The movie "The Soloist" is by far one of the very best movies I have ever seen. Period (if that wasn't indicated by the mark itself). It... takes you inside the minds of real people. Not characters; they're not characters. That's what's important. Normally, in a movie, you go in and you watch characters interact with one another on a plot line for a story. This... was people. Human beings, beyond the stretches and confines of character traits.
I'm a person who inserts himself into what he witnesses. Recognizing my separation from what is onstage or onscreen or on the page, I have learned to let the external world fall away and what is left is me and the production, interacting in a way other people cannot see. That's because I want to be inside fantasy, and that is what I watch and read, usually. Like X-men: Origins (Wolverine). I injected myself with that movie, inserting myself and feeling what emotion and what plot the writers had deigned, because it was all fantastic; none of it was real, so I could throw myself in there and even had to to satisfy the general human desire to escape prosaic life. Having cultivated this, when my mind used it to enter The Soloist, I was blown away. This time, I was walking with people, feeling with people, hearing and seeing with people. Human beings, not characters. It was a new dimension of how people live. I have never before, I think I can safely say, experienced a truly life-changing movie. Not the way this one did. This one honestly altered the way I think about movies. That may seem small, but try being a writer. That's... this is huge.
On multiple occasions, the sound and effects managers suck the watcher into the minds of Downey, Jr.'s and Fox's characters (Steve and Nathaniel). You can see how they're thinking; what it's like to be them, in their respective situations. You hear the voices in Nathaniel's head, you feel the frustrated indecision in Steve's. At one point, Nathaniel is listening to a concert and closes his eyes. To show the audience how he feels at that moment, the screen goes dark and for the next few minutes, bursts of pulsating color shift and move in time with the music, simulating how he experiences Beethoven.
This film is the greatest work of art I have seen in a long time. It threatens Dark Knight from its standing as my favorite movie of all time.
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Carpe Diem Ad Muertum
Sieze the day, to the death. There is no potential that shall be passed by, there is no piece of glory to fall by the wayside, there is no soul to left unsaved by the brilliance of language. As writers, we are gods.
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