Darwin Just Didn't Get It Right!

I said 'Copying Beethoven' wasn't a date movie, but maybe I was wrong. The couple who sat down a seat away from me certainly seemed to think so. I kept wracking my brains trying to think if 'Farrelly Brothers' or 'Leonardo Di Caprio' had been mentioned on the poster, but I just couldn't remember seeing either. Well, these two had come prepared anyhow. They kept pulling bags of corn snacks from the air and letting the rest of us know about it. Ultimately they made a bad movie intolerable. I mean surely the clue was in the title, this was a movie about Beethoven, and as such, it might have a little music in it. In fact whether the movie was good or not, at least we could enjoy that music. Right? Nope. Crunching couple thought the music bits were the intermission. The centrepiece of the movie is a kind of highlights performance of the Ninth. I kid you not, they talked through the whole thing. Naturally, and inevitably, I had to shhh them, but to no avail. Why the Hell were they there? I mean why the Hell were they there? Anyone with even a couple of brain cells would suspect a little bit about the movie, yet they had no interest whatever. Darwin couldn't be right. How could genes like that still be floating around the 'survival of the fittest' pool? When abortions go wrong.

To be fair, the movie didn't warrant too much attention anyhow. Ed Harris , bizarre in brown contact lenses, and Diane Kruger, not just a pretty face, are not too bad. However, they are saddled with a director (and a screenplay), who feels the need to 'explain' the joy of music with shaky camera moves and hazy 'ecstatic' shots. Even that hoary old cliche of the closed eyed hand gestures gets a thorough outing. Music does not require an explanation, and certainly not that of Beethoven. You either get it or you don't. No half-assed music video with a bad line in spiritual mumbo jumbo (about God's language) is going to change that. Certainly it shouldn't be the raison d'etre for a fictionalised account of Beethoven's last year. One way or the other, if you are in the audience you have presumably 'gotten' Beethoven already. Presumably. Well, maybe not afterall.