found it slow-going


I realize you all think the film is wonderful, but I found it extremely tedious. People with me at the theater also had trouble staying awake. It has lovely moments, but my feeling is that it could have been condensed and been made a lot more meaningful. I would have liked to have had it explained how she hears minute sounds and why her speech is so perfect. Her deafness really is a central point of the movie, so I would like to have heard more detail about that. I was left with unanswered questions and grew tired of all the fill-in closeups of her looking thoughtful, attractive as she is.

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I'm afraid I have to agree somewhat, though I love this genre of film. Lakealice makes sense, some of the scenes do not. I think this film became more about cinematography than content somewhere along the lines.

I am an amatuer percussionist and am completely intrigued with different forms of hand percussion especially. I was watching a scene with 3 young asian men, one of which was performing a form of percussion I'd never seen before, the film quickly cut to a shot of sand somewhere, then to people dancing on a boardwalk, obviously unrelated scenes, they never went back to the original percussion group, I felt cheated.

Basically this film is over-edited, a slight bit of narration might have helped.

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She has an essay about her deafness on her website:

http://www.evelyn.co.uk/live/hearing_essay.htm

In it, she says, "It is worth pointing out at this stage that I am not totally deaf, I am profoundly deaf. Profound deafness covers a wide range of symptoms, although it is commonly taken to mean that the quality of the sound heard is not sufficient to be able to understand the spoken word from sound alone." She also makes a big point of saying her deafness is not a big point. Perhaps not to her, but it certainly is a focus of the movie.

What I find no mention of is whether she uses hearing aids. There is no way a person with profound hearing loss would have speech of the quality hers is without hearing aids. Listen to the speech of the girl she teaches to feel the drums--that's what people with profound hearing loss sound like, and you'll notice she WAS using hearing aids.

And if Glennie is helped by hearing aids, then to call her "deaf" is somewhat misleading. Again, there's no way someone who can't hear can have speech like hers.

In her essay, she also says, "For me, my deafness is no more important than the fact I am female with brown eyes." Except she can be hired as a motivational speaker, and I suspect the demand for deaf percussionists is far higher than the demand for female percussionists with brown eyes.

I'm not trying in any way to diminish her talent or accomplishments (although I didn't much care for the music in the movie--maybe I'm a philistine), and I understand her not wanting to dwell on her hearing loss. But there's some disingenuousness floating around that bugs me.

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There is no way a person with profound hearing loss would have speech of the quality hers is without hearing aids.


I was thinking the same thing myself. Maybe it is due to the fact that she did not lose her hearing until she was 8 years old? In which case, obviously, she would have spoken perfectly well at that time. To compare her to the young student she was helping is perhaps misleading because that girl may have been born deaf.

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I think the slowness was necessary to put the viewer into the ideal, meditative state. I found it forced me to slow down, think about the images and ideas the film was presenting. I liked the idea of breathing as the basis of rhythm - never heard that concept before.

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Depends what you mean by slowness. If you mean scenes that are long but need to be that way, it's acceptable. But, like this, if you've got scenes that get the point across very early, then just meander for minutes, it's just not needed.

It made some great points along the way though. I'm a very sound oriented person, always have been. So a lot of it made me go 'yeah? people don't already do that?', so it had less of an impact on people like me. But even those who learned to slow down a bit and listen to what's going on from this movie, still think it's a bit too drawn out from what i've heard from them...

Worth seeing once if you're a music/sound person...


"Andrew, we can't possibly be dead. We have cable." - Nothing

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