Review of The Music Never Stopped (2011) by Jesse O — 24 May 2012

While The Music Never Stopped is a corny name, even if it is the title of a Grateful Dead compilation album, it just strikes me as the name of a TV movie. Thankfully, the movie is pretty good and has a solid story, even if it tries to manipulate your emotions far too much.

You know for once I'd like to watch a movie where a father and son (or whatever other dynamic) that don't get along at the beginning manage to reconnect and have a great father-son moment without having either one of them die tragically before the movie ends.

And it's not like this is a surprise, it's patently obvious from the beginning that that's what is going to happen. If you have seen more than 10 movies in your life you'll easily predict what's going to happen.

It would work if it wasn't so patently obvious that the movie is trying to tell you what to feel. That's why I liked The Way so much, that movie never ONCE tries to manipulate your emotions with cheap tactics.

I can imagine that movie's main character FINALLY finishing the 800 mile walk with his son's ashes, whose death was the catalyst for the main character finishing the journey and sprinkling a bit of his son's ashes at every stop, and then just randomly dying after finishing the journey.

That's not really very satisfying, because it doesn't really accomplish anything. Real emotion doesn't come from killing a main character randomly and expecting us to care. I'm not saying it couldn't work, as it worked in Mary and Max, but 95% of the time it ends up feeling cheap way and comes across as poor storytelling.

That's not to say the movie isn't good because it is, it has a strong story and an excellent performance from J.K Simmons but I never really got into it past a certain point. The soundtrack to the movie is tremendous, which it would have to be since the movie is completely centered around it.

The rest of the cast is good, Lou Taylor Pucci is definitely good as Gabriel but there's something about his chemistry with J.K that sort of doesn't work. They never really felt like father-son, just actors paid to do so.

If you look at their performances individually, they're strong but as a whole it didn't seem to click for me. It works on a generational clash, using music to illustrate the gap in thought and ideology between Henry and Gabriel.

That's about it. Of course this is comparing it to The Way in which Martin Sheen's son's character is played by his real life son, Emilio Estevez, which isn't really fair from my part.

But yea, I've said far too much about this movie already and, again, this is why the scoring system sometimes fails, I spent the entire movie completely shitting on a movie I thought was good overall.

In the end, though, the movie really disappoints with its manipulative tactics, but an excellent performance from J.K Simmons, a good story, and an awesome soundtrack make this movie good, though I'd recommend The Way over this movie any day of the week and twice on Sunday.