Copying Beethoven (2006)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

hyped garbage

Great Film overall

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The music was, of course, marvelous.The story, however, is like some after-school special revisionist nonsense. One other reviewer felt that this was OK because it was a "fantasy." This begs the question why is it necessary to fantasize a story that would have been quite interesting if kept at least somewhat historically accurate? The performance of the 9th Symphony was quite good, allowing for the silly thesis that Beethoven had to be rescued by Anna due to his deafness and only she could stand out of sight pretending to conduct so he could mimic her. Anna saves the day. And therein lies the problem, the story is really about the fictional Anna and anything to do with Beethoven or his music is sacrificed in the process. I doubt many children would sit through this but if they do, they and the impressionable adults who prefer fantasy to reality will probably carry the fiction away as fact, along with other cinematic fabrications that treat historical reality with contempt.Rather than allowing the audience to watch the orchestra during the performance, which might have been interesting, the camera keeps shifting back and forth between Beethoven drunkenly swaying back and forth while supposedly keeping an eye on Anna and Anna swaying back and forth while appearing to suffer from motion sickness. An iTunes download of the music played in a dark room would have been more entertaining.The acting was mixed. Some performances, mainly by the supporting cast, were reasonably good while the others were borderline deplorable. With the New York accents, poorly developed erratic characterizations and Americanized dialogue & behavior, I kept thinking it would have been better done as a full-length cartoon. Maybe Mickey Mouse as Beethoven and Minnie as Anna, and Donald Duck as Karl. "Fantasia" was a pretty good musical fantasy too and the acting more believable.

This is a movie about Ludwig von Beethoven for dumb people who've never heard of Ludwig von Beethoven. Why dumb people who've never heard of Beethoven would ever want to watch a film about him is something that should have been asked before this production ever got started.Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger) is a young student of music composition who's been sent to Vienna in 1824 to assist the famed maestro, Beethoven (Ed Harris). She is to be his copyist, taking his scribbled notes and rewriting it into something that can be distributed to musicians. The aging and almost deaf Beethoven is just days away from the premiere of his 9th Symphony and he's still writing it. That's the set up. What follows from that is, almost measure for measure, every cliché you ever see in one of these stories about a famous old guy and the young woman who admires him. He's impossibly difficult and abusive. She stands up to him. He comes to need her more than he admits to himself. She's the only one who stands by him in his declining years. Yadda, yadda, yadda.There are only two things of interest in Copying Beethoven. One is that you could use it as a class film for really stupid music students. It's less a story about Beethoven's life and music and more exercise in characters appearing on screen to plainly and awkwardly recite certain facts about the great genius. If you watch this movie, you'll come away having heard quite a lot of basic information about Beethoven toward the tail end of his musical career. The other interesting thing about Copying Beethoven is that it is a good reminder of how artists of any sort getting rich off their work is a very recent phenomenon. Creative types used to be dependent on the support of wealthy patrons, who generally didn't pay them that much. Here's Beethoven, who was famous for his music in his own life, yet he's living barely better than an upper middle class existence with a small apartment in a run down Vienna building. It is only when artists were able to sell their work to the masses that they could become rich, as well as famous.The acting of Ed Harris, Diane Kruger and the rest of the cast is fine, but these are all shallowly drawn characters behaving in bluntly obvious ways. There's never any emotion shown or action taken that isn't also explained, either by the character in question or someone else. This film also spends at least 15 minutes show Beethoven conducting the first performance of his 9th Symphony. The music is great and all, but on the screen it comes off as the world's longest and most boring music video of all time.I don't know if this script got excessively dumbed down at some point, but unless you're looking for a remedial primer on Beethoven's later life, you can give this movie a pass.

As an historical insight into the life of Beethoven this movie is next to useless. It is completely fictional, a parallel universe to the real Beethoven but not the real one. That aside it's reasonably entertaining if only for the writers imagination for the fantasy of what they imagined Beethoven to be like if he really did have a sexy female assistant with aspirations of being a great composer.The real revelation here is Ed Harris. I had to check 4-5 times to remind myself this was Ed Harris. The makeup and performance is fantastic. He is almost completely unrecognizable as the Ed Harris we are familiar with in all his other movies. I was looking for full face close ups to see how they did it but couldn't really tell.The music is also pretty impressive. The 9th Symphony sounds brilliant.I'm not sure what this movie was meant to be, but its turned out to be a fictional period piece using historical figures, it looks impressive, but why use and soil the name of Beethoven for it?But Ed Harris, whoever he is supposed to be is amazing.

The fascination we have with Mozart and Beethoven endure and for good reasons. Such heights of musical genius are more fully appreciated, beloved and enjoyed now than in their own days. Their lives also fascinate us. Mozart, the most precocious and preternaturally blessed lad and Beethoven, the storming colossus, trail blazing iconoclast, rebel and first firmly independent artist. Sadly, both have been treated rather shabbily by writers and film makers who have strangely succumbed to myth making or ridiculous exaggerations. All the more odd is that post-Amadeus (the film) that a director and writer would take up the theme of Beethoven's last few years and in spite of a wealth of excellent recent scholarship invent a portrait that was more fabrication than history. In some ways this film is a 'theme and variation' on his life, and that's fine I suppose. I was disappointed to see another fantasy rather than a bio-pic on what the man was really like.There are hints here and there in the film, to be sure. His caustic and volcanic outbursts and overwrought mood swings. His willingness to invent brand new musical thoughts, seemingly out of the transcendent ether, not worrying a jot that no one in his time period would understand, keenly keeping his eyes on the future. In that, he was correct.While I am reminded that this film like "Amadeus" is not a biography and that it caters to those who might not know much about him, those who have more than a surface knowledge of his life will be let down and saddened by this. The actors are all excellent. I do not believe that Harris correctly portrayed Beethoven. During those last few years, he was quite sick, basically unable to hear anyone talking to him even to his face. Those who were allowed close to him had to write their words in note books (this was a foolish and glaring error on the directors part). He was often filthy, did not shave for weeks on end, smelled awful, looked worse, frightened his neighbors with all his screeching and howling while he worked on the mighty ninth. It just does not come across. Perhaps one day someone will make an honest portrait of the great man as he really was and leave all the Hollywoodish garbage where it belongs.This and the other fantasy film "Immortal Beloved" are entertaining as films go but do not do the subject matter justice.