![]() ![]() Music is not a “universal language” at best, it’s a fundamentally human creative impulse that manifests in many different ways across many different cultures, inspiring opinions and ideas in all its many guises. It’s what makes all of it-the hours you spend practicing the hours you spend moving instruments (shout-out to the historical keyboardists), or maintaining them, or making parts for them (we see you, double-reed players!) the anxiety you feel every time you have to fly with your instrument(s) (we feel you, string players) the time you spend doing your taxes as a mostly self-employed person (because nobody knows how painful it is) the hours you spend putting together websites (yours, and maybe that group you perform with) and the material for them the time you spend sending e-mails and asking people for money and doing all your own bookkeeping and administrative tasks (for which, you know, you don’t get paid) the shit you might have to endure to make sure you get paid for that gig you did two weeks ago the dysfunctional organizational politics of non-profits the invariably outsized egos that you’ll have to perform alongside or under-worth it. If you choose to make a career of it, we hope, yes, that you’re passionate about it, but that doesn’t make music as a career easier, it just makes it bearable. It takes years-if not a lifetime-of constant practice, learning, and refinement. Since we’re going to touch on this theme so many times over the course of this movie-and by “touch on” I mean “totally fucking ignore”-I’ll say this just once: So here we are nine years later: Music isn’t part of my livelihood, but Boston is a city of musical plenty and I’ve had eight of those years to get to know lots of people whose livelihood is in music. Of course, the academic career path never materialized that is to say, neither was I admitted to the terminal degree I needed, nor could I come up with a justification for pursuing a job that almost certainly would be unattainable. Musicology seemed, if you can believe it, the more sensible choice. I mostly survived the hazing, but ultimately opted for musicology. ![]() Orchestral conducting has largely been one of those white guy professions-not unlike academia-and if you survive the hazing, it’s vaguely possible you might one day have a career in it. That summer after college I had spent several weeks at an orchestral conducting program in upstate New York, where the point was basically that you got verbally abused by a cranky old white guy. ![]() I saw August Rush sometime in 2008 I graduated from college the year before knowing that I wasn’t going to be a professional instrumentalist, but otherwise I was undecided between trying to pursue conducting or musicology in grad school. And, as we all know, Dickens stories are definitely not fucked up-no way. You thought The Notebook was sticky sweet with sentimentality? August Rush is the Great Molasses Flood.* It is, as some critics have suggested, basically Oliver Twist with music. It turns music into one of Those Facebook Memes with a pithy quote set in the faux-painterly Sophia font. I’ve possibly never encountered a movie that so grossly exalted its subject and so utterly disrespected it- literally at the same fucking time.Īugust Rush combines the improbable timing and interconnections of Love Actually with the quasi-religious mysticism of the Force and somehow manages to diminish both. I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into with this re-view, but I confess I wasn’t prepared for my own abject, horrified, visceral reaction to this movie. None has ever left me seething with fury. Of the films I’ve re-viewed for this venerable blog over the years, some have sparked derision, some delight some have moved me anew, some have fallen flat. Resident musicologist Max DeCurtins explains how August Rush mythologizes innate musical talent, leading to treacly sentimentality, lousy instrumentation, and Robin Williams in a bizarre hat. ![]()
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