What is it?
The 2000 drama movie Songcatcher.
What is it about?
This is how Rotten Tomatoes describes this movie:
After being denied a promotion at the university where she teaches, Doctor Lily Penleric, a brilliant musicologist, impulsively visits her sister, who runs a struggling rural school in Appalachia.
There she stumbles upon the discovery of her life — a treasure trove of ancient Scots-Irish ballads, songs that have been handed down from generation to generation, preserved intact by the seclusion of the mountains.
With the goal of securing her promotion, Lily ventures into the most isolated areas of the mountains to collect the songs and finds herself increasingly enchanted — not only by the rugged purity of the music, but also by the raw courage and endurance of the local people as they carve out meaningful lives against the harshest conditions.
It is not, however, until she meets Tom — a handsome, hardened war veteran and talented musician — that she’s forced to examine her motivations.
Is the “Songcatcher,” as Tom insists, no better than the men who exploit the people and extort their land?
My Thoughts
Months ago my female coworker JB recommended this movie to me along with several other movies, I checked it out back then from our library, but the DVD was scratched too bad to play; and so it was not until recently that I got to finally see this movie.
It was better than you would think by looking at the cover and from the visuals, and sometimes it was comedic with how some people would break out in song/start singing.
The music itself was not bad, but I did not like some of the strong country accents used during a lot of the singing; and the movie was longer than it should have been, and the actor playing the music professor or whoever at the end was acting like a cartoon character which was out-of-place and not good.
I do like how this movie surprises you by slowly presenting the mountain people in a more human and complex way than you would expect eventually, with some good and bad and in between, instead of just making them straight stereotypes.
The end,
-John Jr
John Jr's Blog 