Smells like America

At 5:40 yesterday I arrived in Houston, TX after an 11-hour flight from Amsterdam. I slept for the first 7 hours, which made for a more a tolerable flight. I can't imaging sitting awake in one of those 1st class seats for 11 hours +1 hour on the ground as the plane was de-iced, drinking champagne and nibbling on garlic toasts with escargot. Even further out of the realm of my limited imagination is spending that time cramped in an economy seat, which is where I was located. But neverthless I passed most of the flight in comfortable sleep.

When I awoke, pleasantly surprised at how long I had been asleep, I watched an awful movie called "August Rush." Being an obsessed Keri Russell (of Felicity fame) fan, I was very excited to see this featured among the in-flight entertainment. Keri starred as professional cellist who quit making music after being told that she lost her unborn child when she was struck by a car. There was also an inane romance story in there somewhere too. The child was raised in an orphanage (custody having been handed over to the state by her oppressive father who thought that a child would hamper her career as a concert cellist). At age 11 he realizes his gift for music when he runs away to New York and lives with homeless musician-kids and Robin Williams ("the Wizard") in a condemned theater. Robin sees the boy messing around with a guitar one morning in the theater and pimps him out as a street musican in Lincoln (?) Square. The boy thinks that by creating music is he calling to his long lost parents to find him. One day the boy sneaks into a church, beckoned by the voices of the choir. The vagrant boy one day messes around on the church organ, composes (on paper) a piece of the organ after a 6 year old girl in the choir gives him a 5 minute explanation of where notes fit on a staff. He is spotted by a minster who gets him into Julliard where he composes a lame piece that is featured on the same program where his mother (Keri) is performing as a soloist (her first performance in 11 years). Leaving aside particular qualms about the choreography of Keri's cello playing (her vibrato is wide and uneven enough to make an audience of sailors seasick), I found this movie to be an exercise in cinematic idiocy and fodder for the public's romantic and uninformed conception of prodigiousness. For example, no child, no matter how talented, becomes a guitar/organ virtuouso in less than a week. This is made even more absurd by the fact that in his 11 years and 5 months in an orphanage he never once touched an instrument. This fact nothwithstanding, he manages to learn how to conduct a full symphony orchestra, after a week of music theory classes at Julliard and no, as far as what was depicted in the movie, courses in conducting (as if a week of conducting lessons would teach him what he needed to know to direct an orchestra). And where was child services this whole time? One man from child services (the child's only true friend from the orphanage) was searching the city of new york asking people individually if they had seen the child. I guess the people at Julliard were too overwhelmed by the boy's talent to give thought to the legal ramifications of not turning the boy over to social services. But in the end, the boy's music did bring him together with his parents. The boy's father (also an ex-musician who spent the last 11+ years in mourning after losing touch with Keri when her father forbade her from contacting him after their one night of love) happened to be driving by the park where both Keri and the boy were performing, and saw a banner advertising her performance and got out of the car and to the concert just in time to see the finale, the boy's composition. Remarkably, the boy recognized his parents, who somehow found each other in the crowd, from the stage as he stood there receiving applause. Oh, I failed to mention, that it was Robin's late-night harmonica playing that had originally brought Keri and the father together for their one-night stand.

Thesis statement: Barf.

Those who might feel the urge to watch this movie would do better to watch Amadeus and Oliver Twist simultaneously. If you really have an itch for Robin Williams, may be get out the laptop and put Mrs. Doubtfire on as well.

America smells different than Holland.