Review: The Soloist

Chick 1 says:soloist2

Yay!  One of my I Can’t Wait movies is out!  Robert Downey Jr. , Joe Wright, & Jamie Foxx.  Sigh.  I am happy.

What I Liked: This really is a touching powerful story.  Based on a series of articles by real life LA Times journalist Steve Lopez (RDJ), it follows his friendship with homeless virtuoso Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx).    Downey is always watchable & reliable & he doesn’t disappoint here.  Foxx is spot on as a man ravaged by schizophrenia.  As a former social worker who spent 5 years working with the mentally ill, a lot of this movie rang true for me. Ayers’ frenetic speech (often a mechanism to try to shut out the madness) is frustrating & annoying.  I suspect this is a combination of a well written script & Foxx’s performance.  The difficulty truly connecting with others, the frightening and sudden mood changes all felt real.  Director Joe Wright also used real homeless in many scenes & it shows.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Downey’s laugh in one scene was genuine.  The storyline with Lopez & his ex wife is really sweet as well with a nice performance by Catherine Keener as the ex.  (This was added for dramatic conflict.  Lopez is happily married to his 1st wife today.)

What I Didn’t Like: The movie is a little slow at first with nothing but RDJ’s charisma to keep you invested.  Wright explores the theme of schizophrenia well and I was hopeful to see the power of music explored also.  But I never really felt the movie reached the lush emotional connection it promised.  And, Joe, we all have Real Media Player.  We’ve seen the effect before.

Bottom Line: A moving story about the power of messy, real friendship & the value of each person, no matter how broken.  Worth full admission.

Chick 2 says:

In an age where “successful” movies seem forced to fit certain clichés, The Soloist recognizes a true story that is worth telling, taking only a few liberties from what actually happened.  Robert Downey Jr. plays a journalist who discovers a former musical prodigy, played by Jamie Foxx, who is now homeless resulting from the crippling effects of schizophrenia.  RDJ’s Steve Lopez is looking for his next big story idea but instead finds someone who could genuinely use his help. Lopez is moved to real action, whether or not he admits to himself that Foxx’s Ayers actually needs him and that he is now responsible somewhat for the welfare of another human being.  Another character’s (the well-meaning self-proclaimed Christian) actions are lost in rhetoric when it comes to the terms of “in or out”, while the selfish is truly motivated by the human desire to help someone regardless of how it hurts or if he actually succeeds.  In the end, the movie asks the question if Ayers has actually been helped or not, but answers that it doesn’t matter because hearts have loved and been loved in the process.  The end didn’t need to be “Hollywooded” to make an impact.

Director Joe Wright is truly a genius story-teller, aided greatly by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.  Images from the movie would make beautiful stills and you are engrossed in the music, a central character, by unconventional camera techniques that take sound and translate it to the visual.  Some of the moments were a bit too long for a musically uneducated person such as myself, but definitely added to the story.

Posted on April 25, 2009 by admin in Reviews, The 2000s 1,308 Comments

1,308 Responses to Review: The Soloist

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    Beirut, Lebanon
    CNN
    —
    A deadly Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday has left over a dozen people dead, including a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, sharply escalating the conflict between the two sides and raising fears of all-out war.

    Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, part of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was assassinated along with “about 10” other commanders, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, accusing them of planning to raid and occupy communities in Galilee in northern Israel.

    Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s death on Friday, saying he was killed “following a treacherous Israeli assassination operation on 09/20/2024 in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”

    According to Hagari, the targeted commanders were “underground underneath a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyeh neighborhood, using civilians as a human shield” at the time of the attack.

    Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others injured in the airstrike, which leveled a multistory building in a densely populated neighborhood.

    Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States for his suspected involvement in the 1983 strike on the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 US personnel later that year.

    A CNN team on the ground in Beirut saw a frantic effort to rescue people from underneath the rubble and rush the wounded to hospital. Witnesses said nearby buildings shook for nearly half an hour after the strike, which the IDF said it had carried out at around 4 p.m. local time.

    A week of surprise attacks
    Friday’s strike marked the fourth consecutive day of surprise attacks on Beirut and other sites across the country, even as Israeli forces continued deadly strikes and operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

    The first major attack against Hezbollah this week came Tuesday afternoon when pagers belonging to the militant groups’ members exploded near-simultaneously. The pagers had been used by Hezbollah to communicate after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged members to switch to low-tech devices to prevent more of them from being assassinated.

