Word: reals
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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...
...this sounds like Marley and Me-style pleasantly 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...
Local promoters and real estate agents cringe at the bad press, but the warnings aren't surprising, with more than 1,300 murders along the border since January, nearly 90% drug-related. Beheadings and mutilated bodies along roadsides are common news items. In one sensational arrest, the police jailed Santiago Meza Lopez, a drug warlord "disposal expert," who allegedly took hundreds of corpses and dissolved them in tubs of acid. He was known as El Pozolero, or "The Stewmaker." Such a delicious story is difficult for the media to ignore...
...Hummers filled with stern-faced soldiers and .50 caliber machine guns is not the post-card image tourists seek, nor a perception easily changed -unless of course you live in Rosarito. "The military has really made a huge difference," said Kanoa Biondolillo, co-owner of Baja123 real estate. "There's been a huge drop in local extortion, you don't have to bribe the police anymore if they stop you. I've never felt safer...
...Biondolillo says there were 50 or more real estate offices in Rosarito Beach; today there are 12. "We've really gotten beaten up in the American press, people think it's a war zone, but it's not. The violence is only in targeted areas, where the cartels...