I've always loved music . Despite ruining my life by chaining myself to the internet and coming on to this website to spill my worthless opinions on films that on average are very mediocre I've always considered music to be the most moving , uplifting , life enhancing , most dangerous form of art . Perhaps it's because of my love of music that I've never taken the plunge and tried to make music . I've always been gripped by a sense of awe when it comes to music . To hear The Edge playing guitar chords or Matt Johnson sing of existentialist fatalistic angst it would seem almost heresy to try emulate musicians , but as I sit here listening to Simple Minds perform Room at a club in Amsterdam in 1980 I sometimes wish I might have tried a little bit harder and wonder what might have been if I tried to join the cult of the musician
This animated short I AM TOM HARDY by Ainslie Henderson hits the right note with me . It follows the life of a wannabe music star Tom Hardy who finds himself at the crossroads of a career that never was . As Bob says this is very well done with optimism in Tom's psyche being tempered with reality that he's merely living a quixotic dream and that his talent just isn't good enough to make it . As with MOVE MOUNTAIN that I saw earlier today the stop frame animation is very impressive especially the expressive look emitting from the characters eyes . Again I've got to say this is an obvious labour of love and what mercenary philistines there must be working on Hollywood movies if they never show the sort of passion being shown in a short film like this . What I also found interesting is the way Tom is shown to age by something brutally simple - he starts losing his hair . We end up losing our hair then before we know it we lose our life and if you've got any ambition to do anything in life then it's better to do it yesterday rather than tomorrow and I AM TOM HARDY is a painless and engaging warning to us all