Tuesday, March 4, 2008

In the Screening Room - Scott Hick's
Shine


Session 015 - Shine

Who saw it and what are your thoughts on it?

By Brian Mulligan at 7:04 AM

2 comments:

chachiincharge said...

Okay it has been a few months since I saw it in prep for this screening room, so I may be rusty.

I can't recall a whole lot because in truth, it wasn't all that memorable. I found it kinda boring if I recall.

I thought Rush was good as being eccentric, but nowhere near good enough for an Oscar. He has been better.

I liked Armin Mueller-Stahl as the father, but in the end all he gets to play is angry and I really didn't get a sense of what made him that way.

I didn't buy any of the love story, and thought that it was all just a pity-parade for him, and not because of any true care for him.

Overall, kinda of cliche and certainly forgettable.

March 4, 2008 at 7:21 PM
Brian Mulligan said...

You’re absolutely right, Shine is lifeless. It’s dull, it’s tedious, it’s not even well told and as I mentioned in the Oscar blunders post, how Scott Hicks ever got a nomination for this film is beyond me. There is not one thing that stood out from a director’s point of view that made this film feel special.

The only decision I can think of that he even made is the idea of showing Rush’s character at the beginning and then having the story work its way back to him… not exactly virtuoso direction. Plus, I can only imagine he did that because otherwise Rush bears absolutely no resemblance to the actor playing him as a child. Or maybe it was his decision to have a story about a piano player in which we only sparingly hear him play for roughly the first half of the film (at one point I started to wonder if we’d ever get to listen to this ‘boy genius’ perform).

Scott Hicks is so heavy-handed in this; I must have been watching a different film than the Academy. The first forty minutes (40!) are dedicated solely to the purpose of showing what an awful childhood David (Rush’s character) had because of his dad’s desperate need to have him be a ‘winner’. “You must win David” is repeated and repeated and repeated. The remainder of what should have been the establishing scenes of the film are dragged out past the hour mark, and include his dad fighting with David, with David’s piano teacher (whom I am simply amazed he would have even hired, considering his need to control everything in David’s life), then with David again.

Hell, David is a bystander in his own damn movie. Then playing piano rattles his brain.

At this point Geoffrey Rush finally shows up and wins an Oscar (presumably because he talks really fast and repeats everything he says three times). Rush is fine, but again, I have no idea what the Academy was thinking rewarding this performance. This is the type of role Kate Winslet was referring to on “Extras” when she said, “Seriously, you’re guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental.”

This is just a straightforward movie, with a storyline that shows a great piano player facing hardships, going mental and eventually playing piano again. Again I ask, how did this rack up 9 Academy Award nominations? C

March 5, 2008 at 8:00 AM

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