The Music Never Stopped: What we do for love

The Music Never Stopped (2011) • View trailer for The Music Never Stopped
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for thematic elements, mild profanity and brief drug references
By Derrick Bang


Many of our strongest memories, happy or sad, are amplified by songs: first date, first kiss, what played on the radio as some dreadful news was delivered.

Movies are all about the often crafty application of music. Sometimes only a few measures of main theme or underscore are necessary to revive scenes or even entire films: the ominous strings in Jaws; the Pink Panther theme; the opening fanfare in Star Wars; the horn blast and “heavy guitar” strum that accompanies the silhouette of James Bond, as he strolls and shoots toward the circular gun barrel. No doubt you have many of your own, and that’s the whole point; we all do.

Temporarily brought back to "himself" while listening to the music he loves,
Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci) attempts to explain his passion about certain songs,
while his bemused father (J.K. Simmons) attempts to make sense of an entire
decade that he willfully ignored. Can this generational chasm be bridged?

The Music Never Stopped, a touching drama expanded from an actual case study, draws its juice from this premise: the notion that music touches us, all of us, in a manner that opens a window deeper into our souls. In most instances, this merely intensifies a relationship also built by conversation, trust, shared experience and time: the years we spend getting to know each other.

But what if music were the only means of establishing a new connective bridge, to replace those damaged by circumstance?

Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks’ screenplay is based on “The Last Hippie,” a case study from Dr. Oliver Sacks’ 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars. Sacks, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, also happens to be an accomplished storyteller; he has written numerous best-sellers, based on his work with various intriguing patients. Quite a few of these accounts have become memorable films or plays.

His 1973 book Awakenings was turned into an Academy Award-nominated film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro; his 1985 collection, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, became a must-read title. Temple Grandin, a professor with high-functioning autism, also is profiled in An Anthropologist on Mars; her story recently was dramatized in a Golden Globe-winning HBO film starring Claire Danes. 1999’s At First Sight, starring Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino, also is drawn from one of Sacks’ essays.

“The Last Hippie” concerned a young man with devastating amnesia caused by a brain tumor. He could remember no new events in his life, but his recollection of music, specifically songs by the bands he adored in the 1960s, remained intact. In a very real sense, as Sacks noted, this young man had been marooned in the ’60s.

The Music Never Stopped, set in 1986, opens as Henry and Helen Sawyer (J.K. Simmons and Cara Seymour) learn that their long-estranged son, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci), has been found wandering the streets of New York City. He has a dangerous brain tumor; surgery removes the ongoing threat but cannot repair the damage. When Gabriel recovers, he’s still in a near-catatonic state, his mind no longer able to create long-term memories or recall short-term events. In effect, every day — every conversation, no matter how many times it’s repeated — is a fresh experience.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Clasped hearts

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) • View trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for war violence, sensuality and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.2.09
Buy DVD: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • Buy Blu-Ray: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button: The Criterion Collection [Blu-ray]


Death and sorrow hang over this film like a shroud.

But not despair — never despair — and that's an important distinction.

Having faithfully brought her foster child to revival-style church meetings
every Sunday, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) is amazed and gratified when
Benjamin takes his first few halting steps, apparently having had his "demons"
exorcised by the nearby minister. As it happens, the truth is much more
complicated than that...

I wonder, though, whether that subtlety will be perceived by mainstream viewers more inclined to chafe at this film's deliberate, leisurely tone and close to three-hour length. The rewards are many for those with a maturity to appreciate this story's primary message — that life is measured, not in minutes, but in moments — but director David Fincher's approach is relentlessly melancholy.

Despite its unusual story and unexpected bursts of whimsy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button likely will be perceived as a major downer.

In this respect — and in many others, come to think of it — this film bears a striking similarity to 1998's Meet Joe Black, an equally long and unhurried effort by star Brad Pitt to sell himself as a peculiar protagonist (and, as a result, bizarre romantic lead) in a decidedly adult fairy tale.

Fortunately, Benjamin Button is a more polished and intriguing story: one whose weight justifies this film's length (definitely not the case with Meet Joe Black). Fincher also has a better handle on the all-essential approach required to keep this concept afloat: one wrong move, and the entire project would sink like the drowned WWII sailors Benjamin (Pitt) encounters during one of his many adventures.

Although ostensibly based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eric Roth and Robin Swicord's screenplay borrows little more than the title and freakish central concept of a man born old, who subsequently ages backwards. Aside from the additional grace note of a female lead named Daisy — a nod to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby — this is a wholly original tale, and a striking one, at that.

It has the episodic, Everyman-experiences-life structure of Forrest Gump, blended with the anticipatory heartbreak of 1968's Charly, itself based on "Flowers for Algernon," a Daniel Keyes fantasy story (later novel) that explored the consequences of knowing one's fate in advance.

Using a dual flashback/ voice-over narrative style — Benjamin gently relates his saga, his voice taking over from Caroline (Julia Ormond), as she reads his diary aloud to her elderly and rapidly failing mother, Daisy (Cate Blanchett) — our hero introduces himself as he says, with unintended irony, "I was born under unusual circumstances."

The year is 1918, the setting New Orleans, where a distraught father — whose wife has died in childbirth — abandons his infant son on the steps of Nolan House, a retirement home filled with kindly elderly tenants and their equally benevolent caregivers. The baby, unattractive to the point of appearing deformed, is embraced by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, truly radiant), a church-going woman who believes that all children possess God's grace.