August Rush(2007)- User Reviews

This movie is pure art! Critics who pan this film as "silly" and "sugary" and viewers who see it as "heartwarming" or "a tibute to music" are missing the point. Only the reviewer who saw the movie as an example of "magical realism" (a la Garcia Marquez' Hundred Years of Solitude or Allende's House of Spirits) and the critic who thought the movie was "prone to long shots of light sparkling off bright objects" appoached the heart of the matter. The movie is a montage of visual shots and audio bites which express the delight and wonder of people caught up in a musical rapture. They are separated physically and emotionally by their own unique response to the stimulation of music, only to be reunited at the end by the commonality of music as a means of communication, which is at oncle individual and universal. In essence, August Rush is a metaphor for this emotional transfiguration sparked by music. It is a visual poem, and like a poem the meaning is in the connotation of the images, not in the story as such. Sure, the story line is trite and silly, and the acting is saccharine, but the movie as art demanded this approach. "The medium is the message." I give this movie a standing ovation- and at 67 I am not easy to please!