The Soloist: In this fact-based drama, Robert Downey plays Los Angeles Times journalist Steve Lopez. Estranged from his former wife, Mary (Catherine Keener) -- who is still his editor -- Lopez leads a solitary existence in his upscale but empty home, lulling himself into oblivion, night by night, with a bottle of wine and Neil Diamond tunes. With readership shrinking and layoffs all around him, Lopez desperately needs a human interest story to keep his career on track. He stumbles across an especially compelling one when he meets Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a musically gifted homeless man.
As he profiles and eventually befriends Ayers -- whose passion for Bach and Beethoven Lopez finds infectious -- the columnist works to get him settled in an apartment and find him a safe environment in which to practice. Eventually he strikes on the real-life Lamp Community, a refuge on LA's skid row. Like Ayers, whose schizophrenia cut short his promising cello studies at
The film examines the topics of mental illness and homelessness and it goes about that task with documentary-like realism, coupled with extraordinary tenderness. The result is a film that packs an emotional wallop and yet, paradoxically, feels hopeful. Hopeful that the simple act of friendship can make a difference in someone's life, even if we are unable to offer solutions for a friend's problems. Lopez desperately wanted to fix Ayers, to help him unleash his musical gift to the full. But it turns out that that's not really the point. Loyalty, faithfulness and determination to keep trying, no matter what—those are the values that matter most, according to this film.
The Visitor: A deeply moving drama built around longtime character actor Richard Jenkins. The Visitor is a simmering drama about a college professor and recent widower, Walter Vale who discovers a pair of illegal aliens who were the victims of a real-estate scam living in his
Stranger Than Fiction: Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS agent whose life is little more than a string of dull, dreary, methodical routines. Every morning he brushes his teeth a certain number of times, and he walks a certain number of steps across the street to catch his bus—and the film annotates his activities with pop-up diagrams that track his every move. Harold's activities are described to us by a female voice-over narrator—and then, one morning, Harold hears the voice for himself. At first this is merely annoying, and it drives Harold nuts—but then the woman's voice makes a cryptic reference to Harold's imminent death, and Harold begins to fear for his life.
The voice belongs to Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a novelist who has a bad case of writer's block; the problem is so bad, in fact, that the publisher has sent her an assistant named Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) to goad her into finishing her latest book. We learn that Kay has a reputation for killing off her main characters, and the reason her current novel is stuck in limbo is because she can't figure out how to bump off the main character—who just happens to be Harold Crick.
Harold turns to a literary prof named Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who creates a test to narrow down the possible range of genres to which Harold's life story might belong. Harold also happens to be auditing—and falling in love with—an idealistic baker named Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), so he takes notes every time they meet, tallying the moments between them that seem to point towards a happy ending and those which seem to point towards something more tragic. Of course, since he works for the IRS, and she withheld a portion of her taxes to protest government policies, the relationship might seem doomed; then again, romantic comedies often start with couples hating each other's guts, so who knows?
This very unique but heartwarming film explores topics such as control and meaning in our lives, outside influences and death.
Submitted by P Y
