The stories are good, but the music is EXQUISITE! The music binds the 5 stories together! It's entertaining to listen to! It's impossibly difficult to play (I know)! John Corigliano (with collaboration from Joshua Bell, maybe the best living violinist) made the music so good that Corigliano easily made it in to a work of its own that premiered with the LA Symphony even before the movie did. And was critically acclaimed.
In other words, the music stands on its own!
The acting is good, also. Especially the violinists. It is easy for a former player to point out when actors aren't actually playing their instruments, especially strings. In The Red Violin that never happened. They went to enormous lengths to get the performers to be in sync with the music.
The best example was casting a 8-year old actual violin student to portray the child protege, who they then taught to be an actor. An 8-year old is actually playing this impossibly-hard etude! Tho you actually hear Bell playing the kid is actually doing it also! And it shows! I thought just this adorable, amazing kid alone was worth the price of admission, so to speak.
The directing and writing is equally good...
Until the end.
I hated the ending!
But I was intrigued enough by the rest of it to watch the DVD extras. The "making of" featurettes are good (Joshua Bell looks like he's 18 even tho he's a year older than I am!) but I got a relief, and a new-found appreciation for the film after listening to what the director/writers had to say about the ending.
I know I'm not the only person to misunderstand their intentions based on their commentary.
So, I highly recommend watching The Red Violin! Regardless of what you think of it's ending, it is still worth seeing!
And if you don't like the ending, as I did, watch the director's commentary, at least for the last of the 5 stories. And like I did, think of how you would change it to make their (better) vision come to life.
1 comment:
...then buy the soundtrack, like me.
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