Last Thursday I attended the Toronto premier of Director Stephen Sawalich's film, Music Within, starring Ron Livingston and Michael Sheen. Music Within tells the story of Richard Pimentel, who while not well known in North America, can be credited with bringing people with disabilities, their cause and their issues into the mainstream. His seminal training program, based on his 1981 book Tilting at Windmills, was mandatory training for all bureaucrats in the US government, and his efforts led to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (something which shamefully, Canada has yet to legislate nationally). I wanted to like this movie and think it would have been better served had Sawalich focused less on Pimentel the man and more on what he accomplished. While I appreciated getting to know more about someone who's story rightly needs to be told, I think this film would have done better as a PBS documentary than the Sunday-Night-at-the-Movies plodding film (with plodding storyline and poor production values) it is. Worse, I felt I spent 90-odd minutes hammered by a public service announcement on an issue I already wholly support.
For raising awareness on this issue, my rating 3 out of 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment