Introduction:
“Raise Your Voice” is one of my favorite movies due to its sensitive and emotional nature. It also shows what it takes to be fully determined and set off to fulfill your dreams. Hillary Duff, one of my favorite actresses, plays the main role in the movie.
Summary:
The movie “Raise Your Voice” shows a teenage girl’s determination to fulfill her dreams of becoming a star while her stern father does not allow her to. But the girl’s mother wants her daughter to go after her dreams. It is an entertaining play starring Hilary Duff as that teenager girl. This movie has a strong Christian worldview along with some light romantic and feminist elements, which helps dilute the experience.
The movie stars Hillary Duff as Terri Fletcher, a high school student in Flagstaff, Ariz. Terri became popular for her inspiring singing voice in both her school and church choir. The movie begins with her dear brother Paul’s graduation day. As a graduation present, she buys two rock concert tickets for Paul. Paul got grounded after arguing with his father Simon. The argument was about letting Terri go to summer music camp at a prominent school in Los Angeles. Since Simon did not agree on the topic, Terri and Paul sneak out of the house anyway to attend the concert. Unfortunately, they have a severe accident on their way back home, and Paul dies.
This tragedy becomes the cause of driving the family further apart. Simon’s wife, Frances, and his free-spirited sister, Nina, collaborate to send Terri to the summer music camp where the school accepts her admission. They convince Terri that the opportunity is just too good to miss. They tell her to convince her father on this lie that she wants to visit Nina in Palm Desert so that she can overcome her sadness and sorrow over Paul’s death. What they don’t know is that the music school accepted Terri on the basis of a DVD featuring Terri’s singing, which Paul had secretly edited together and mailed.
Terri is still grievous over Paul’s death even at school. The guilt overwhelms her regarding his death and now also about lying to her father. After going through some difficult times to adjust, Terri begins to make friends. She also catches feelings for one of her fellow students. His name is Jay. He’s from England and is also going through a tough time due to the divorce of his parents. Jay accompanies Terri in her lessons which is a source of encouragement for her. They work on a song together for the final show at the music camp, where the best one will be presented with a $10,000 academic scholarship from the school.
Review:
Being entertaining, the movie has many emotional moments, and the musical performances are exciting and also inspiring, just like its name.
The movie “Raise Your Voice” depicts a strong Christian, liberating worldview with some optimistic moral components. It possesses clear situations showing church, prayer, and God and a climactic prospect where Terri sings about God watching over her. However, some feminist and romantic features weaken this perspective. For instance, Terri’s mother asks Terri to lie to her father as he won’t let his daughter follow her dreams in music. This subject of the strict, irrational father and the musical child dates back to “The Jazz Singer,” which was the first feature-length sound movie featuring Al Jolson.
“Raise your voice” doesn’t have as much emotional end as it is in its first two-thirds part. The script maybe requires an expressive settlement where Terri and her father could more openly antagonize their sorrow over the demise of her brother.
Though not quite the four-star, it still gives many youngsters a resilient, inspiring understanding. “Raise Your Voice” treacherously overlaps between emotionality and sincerity, and tense and cliché-ridden. It is sensitive and mature in a manner that deals with the loss of Terri’s brother and the repentance, guilt, and complete devastation that Terri goes through due to it. The memory of Paul wholeheartedly remains in the forefront of her mind, no matter what she’s doing. Training her voice and being in love with Jay doesn’t stop her from thinking about her brother and his wish for Terri to become a star. Hence, the movie is much more than a one-dimensional film about a girl who wants to be a singer. It plays the role of an emphatic story of a girl who is determined enough to follow her dreams and goals, suffering a loss that she cannot afford, and equipped enough to move forward with her life while attaining inner power in the course.
There was a bit of heavy-handedness at crucial instants in the movie which tends to threaten the goodness of the movie. The dramatic scenes were often overscored with such pompous, overemotional melodic strings that they failed to display all forms of sensitive delicacy. The outcomes are immensely more effective when the scenes are allowed to play gently, aligning exclusively with the performers and their enactments. In a scene in which Terri and her group carry out an impromptu song in front of a gleaming city cascade, a painted-faced mime appears out of nowhere, which is a bizarre decision to make.
Moral Problems in the Movie:
Some morality issues were observed in the movie, which caught my attention. At the start of the film, there’s a scene where a boy who also studies where Terri does one morning reaches out for her hand since he’s also obsessed with her. Terri exchanges a handshake with him. Seeing this, Terri’s friends say, “He’ll be worried for the next month that he just got you pregnant!”
In the music camp, Terri gets romantically involved with her fellow student, Jay. Once they got in a fight. After the heated argument, Jay left the campus. At night, Jay appears at Terri’s house being drunk. With fear of Jay being rusticated from the school, Terri helps him jump on the roof of her house and stays with him overnight. This meeting has not been implicated as sexual, but the fact that most people nowadays do not depict the consumption of alcohol as a wrong act. In fact, it is being shown as something which is usual and normal, and not something to be ashamed of. The movie shows that in order to numb his hurt and offended feelings, Jay ingested alcohol.
The summer music camp has one more couple, Sloan and Kiwi. Kiwi is interested in Sloan as he discovers that she is physically striking, and he keeps on trying to catch her consideration. Then there comes a scene where finally his passion is rewarded in an unusual section where both of them abruptly start kissing fervently, moving all over a room while knocking over things and ultimately falling on the floor, where the section finishes.
The display of such scenes does not make it a movie for children to watch.
Religious View:
There are some religious exclamations in the movie. If the movie had been made according to the rules of Christianity and ended in the same manner, it could have been really great, and keeping this in view, one can discover many ethical lessons in the film. Discerning the humanist fashion the moral in the movie is a good moral. One can clearly observe the points where the movie is amended away from Christianity, such as it has been shown that Terri prays but not that her prayers are responded to. Her father has been depicted as a firm Christian, and the play is convincing that being too firm can be negative for faith. Terry has been shown singing in the church and she likes it. The reason could be because she loves to praise God.
Terry and her mother’s dishonesty towards Simon was not right. It could have been a lot better if a movie like this had been made by Christian. Later discovering that it was planned that way just confirmed my doubt that the ethic initially was Christian but became more non-Christian when the tag “Christian movie” was removed.
Conclusion:
To conclude, Terri’s determination, brother’s love, and support for Terri were worth noticing. The movie tells its viewers that though the road to success is hard, one must not just dream but instead follow them and reach their destination. Even with its over-the-top instants and platitudes, “Raise Your Voice” is so pure in heart that one is ready to absolve one’s faults and appreciate all that one realizes. The peak moment, fixed during the music program’s single settings, sees Terri getting up in front of a large crowd, putting down her defenses and anxieties, and persuasively performing a song that she bestows on her brother. It’s a justly charming moment because it means a lot more to Terri and to the audience than the category typically gathers.
Works Cited
“Raise Your Voice.” Raise Your Voice (2004) …Review and/or Viewer Comments • Christian Spotlight on the Movies • ChristianAnswers.Net, christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2004/raiseyourvoice2004.html.
Raise Your Voice FanFiction Archive | FanFiction, www.fanfiction.net/movie/Raise-Your-Voice/.
“RAISE YOUR VOICE | Movieguide | Movie Reviews for Christians.” Movieguide | The Family & Christian Guide to Movie Reviews, 16 July 2015, www.movieguide.org/reviews/raise-your-voice.html.