    Almost exactly 24 hours later, Lebanon was rocked by a second wave of explosions, after Hezbollah walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and the south of the country on Wednesday.

    At least 37 people were killed, including some children, and more than 3,000 were injured in the twin attacks.

    In a United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday warned that the detonation of communication devices could violate international human rights law.

    Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon clashed at the heated meeting, with Bou Habib calling on the council to condemn Israel’s actions and Danon slamming the Lebanese envoy for not mentioning Hezbollah.

  20. Thomascyday August 9, 2025

    Beirut, Lebanon
    CNN
    —
    A deadly Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday has left over a dozen people dead, including a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, sharply escalating the conflict between the two sides and raising fears of all-out war.

    Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, part of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was assassinated along with “about 10” other commanders, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, accusing them of planning to raid and occupy communities in Galilee in northern Israel.

    Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s death on Friday, saying he was killed “following a treacherous Israeli assassination operation on 09/20/2024 in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”

    According to Hagari, the targeted commanders were “underground underneath a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyeh neighborhood, using civilians as a human shield” at the time of the attack.

    Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others injured in the airstrike, which leveled a multistory building in a densely populated neighborhood.

    Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States for his suspected involvement in the 1983 strike on the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 US personnel later that year.

    A CNN team on the ground in Beirut saw a frantic effort to rescue people from underneath the rubble and rush the wounded to hospital. Witnesses said nearby buildings shook for nearly half an hour after the strike, which the IDF said it had carried out at around 4 p.m. local time.

    A week of surprise attacks
    Friday’s strike marked the fourth consecutive day of surprise attacks on Beirut and other sites across the country, even as Israeli forces continued deadly strikes and operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

    The first major attack against Hezbollah this week came Tuesday afternoon when pagers belonging to the militant groups’ members exploded near-simultaneously. The pagers had been used by Hezbollah to communicate after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged members to switch to low-tech devices to prevent more of them from being assassinated.

    Almost exactly 24 hours later, Lebanon was rocked by a second wave of explosions, after Hezbollah walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and the south of the country on Wednesday.

    At least 37 people were killed, including some children, and more than 3,000 were injured in the twin attacks.

    In a United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday warned that the detonation of communication devices could violate international human rights law.

    Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon clashed at the heated meeting, with Bou Habib calling on the council to condemn Israel’s actions and Danon slamming the Lebanese envoy for not mentioning Hezbollah.

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    Stunning images show Arctic glaciers’ dramatic retreat
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    Swedish photographer Christian Aslund is riding a small boat along the coast of Spitsbergen, an island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Here, deep into the Arctic Circle and midway between Norway and the north pole, he is investigating the health of the glaciers, by comparing them to what they looked like in archival photos.

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    The comparison is part of a series that Aslund worked on in collaboration with the Norwegian Polar Institute and Greenpeace, to document the retreat of Svalbard’s glaciers over the last century. He visited the area twice — in 2002 and in 2024 — and picked which sites to photograph based on historical images that he found in the institute’s archives.
    “In 2002, the widespread knowledge, or acceptance, of climate change wasn’t as broad as it is now,” Aslund says. He published the first set of photos over 20 years ago to create awareness of how much the glaciers were receding. But to his surprise, he received some comments suggesting that the images had been “Photoshopped,” that the glaciers were just expanding and contracting naturally, or that he had taken the pictures in the summer and compared them to archival shots taken in the winter: “But they are not — if you look at at the archive photos, you see that they don’t have any sea ice and not enough snow on the mountains (for it to be winter). And also, in the winter, it’s permanently dark.”

    In the summer of 2024, he decided to return, taking pictures at the exact same locations as before. “I had a feeling that the glaciers would have receded even more,” he says, “and that was confirmed. We wanted to show that these glaciers are not going back and forth. They are constantly being pulled back by a warming climate. It’s a major difference.”

    The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world since the year 2000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but according to other estimates it has warmed even more — four times faster than the global average since 1979. NASA says summer Arctic sea ice is shrinking by 12.2% per decade due to warming temperatures.

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