corny as Kansas in August

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2012)

August Rush is as corny as Kansas, but it still works. The plot is completely predictable though preposterously improbable. The suspense is in just how long they are going to delay the climax. It is magic realism about a boy Freddie Highmore playing Evan Taylor aka August Rush who has a supernatural talent to pick up any instrument and instantly start improvising in a creditable way. He even magically learns musical notation without any instruction or ever seeing written music.
A young Jonathan Rhys Meyers (King Henry VIII in the Tutors), as the father, has a face like a piece of art. It is hypnotic, menacing and sexy. The camera gives you plenty of time to contemplate it.
Must of the movie is watching people pretend to sing or pretend to play musical instruments. To a lay eye, it is all quite convincing. I think Jonathan Rhys Meyers actually sang his parts. He made a quite credible rock musician.
The boy is inspired by the incidental sounds around him to create music with matching rhythms and textures. The way the movie flows from one to the other is brilliant and a treat for the ear.
Robin Williams plays a Fagin-like character forces child street musicians to hand over their take. He is quite creepy. You don't think of him as Robin Williams. He IS a crazy, greedy, unscrupulous old coot.
Leon Thomas III as a fellow street urchin/musician stole every scene he appeared in.
The weakest actor is Highmore, who is too bland and generic a little boy.
Jamia Simone Nash, a little black girl, knocked my socks off with her performance in a church choir. I hope we see her again in some other movie. Her part was way too short. I got the feeling I was getting to see Whitney Houston at age 9.
The thing that bugged me most was August's supposedly original composition selected by the Juliard school of music was a complete rip-off of Bach, an interesting arrangement, but not an original composition.
It leaves you feeling good with its impossibly happy ending.