It means that his brain is perfectly functioning, while his body is more or less useless... just think of it as the opposite of you.

Anyone ever been to photofunia.com? It's a blast! It's mildly addicting, but so much fun, and the results are actually pretty cool! :D

BUT - that's not why we're here today. I've been looking for a new movie to watch... I kind of wanted Ron Livingston to be in it, because I'm kind of on a Ron Livingston kick, but I also wanted to watch a movie that I didn't think anyone had seen, or even heard of, before.



I found it. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm working on getting a hold of it and watching it... basically, I was reading an article/interview about Mr. Livingston in his roles in Office Space and Band of Brothers, and they talked about him in another war role, as Richard Pimental in "Music Within." (Came out in 2007) I decided to check it out - it looks like it went straight to DVD but I could be wrong about that. 00:32 seconds into the trailer, I was hooked, and as the trailer progressed, I was pulled more into the movie. I really wanna see it now.

Here's a quick synopsis of the movie:

Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston) begins his life as a fighter, and his life's work becomes a process of fighting for the rights of others.
Rising up from a childhood in a dysfunctional family, armed with a talent for public speaking and a winning personality, the young man makes his way to a Northwestern college, confident that he will ace his try-out for his idol Dr. Ben Padrow (Hector Elizondo), the coach of the winningest team in the history of the College Bowl.
But Dr. Padrow shatters his dream when he rejects him. Richard's immediate reaction is to enlist in the army for a tour of duty in Vietnam. During combat, the young recruit loses his hearing to a bomb blast, and has to deal with this newfound disability on his return to civilian life in Oregon.
Richard discovers that his disability and the struggle to transcend it is a defining moment in his fight for what he believes in. When he tries to help his friends, vets like himself and others with disabilities, to get work in an environment that treats them with pity at best and disdain as a matter of course, he realizes that he can make a difference. The friends who make up his close-knit clique are: Art Honneyman (Michael Sheen), a student wheel chair user with cerebral palsy who uses his rapier wit to deflect the prejudice that greets his disturbing appearance; Mike Stoltz (Yul Vázquez), a fellow veteran with a lot of rage and nowhere to put it; and then there is Christine (Melissa George), the passionate libertine who strokes Richard's ego and initiates him into the world of free love.
Together, the friends experience the currents of those turbulent times, and the wild, joyful energy of winning through confrontation and humor. Without his hearing Richard is all the more prepared to listen to the message deep within himself, and to carry that message to the thousands of people whose lives are improved by the movement he helps to organize.

YAY! I think it'll be one of those movies that speaks to you, like Seven Pounds, or Pay It Forward, and I'm totally into it because it's Historical Non-Fiction. I'm really looking forward to seeing it! :)

Here's a snippet of the interview with Ron Livingston that I mentioned earlier, talking about the movie and what not.

In "Music Within," you play Richard Pimentel, who was instrumental in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990. What specifically drew you to this story?

For me, it was a story about a guy with a crazy life. Kind of like the one you saw in "Forrest Gump," except that this one really happened.

[In] the very first opening moments of the script, he's sort of abandoned, left in an orphanage by his mentally ill mother who can't remember where he is to tell the rest of the family. They want to know where he is and she doesn't know. She says, "What kid?" [It] just seemed too perfect to be true.

And Richard's got a particularly wicked sense of humor that, to me, opened up just a whole new ground in how you can talk about people with disabilities. We're sort of used to the politically correct—you have to be very solemn, or it gets preachy or it gets very passionately felt. I think Richard feels passionately about it, but his primary medium is he starts with humor.

And he starts by challenging what you think you know and he goes from there.

The banter between your character and the Art Honeyman character was some of the liveliest.

Yeah, it's funny to think of it as being lively banter when you consider that one guy's deaf and the other guy has cerebral palsy and it takes him ten minutes to say anything.

But I felt that they did a great job with both the script and the shooting of the movie, that what seems like it might be painful in the beginning, by the end of it, the audience is used to it. You really feel you go along with it and it does feel like banter.

You met with Richard Pimentel for a few days before filming. What were your preconceptions and misconceptions about portraying him and bringing his story to light?

I just wanted to get a good feel for him. Any time you play a real person it feels, to me anyway, that there's an additional responsibility to represent them honestly. You don't always have to represent them the way they want to be represented (laughs), but you don't want to be making up stuff about them. You want to try and get them on the nose.

Richard was very helpful as far as being very open talking about what made him tick, what his particular kind of issues were, and how he felt about certain moments in his life. It really helped me right away with a little bit of a framework.

And then there's ultimately a lot of parts to the character that you just have to bring from stuff in your life, or you just make it up and hope that the guy won't mind too much or that it won't be too far off.

His character does show his flaws in the movie...

Yeah, who doesn't have flaws? And I think your flaws and your strengths always kind of go hand in hand. They tend to be one and the same

Everyone is asked that question - if you could choose to be struck blind, or struck deaf, which would you choose? And I've always said I'd rather be struck deaf, partly because I'm clumsy as all get out and would fall all over the place if I couldn't see, and partly because I know sign language and have been educated on how deaf people hear differently than us, and how they see the world in a different way, and part of me wants to experience that. I think it'll be fascinating to see how Mr. Pimental's life was changed after he was struck deaf by the bomb blast.

I'm really looking forward to it, and if you get the chance, you should check it out, too. Ron Livingston is a great actor, and I have no doubt he'll do a great job. :)

Let's get this!

~Lauren