Change Your Image
mariannay
Reviews
They Came to Play (2008)
They came to play for love, not for money
This is a "Spellbound" about music (for those you have seen this documentary about Spelling Bee competition). The film follows a group of pianists during a yearly Amateur Piano Competition held in Texas in the United States.
The film is greatly edited, is entertaining and very witty. Moldovan housewife from the former USSR now living in California - Esfir is really touching, as well as an ophthalmologist from Alabama and many other contestants. There are software engineers, a TV producer, a flight attendant and a federal judge.
They are all are over forty and have day jobs. And some of them have overcome something quite challenging in their lives - AIDS... heartbreak... political asylum...
And, what is also important - the film celebrates great classical music: from Beethoven's The Tempest - to Rachmaninoff and Bach, Haydn and Chopin. A contestant or two will crash and burn on stage, but nobody's career will be ruined. In fact, there is nothing "amateur" about most of these pianists - some of them are brilliant - like Drew Mays - and they came to play for love, not for money.
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Very effective film
To my opinion, this is a very effective film. It succeeded in its initial purpose: to raise public awareness, to bring attention to the issue of ecology, climate change and to how we treat this problem. In that respect the film is absolutely successful, and I am very proud to have worked on it as part of production team. In the film, Al Gore states, "Global warming is not a political issue, it is a moral issue." To me it is both a political and a moral issue, of course, but both are important. When Gore reflects about the White House poster/chart with the woman drawn on it/ looking at the scale. On one side of the scale there is a gold bar, on the other the entire planet. The woman is choosing reflecting: which one to chose?.. Ever metaphor that Al Gore uses is very effective and often very witty. One can argue about details, certain scenes, certain photographs, but my overall recommendation is to see it. It is important, contemporary, and puts Hollywood means to good use.