Word: lopezes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...based on the real story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez's (Downey) relationship with a homeless schizophrenic named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Foxx), whom he met in a downtown LA park in 2005. Ayers was playing a violin during that first encounter, apparently quite well, despite it having only two strings. He had been a Juilliard student in the 1970s, until mental illness cost him just about everything but his love for music. That year, Lopez wrote nearly a dozen columns detailing his attempts to understand and assist Ayers and, in 2008, published a book about their friendship...
...heartwarming pabulum to you, think twice. There's real sentiment here, but the sentimental is blessedly missing. The script by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) is smart, witty and lean. Wright's principal indulgences are visual, as in his 2007 film Atonement. He turns a neighborhood bar where a depressed Lopez pounds shots into something that glows like the inside of a vein, and makes Skid Row into a Hieronymus Bosch painting with grocery carts (using some of LA's estimated 60,000 homeless as extras...
...Latin America, where thousands of children are growing up behind bars alongside their incarcerated mothers and fathers. That might sound like Dickensian tragedy; but in Bolivia it's a legal - and fiercely defended - practice. "We've seen that this is best for mother, or father, and child," says Jorge Lopez, Director of Bolivia's Penitentiary System. "It's important not to rip those bonds between parent and child." What's more, sadly, it may be the best alternative for the children themselves. In Bolivia, South America's poorest country, it's often financially impossible for family members on the outside...
Advocates argue that keeping the children inside prison may also have positive effects on their convict parents. "Having a child near helps the parent reform his or her actions and be more eager to rehabilitate and readapt to society," Lopez adds, noting that Bolivian legislation on this issue was based on studies reflecting that trend. (See pictures of how boxing helps prisoners in Thailand...
Still, housing children with incarcerated parents is becoming a more accepted practice across a region that shares many of Bolivia's social shortcomings. According to Lopez, Ecuador, Peru and Guatemala have systems similar to Bolivia's, which allows kids to live inside until the age of six (though even Lopez admits that kids sometimes stay years longer). Some women's prisons in Mexico hold toddlers; and in Argentina, there is a special facility for pregnant inmates and those with kids under the age of four...