I Used to Like Music!

Rating: 1/10 (26 April 2008)

A relative (whom I knew to be a very accurate reverse barometer of movie quality) recommended this stinker to me. She raved and raved, on and on. I know, I should have known better, but in a weak moment I watched it. My family, who have a working knowledge of good music and good movies, spotted the fraud in moments and quickly wandered away. But I, like some pathetic boob, watched it to the dreadful conclusion. By the end I was laughing out loud at the painful, unintentionally hilarious clichés. There are too many illogical, vapid, um ..... cheesy (it really is best descriptive adjective for this tripe) scenes, which crowded in on each other like rats trying to escape a flooded sewer. Speaking of sewer -- Oh the smell! Oh the humanity!
Never mind all the schmaltzy lost child and quixotic Fagin references. However, I ask myself in retrospective incredulity, could a movie about music be so utterly devoid of musical quality? Didn't any of the producers or directors even have a modicum of knowledge or appreciation for music? They had to all had to have totally tin ears to allow such musical trash to permeate nearly the whole misguided effort. And what of the classical musicians who were forced by some demonic overlord to perform this wretched stuff? They must have been wearing ear plugs under their long hair. Awful, awful, awful!
Do yourself a favor, stay away at all costs. I will never regain the brain cells destroyed by this menace! I will live the remainder of my life haunted by images of o-so pathetic street urchins, gospel choirs (who never sing about God or Jesus?), faux Irish bands with fake accents, and beautiful cello ingenues, who seem to have masted the instrument without knowing any bowing or fingering technique, only to play the most insipid music ever to despoil a sheet of manuscript paper. The small Elgar snippet near the end was fine, but even Elgar couldn't save this movie. Arrg, arrg, gurgle!