August Rush
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Features
• AC-3
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• Dolby
• Dubbed
• DVD-Video
• Full Screen
• Subtitled
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : 21 November, 2007
DVD Release : 11 March, 2008 |
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August Rush Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
"Bad! Unbelievably Bad!"
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This film has been widely classified as "a fairy tale" for our times. But a fairy tale, as Bruno Bettleheim pointed out long ago, contains gritty elements of psychological realism and represents symbolically through its ogres and witches the dangers which all children confront on the road to maturity.
"August Rush," on the other hand is just an indulgent exercise in New Age Wish Fulfillment. It could more accurately be classified not as a fairy tale but, to put it mildly, as "a vast betrayal of life." Consider in this regard its opening. A rock musician scores after a first meeting with a classical cellist on the rooftop of a Greenwich Village flat. She learns after their one-night-stand that she's pregnant. Naturally, these two individuals of low responsibility, separated after their only encounter by a controlling Hollywood-type parent, continue to hunger for each over an eleven year period. Yeah, right! Similarly, the controlling parent allows his erring daughter to bear the child, but then forges her signature to give it up for adoption. Shades of pleasing everybody, "Juno" or "Murphy Brown" style. Out of wedlock liasons are given a pass, so as to be thought daring, but pregnancies are then carried to term, so as not to the offend the pro-life section of the audience. This is once again the Hollywood mentality, trying to have things both ways, beginning with the seemingly daring, but landing on a very neat, conventional trajectory.
The film, sad to say, goes from bed to worse. Children, I'm sure, would quickly see through its escalating preposterousness. Some weak-minded adults, on the other hand, interested in instant uplift, might be inclined to find it "spiritual" and "exhilarating." As Oscar Wilde said in another context, "only a man without a heart" could fail to laugh at the trials and tribulations of the characters in "August Rush."
The only bearable performance, for my money, is that of Freddie Highmore, a talented child actor. Unfortunately, however, he may be finding himself, like Haley Joel Osment earlier, pushed into bad roles that undermine his ostensible skills. "August Rush," I'd argue, is Freddie Highmore's "Pay It Forward." One hopes he or his agents exercise a better choice over scripts in the future. The worst performance in the film, not surprisingly, comes from Robin Williams, who became an act rather than an actor in "Good Will Hunting," and has yet to recover. Just like Dustin Hoffman in recent roles, he's here playing yet another caricature of a weirdo to diminishing effect. The one star is for Freddie Highmore. |
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August Rush dvd movie.