BEFORE: Getting another late start, I was out last night working at an event for this new animated "featurette", it's 6 music videos that were done by my boss for a musician named Jackie Greene. This was work-related, so I'm not going to count this as part of my chain - anyway, the total running time was only about 30 minutes so it doesn't qualify to me as an official feature-length film for the purposes of my project. Anyway, I probably can't judge the piece objectively, because I appeared in the film as the model for a nightclub bouncer, the footage of me was rotoscoped to create this animated bouncer character. It still looked a bit like me, and while I was selling DVDs at the merch table a number of friends and ex-co-workers talked to me as they passed by, and told me that they recognized me in the film. Anyway, it's good timing because that project was all about putting crazy images to 6 songs, and tonight's film is also all about music.
From the Laura Linney chain I'm going to transition to a Meryl Streep 3-film chain, which will get me very close to an Easter-based film. The transition link is Adam LeFevre, who played the town's police chief in "You Can Count on Me" - he carries over, and so does one other actor.
THE PLOT: Story of a schoolteacher's struggle to teach violin to inner-city Harlem kids.
AFTER: Looking back over this week so far, I'm suddenly realizing that it's been mostly about the kids. From the kid that Sherlock Holmes taught about beekeeping to the two sons of divorcing parents in "The Squid and the Whale" to the young son of a single mother in "You Can Count on Me", the focus has really been on child actors. ("Breach" is a bit of a stretch, the young central character was in his early twenties, I think...) And up until now it's pretty much been "Laura Linney plays a single mother who yells at her kids". But tonight's different, it's "Meryl Streep plays a single mother who yells at her kids."
Then there are more kids she yells at, these are young students that she teaches violin to, after her husband splits, leaving her with 2 sons and a pile of 50 violins (for some reason). Her new boyfriend turns her on to a music teacher job at a Harlem school, though she has no formal teaching experience or credentials, she works her way in as a substitute teacher, and the fact that she has 50 extra violins on hand (for some reason) doesn't hurt. Without formal training, she uses a combination of tough love and creative encouragements to get these inner-city kids to practice violin, and eventually perform in a school concert.
She manages to have great success with this program, but then came a difficult time, when school music programs started to get their funding cut, thanks to Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush Sr. You have to remember this was a different time, when conservatives were in charge and took a hard line against things like music and art, which they for some reason associate with liberals and weakness, as opposed to strong conservative school programs like sports (and, one assumes, gun training). This came around again during Bush the Lesser's administration, and it's coming back around again now, with Trump's proposal to stop funding the NEA entirely.
On that argument, obviously I'm always going to come down on the side of the arts. I had a strong background in music during my education, from the age of 4 or 5 my mother encouraged me to play piano and/or drums, but I didn't really take to them as much as I could have. I picked up the clarinet in fourth grade, and stuck with it through high school orchestra, but I've been told that I maybe only wanted to play clarinet because my sister was playing it, and I therefore forced her to switch to the oboe. I really dug singing all through school, and as an extra benefit I was pretty good at it, and though I never qualified for district orchestra on the clarinet, I found it was much easier for me to make the district chorus. Then after my voice changed I learned there was an appalling lack of bass singers in my high school, and that made it much easier for me to get spots in musical theater productions, and also specialized choral groups like a double quartet. I stuck with singing in college, too, until I realized that most of the young men in NYU Chorale were there to hook up with other young men in the NYU Chorale. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not my scene. Later I started and ran two different a cappella groups, because that was easier than auditioning for other people's already-established groups.
Music's still a large part of my life, it's certainly tangential to animation and filmmaking in general - what's a film without music? And I've made vocal appearances in animated films, both dialogue-based and singing-based. And it all got started back in the day thanks to music teachers, including my mom, who was a grade-school music teacher for 40 years - thankfully, in the next town over from where we lived, because having your parent for a teacher, even a music teacher, is just about the most embarrassing thing I can imagine for a kid to go through. Now, as adults (OK, sort of...) my mother and I can finally talk about music, even though she skews very classical and I only listen to rock from the 1960's through 1980's, with a few exceptions.
