I’ve been waiting to see this for years* which tends to either make the movie going experience disappointing or exhilarating and I’m happy to report that this experience fell on the exhilarating side. I spent a lot of time feeling bad for Zac Efron, whose good acting cannot overcome his distracting good looks while meanwhile Christian McKay, with his run-of-the-mill face blew me away as a young Orson Welles. It’s a solid movie about the theater and I think it made a very good book-to-film adaptation.**
Cost: $3.00
Where watched: at home.
*It never really opened here, though I was watching for it. Then the library didn’t have it. Once, Matt and I walked to the video store with the express purpose of renting it and the store’s copy was missing. It was only when I was combing the same video store’s sale racks for a copy of Fast & Furious 6 that I found this copy for sale.
**Because I read the book in preparation for the movie. In 2009. Here’s a quote from the book I saved on my Goodreads Quote page:
“She left for the Mercury, but I stayed on the roof for a while. I breathed in the city: its warming wind, its noise. And I was one young man on a roof who had just spent the night with a beautiful woman…and the sunlight suggested winter and hard days to come, but we would all survive somehow, and the seasons were bigger than any of us anyway–and we were all tumbling along on the breeze of something enormous and eternal and gloriously busy.”
poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2009/me_and_orson_welles.html
Aha! One I missed! And now I am set.
But that wasn’t a good three sentence movie comment, now was it? So glad that you got to see this movie and that it did not disappoint. I agree about Mr. Efron’s good looks!
I agree that Zac Efron is a much better actor than he’s often given credit for, probably because he’s so darn good looking. Leonardo DiCaprio got that too, in the early days. And Brad Pitt (although I personally never found him all that good looking [too pretty] until he got older and a bit grizzled). I was curious about Christian McKay so I looked him up. He’s been in a truly shocking number of films/shows in the last 7 years, absolutely none of which I’ve seen!
I just looked him up too and he was the funder guy of Chris Hemsworth’s character in Rush. He was good in that.
An aside of “Chris” news. One of the parents at my school has a jacket that says Porche on it and he joked he was starting with the jacket. I told him about the movie Rush and how good Chris Hemsworth was in it. And he then made a further comment where it was clear he was confusing Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth. I set him straight: Evans=Captain America, Hemsworth=Thor. Today, a few weeks later he told me he hadn’t seen Rush yet, but he really enjoyed Captain America. And I set him straight again. I think once he sees Rush, he won’t be as confused. Aside from being blonde and having the same first name, they are quite different looking.