Sunday, April 26, 2009

The Soloist Review

















The Soloist is a good film but, has issues.  Joe Wright's Los Angeles feels slightly set in the future with polished concrete reminiscent of  Gattaca (1997), where the disparity between have and have not screams.  The worlds are set so strong in black and white figuratively with classes meeting between these two characters in under freeway acoustic worlds.  The world has gone mad.  Newspapers are dying, people are off their meds and the future looks bleak.  Most of all Soloist spends too much time in madness.  The story feels laden with heaviness that it can't escape.  All of the people in Nathan's (Jamie) World are so crazy that it just does not feel balanced as a movie.  Feels more like a bad acid trip.  

Not that movies need to have all the answers, but Solo falls short of brining anything new to the table after 2 hours.  You finish at a slightly different point from where you started.  Soloist does not know what issue it is trying to tackle and gets confused, poverty, mental illness, classism, the economy.  You want Nathan to be victorious some how but the film never quite gets there.  Still I would recommend for your Netflix account.

There is a beautiful gift in the center of the film.  For a moment inside of Nathan's head and we get to see music the way he sees music.  This catches you completely off guard and takes you back to the first time you saw and a laser light show set to Pink Floyd, but dare I say better.

What did you think?

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