I know I couldn't be a music teacher myself, I don't have the patience to even talk to a child, let alone raise one, or listen to it play a musical instrument badly for hours on end. After listening to a room full of grade-schoolers play the wrong notes on a badly-tuned violin, I'd probably be ready to jump off a bridge or walk out into traffic. How this music teacher in the film, or how any music teacher deals with their job, I have no idea - but more power to them. As the movie points out, kids who study music tend to do better in math and science, there's some connection probably through learning discipline through music, and that characteristic extending to other aspects of education.
Surprisingly, this film was directed by Wes Craven, who's much more famous for directing horror films like "Scream" and "Nightmare on Elm Street". I'm not sure why he stepped away from that genre just to make this film, but I'm glad that he did. Maybe he had a personal connection to music education, or he was blown away by the documentary "Small Wonders", which was also about the same music teacher, Roberta Guaspari. It's the only film he ever directed that got any Academy Award nominations, so as a filmmaker that might have been a sign to him that he didn't need to restrict himself to one genre - but of course he went back to that well for "Scream 3" and "Scream 4".
I've got a big bone to pick with whoever's responsible for the sound on this film - or perhaps whoever controls the sound at Carnegie Hall, but that seems unlikely. During the big concert scene at the end, the announcer said the names of the famous violinists who were performing with the kids at "Fiddlefest", but I couldn't hear one name clearly. It was kind of like when they announce the baseball players in a stadium, and there's something wrong with the PA system. Later I had to look up the names of the violinists on Wikipedia, and isn't that sort of against the whole point? These musicians took time out of their busy performing schedules to make appearances in this movie, shouldn't the audience have been able to hear their names clearly, so that we'd know who they were?
In the end, though, it feels like a bit of pandering to over-simplify music education, as the film turns into "Meryl Streep rescues a bunch of inner-city minority kids through music". And you can confirm that this is where the film ultimately is going to go because at one point her character informs a parent very directly, that she's not all about rescuing a bunch of inner-city minority kids through music. The more you find a character protesting about what he or she is NOT all about, the greater the chance that a director added that line in a feeble attempt to disguise the fact that that IS what the character is all about. Or you can just take this as a female take on "Mr. Holland's Opus", the fact that this was released four years after that film is a little telling.
EDIT: Besides Adam LeFevre and the presence of a Culkin brother (Rory in one film, Kieran in the other), I did notice that "You Can Count on Me" and "Music of the Heart" did share something else in common, the presence of a particular piece of music. "You Can Count on Me" used it again and again, and "Music of the Heart" used it only once, and by the sound of it the composer was probably Bach. See, my mother would have recognized it right away, knew it was Bach, and she'd also be able to give you the exact name of the piece. I'm not as knowledgable, I only know that it's Bach because it sounds so mathematical in its progression, but I only know THAT because of my mother and other music teachers like her. But I have IMDB to help level the playing field, so I now know that the piece is Bach's "Cello Suite #1 in G Major".
Also starring Meryl Streep (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "In Dreams"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Vampire in Brooklyn"), Gloria Estefan (last seen in "Marley & Me"), Jane Leeves (last heard in "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Father of the Bride Part II"), Jay O. Sanders (last seen in "Starting Over"), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "The Comedian"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Going in Style"), Jean-Luke Figueroa, Olga Merediz (last seen in "Evita"), Charlie Hofheimer (last seen in "Paranoia"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave"), Betsy Aidem (also carrying over from "You Can Count on Me"), with cameos from Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Mark O'Connor, Michael Tree, Charles Veal Jr., Arnold Steinhardt, Karen Briggs, Sandra Park, Diane Monroe.
RATING: 5 out of 10 permission slips
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