Wonderful movie. Great acting on everyone's part. More than a few people wrote in IMBd identifying themselves as either psychiatrists or as someone with a mental illness and said that Jamie Foxx realy captured the schizophrenic character. The director said in the commentary that he meant for the film to be viewed as almost a realist drama of the way a person with mental illness interacts with the world. And, of course, Robert Downey, Jr. does a great job being sardonic. Many other fine performances. The IMDb says that many of the people in the Lamp Community scenes were people with mental illnesses who lived there.
There's a scene where the young Nathaniel Ayers sees a burning car roll slowly by his basement bedroom window. This was in his hometown of Cleveland in 1969 (and filmed in Cleveland). Cleveland's Cuyahoga River catches fire in 1969 so the burning car could have been a result of that or perhaps of the riots that Cleveland had at that time. Or a way to show how Ayers' early life, while having a very loving family, still had a very difficult environment. The scene parallels nicely with the fire in his basement bedroom and with the later scene in the newsroom of the reporter being escorted out of the building due to all the firings and budget cuts which shows both Ayers and Lopez having their own issues. Some of you may know Randy Newman's song Burn On which is about the river burning.
In Lopez's book, he says that Ayers got verbally angry with him but never physically as shown in the movie, but then Lopez is also, in real life, happily married. And Ayers was not a cellist at Julliard but a double bassist which just looks like a big cello to me. Nope, sorry, it must be the cello they used for the Jaws (1975) soundtrack.
In late-breaking news, and of some relatedness to the movie at hand, and of special interest to any reader who knows where Columbia University is, your alert NYT obituary reader caught this one last week:
"Mrs. Hutchins was known for her pragmatism. In 1957 her friend Virginia Apgar, a doctor and amateur violinmaker, began to covet a shelf made of perfect maple. The shelf was in a phone booth in the medical school of Columbia University, where Dr. Apgar taught.
One
night she and Mrs. Hutchins stole into the building with some tools and
a replacement shelf, stained to match. As Dr. Apgar stood guard, Mrs.
Hutchins set to work. To their dismay, the new shelf was a quarter-inch
too long.
Mrs. Hutchins had a saw, and there was a ladies’ room nearby. As The New York Times reported afterward, “a passing nurse stared in astonishment at the sounds coming through the door.”
Dr. Apgar could think quickly. (She had, after all, devised the Apgar score, used worldwide to measure the health of newborns.) “It’s the only time repairmen can work in there,” she said.
Spirited out of the hospital, the shelf made a magnificent viola back."You can read the entire obit here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/music/09hutchins.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries
In more late-breaking news, yesterday was the anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987.
The world might be at peace today and living large messianically speaking if it had not been for some schmo in Portland who couldn't follow what was going on while he was sitting in the giant circle in the giant waterfront park in Portland with a whole bunch of convergencers. There was a secret message being whispered around the circle but I (I mean him) couldn't understand what the person next to me (him) said which meant that the next person got a garbled version of the truth. Maybe next time I'll (he'll) get it right.
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