Review: Downey a virtuoso in 'The Soloist'

A journalist -- Steve sublimation printer Lopez http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp of the Los Angeles Times -- meets a homeless guy on the street playing Beethoven on the last two strings on a fiddle.
He's not performing for the public. If he has an audience in mind at all, it's the German composer -- he's placed himself in the shadow of Beethoven's statue in Pershing Square in Los Angeles.
The guy says his name is Nathaniel Ayers and that he went to Juilliard.
His story checks out, and Lopez writes it up: A prodigious musical talent grows up in the ghetto, earns a scholarship to Juilliard School to play the cello, succumbs to schizophrenia, flunks out and winds up -- 20 years later -- pushing a shopping trolley up and down Grand Avenue, playing violin for the birds. ("The pigeons clap when they fly," sublimation printer Nathaniel explains.)
Readers are moved. Someone sends a cello to the paper, and in delivering it, Lopez becomes embroiled in Nathaniel's life. This gift has strings attached, in more ways than one. Lopez wants Nathaniel to move to a community shelter. He wants him to take meds, to resume his lessons. He wants to fix him.
Hollywood tends to do this stuff too easily, equating mental illness with artistic or spiritual transcendence and most often trivializing both in the process.
Written by Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich") and directed by Joe Wright ("Atonement"), "The Soloist" isn't immune to the temptation, but it's smart enough to locate the cliché in the reporter's own sublimation printer need for healing.Lopez -- played by Robert Downey Jr. -- accepts the role of fairy godfather with some reluctance (and alarm when Nathaniel takes to calling his savior his "God"), but we note that his own house is scarcely a home.
His wife (Catherine Keener), also his editor, has gone. The kids are gone. Paintings are stacked against the walls. His belongings are in boxes -- not so different from the junk in Nathaniel's cart. Perhaps Lopez is the soloist here?
At any rate, Downey plays him like a virtuoso. In the normal way of things, this picture should belong to Nathaniel (Jamie Foxx). He's making beautiful music, wears a star-spangled wardrobe and flips between states of semi-autistic reiteration, periods of calm and fury.
Somehow, though, Foxx slips into a supporting role. That's not necessarily the actor's fault or even to the detriment of the movie, though flashbacks to his youth are relatively one-note.
Wright makes every effort to put us into Nathaniel's head, but these expressionist flourishes are only sporadically effective. Whichever way the screenplay may have been weighted, I suspect Wright saw what he had in Downey and let him carry it.
He's been sucking up the accolades for a long time now, and rightfully so, but until "Iron Man" most of Downey's best work has been restricted to supporting roles. (I'd pick out "One Night Stand," "Zodiac," "Wonder Boys" and "A Scanner Darkly.")
This time he assumes center stage through sheer focus. He's unerringly truthful, never showy, not the cynical snark he could easily caricature. Under sublimation printer Downey's influence, "The Soloist" becomes a movie about a concerned middle-aged white man learning what commitment means.
There are other good things: Wright, who also made "Pride and Prejudice," is a gifted -- if self-conscious -- stylist, and he seizes on downtown L.A. as if nobody had filmed there before.
More importantly, it's a film you find yourself listening to intently. He holds back the music for long stretches and makes it count. (In one ostentatious sequence set in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Beethoven's Third is rendered in a fantasia of abstract colors.)
Best of all, maybe, are the faces of the homeless Wright shares with us -- old faces, odd, asymmetrical, sometimes bewildered faces. Faces the like of which we don't see on movie screens too often, but vivid and painfully real in a way that -- for whatever reason -- eludes the heroic efforts of Foxx.
"The Soloist" doesn't sublimation printer muster much in the way of a grand finale -- nothing but a tentative bridge across the racial and class divide. Maybe even that gesture of solidarity smacks of Hollywood hokum -- Wright lays everything on a bit thick, even his restraint -- but at least this movie acknowledges the divide. It's worth seeing for Downey at his peak, and hearing for Beethoven, too.

PETA to Pet Shop Boys: Rescue Shelter Boys, perhaps?

Just because http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp they named sublimation printer their new CD "Yes," does not mean that British electro-pop duo, the Pet Shop Boys, will agree to just about anything.
The band has turned down a request from an animal rights group to rename itself the Rescue Shelter Boys.
The organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA), sent a letter to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledging that its request, at first blush, might appear "bizarre."
But, by changing its name, the band could raise awareness at every tour stop of the "cramped, filthy conditions" that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores, PETA said in its letter. Read how the Pet Shop Boys got their name
The duo, which has performed under its current name for more than 20 years, reproduced PETA's written request in full on its Web site.
The musicians said they were "unable to agree" to the request "but nonetheless think (it) raises an issue worth thinking about."
The animal rights group said it was pleased the Pet Shop Boys had drawn attention to the issue by posting its letter so prominently on the band's site. Talking about its campaign on a blog entry, a PETA staffer wrote:
"I think I may have to stick "West End Girls" on my iPod right now to celebrate."
"West End Girls" is one of the many hits the group has had in its long career.
PETA is no stranger to oddball campaigns. A recent one was aimed to re-christen fish as "sea kittens" because "who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?"

Kurt Cobain remembered 15 years after his death

The park bench facing http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp Lake Washington is sublimation printer covered with flowers, poems, a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and graffiti.
"I miss your beautiful face and voice," one dedication reads.
"Thank you for inspiring me," says another.
"RIP Kurt."
Fifteen years ago Wednesday, at a house adjacent to the park, Kurt Cobain's dead body was discovered by an electrician.
The Nirvana frontman, 27, had sublimation printer committed suicide, police later ruled, killing himself with a shotgun while high on heroin and pills.
His death ended a battle with hard drugs and added Cobain to a long list of legendary musicians, such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, whose careers were cut short by their addictions.
Cobain's ashes were reportedly scattered in a Washington state river and a New York Buddhist temple.
Nirvana band mates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl eventually formed other bands. Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, stayed in the limelight with an acting career and legal problems surrounding sublimation printer her own drug problems. Frances Bean, the couple's daughter, has largely lived outside the public eye.
What was unclear when Cobain died was whether the music Nirvana created would endure or fade away like the grunge craze it helped to inspire.
"At one point I thought, 15 years on, no one would really know who Kurt Cobain was outside of a group of diehard fans," said Jeff Burlingame, a Cobain biographer who grew up with the musician in Aberdeen, Washington, and knew him when he was a teenager who, without a place to sleep, crashed on mutual friends' couches.
But Nirvana's music endured, and Cobain even found fans in his sublimation printer hometown of Aberdeen, which he had derided as a small-minded town.
"The old-timers who were there when Kurt was around really took offense to some of the things he said about the sublimation printer area, so they had no real reason to honor him," said Burlingame, who co-founded the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee.
A famous son is a famous son, though. Now, visitors arriving in Aberdeen are greeted with a sign that reads "Come As You Are," after a famous Nirvana song.
Cobain Memorial Committee members, who include Cobain's paternal grandfather, hope to establish a community center in the late rocker's honor that would give area youth a place to play music and pursue artistic interests.
A concert will be held Friday in Seattle to honor Cobain and raise money for the center.
When Cobain died, he left behind a fortune that was estimated in the millions.
Even more money sublimation printer poured in over time from the royalties from his songs. But a lawyer hired by Love, Rhonda Holmes, says most of that money is missing.
According to Holmes, Love recently discovered that "managers, assistants, CPAs, lawyers, people like that who were supposed to be entrusted with carrying for their well-being and finances basically looted the estate."
Forensic accountants are now trying to sublimation printer determine where tens of millions of dollars from Cobain's estate ended up and how it could be recovered, Holmes said