Word: wright
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...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...
...Without direct experience in the awful second language of mental illness, one cannot say whether the translation is in fact, accurate, but Wright's visual representations of schizophrenia are searing. Teenage Ayers watches a burning car drive by and we assume it is the symptom of a rough neighborhood, but as it glides past with eerie smoothness, it is revealed to be hallucination...
...There is beauty in these visions as well. Ayers favors playing in a tunnel under a freeway, where he can hear "the pigeons clapping." As delivered by Foxx in mumbled tones, this is garbled poetry, halfway to making sense. Later, when you've almost forgotten that, Wright pulls the camera up to helicopter level, over the loops and cement curlicues of the freeway. Up from its core rise two pigeons, which indeed, seem to be clapping...
...increasingly short supply in the newspaper world today: veterans like Lopez, who are awarded the gift of time to find his stories, and readers who respond to them. Just after Lopez writes a column explaining that the cello is Ayers's true love, but he doesn't have one, Wright cuts to a little old lady reading the paper with her arthritic hands, a cello in the background. The next morning, we get a driver's seat view of that cello, winding its way through the newsroom in a mail cart to be deposited in front of Lopez with...
...Carolyn Wright, the campground's "ambassador," was driving a golf cart, waving to campers she knew from years past and stopping to answer questions. "Camping is a cheap way for people with kids to explore new things," she said. "Kids have as much fun here as they do in Disneyland." At least the lines for the restrooms are shorter...