person he could truly call a friend.

Sorkin's writing shines through beautifully in the movie's dialog. He manages to write a conflict where there are no heroes and no villains, there are simply a bunch of people who all think that they are in the right. From Zuckerberg's thinly veiled insults to Parker's overly confident manner, the movie manages to keep the audience laughing while still telling an interesting story without ever really giving you someone you should be rooting for.

Of course the best writing in the world would be worthless in the hands of bad actors; luckily the young stars are able to pull it off. Playing against his normal awkward nice-guy characters, Eisenberg creates a perfect genius jerk; playing things cold and clinical for the most part with just enough human in there to still keep Zuckerberg from being completely unsympathetic. Garfield brings a nice balance to Saverin, making him seem both smart and professional, but still susceptible to emotions that seem foreign to his friend. As far as Timberlake goes, this is the perfect role for him: a complete douche-bag.

The only things really going against this movie are its length and ,strangely enough, its music. The movie is pretty long, coming in at about two hours, but it would be hard to cut anything; the parts that get dull are important to the plot, and the parts that are not important to the plot (Eduardo's girlfriend and the scarf, for example) are genuinely funny.

The musical choices for the movie are not bad, per say, but they are a little odd. The film's original score is by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, yes, that would be the Ross and Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame, and it shows. A lot of the film's music is tense and brooding; stuff that would be a lot more at home in a horror film than a serious drama with comedic highlights. It's not that the music is bad, it's just that I kept waiting for the zombies to show up.

“The Social Network” is one of those rare movies that plays computer use straight; characters speak a language that many people will find foreign. Is your average movie goer going to understand what an “Apache server” is? How about what “PHP” is? No, probably not. I consider myself fairly computer literate, and a lot of that was Greek to me (but then I could never wrap my head around programming). I like that they took this route in dealing with computers though; programming is done in a plain black window and they don't try to make it look cool or exciting. If you want to see flashy montage sequences where programming/hacking is done using cute computer graphics and people hitting keyboards very quickly then go rent “Hackers” because this is not that movie.

It will be interesting to see how this movie is ultimately received both critically and in the box office. It is a good movie, probably even award-worthy, but it's a little Inside Baseball . I would compare it to movies like “The Late Shift” or “Pirates of Silicon Valley” in the sense that the subject matter may not be that interesting to most people, but that the movie itself still manages to be quite compelling.

Even if you are not that interested in computers or Facebook, “The Social Network” is still an interesting movie. With a strong script, good directing, and a solid cast, this is a great movie to go see. It's fun and entertaining while still maintaining a strong sense of drama. Don't forget to whip your phone when the movie is over and Facebook about seeing it; at least that's what people did at the screening I was at.

“The Social Network” opens nationwide on October 1st, and contains adult language, sexual situations, and drug and alcohol use.