August Rush (4/10)

Welcome to the biggest disappointment of 2007, for me. We all develop expectations for movies based on their previews and advertisements, as well as the hype that the media brings to it. In this case, the practical version of this movie did not hold a candle to the theoretical version my mind had created.

Two young musicians meet unexpectedly and seem to fall in love, having sex on the first night. They never see each other again, the boy going on to tour with his over-pretentious cock-rock band, and the girl pursuing her virtuosic ability behind a cello. The girl is pregnant, and wants to have the baby, but her father disapproves. Late in the pregnancy, she is in a wreck and there is an emergency delivery. The father forges her signature on a form to put the baby up for adoption, and tells her the baby is lost. She abandons cello and becomes a music teacher. Meanwhile, the boy abandons his band and becomes an investor of some kind.

Alongside this story, we see the life of a young boy named Evan who longs for his parents. He is in love with music and hears it in everything, but he doesn't know how to play it or make others hear it. He runs away from his orphanage, and finds himself homeless in New York City, where he meets a young boy that takes him in. The boy is part of a group of homeless kids that play music on the street for money, led by Robin Williams, an insane person. The kids work for money, which they give to him, in exchange for a place to stay and work on their music. Here, Evan first touches a guitar, and is immediately incredible at it. The rest is a story of a kid who believes that he can find his parents if they can just hear him.

It's a chick flick that for some reason assumes it's audience has the collective mind of a five year old. Full of cliches, full of pretense, lacking in all substance and originality, and worse than that: it professes to love music, and then mocks it without restraint for the entire length of the movie. They make no attempt to make any of the several musicians in the movie look as though they are actually playing the music you hear. Evan's father, who dresses like a 90's punk kid but plays in a band comparable to Nickleback, spews pretension and sappy romance I-talk-to-the-Moon-and-it-talks-back nonsense to seduce the beautiful cellist, whose performance was actually the only decent one in the movie.

Bottom line: The premise for the movie is excellent and made me desperate to see it. But the writing is horrendous, ignorant, and cliche, the music lacks creativity, the acting is weak. From a movie that professes a love for music, you expect a unique and beautiful sonic experience, but you get an unrealistic, pretentious chick flick.