August Rush - cello concerto

Last night, Tam and I watched the movie August Rush. I am not a movie critic, but I must offer my few cents here. If you are a musician (which many of you are being that this site is centered around music) then you might find yourself in a similar place of frustration when watching this movie. Why is it that film directors don't care about how ridiculous actors look when they are pretending to play an instrument? It drives me nuts! I've seen movies where the string players in the background don't even have their bows on the strings when playing. And God forbid that they would actually bow the same direction. While this beautiful music is playing, there is a clump of random sticks waving frantically in the air without any sense of rhythm or sync. Anyway, it was quite apparent the main actress who played the cello in the movie didn't know how to actually play the thing. Ok fine. But if i'm directing the movie, I'm gonna hire a pro to be a body double, zoom in on the hands, and make it look convincing. We do that for action films right? When Brad Pitt goes flying over the cliff onto the train, nobody wants his billion dollar face to get scratched, so some other less important guy gets paid a few bucks to hurt himself. Makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, the film can be fairly described as "cute." But musicians, please don't go see the movie to get inspired to write your next album. It won't do the trick.

It DID however make me think about my days in college studying classical music (the picture posted here is one of my old Mozart scores). The classical piece they used in the film for the cello player was Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto. That's one of my most favorite classical pieces written. So much depth. So much emotion. If you have some time or if you are at work in a cubicle getting paid by the hour, make sure you enjoy Yo-Yo Ma playing this beautiful work of art today. It doesn't get better than this.