Stolen Treasures

Rating: Null/10 (20 August 2010)

Every waking moment we convert our lives to stories, with the largest component stories we share with those we choose and those we don't.
At some point for each of us, that shared story contributes to a genre and loses its personal connection. That is a death of sorts where your visceral connection to life is transformed to the same connection but through a medium controlled by market forces and a narrative shaped by its own laws. That death hurts, so while some big part of us celebrates when we re-encounter the thing, some other part dies.
If you were there in the summer of 67 when music mattered in a way impossible to communicate now...
If you were there when it seemed that the actions of a few musicians and the millions who fed them drove, literally drove the cosmos, pulling the dead husks of the old behind...
If you really believed in a God and the goodness of life because you knew it through the joy of shared ears...
Then this movie will present quite a challenge. You cannot do other than love it: the craft of the narrative is strong. It hits the entertainment marks in ways and at times that we expect because we paid. The music is strong, very strong and illustrated in ways that at least do not offend. The characters are derived from those we want to like. The sex is affable enough. Rock music is saved at the end by an enthusiastic public who we see throughout the story as being of all ages and classes.
And yet there is this sense of loss that this is what it has come down to, some pop tropes with familiar sounds. Some amusement as though the tentative futures we held so dearly and the prayers we burned for did not matter. Compounding the ambiguous feelings for this well done thing is the involvement of Hoffman as our (in my case) American surrogate on the scene.
He is there for the music and not for the fame or sex. He alone is willing to die. As an actor, we have seen him before straddle the line between what matters and the way it has to be delivered. But he does not do that here. He simply goes with the record.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.