Radio Movie Full Movie Download
Graziana Getz
Radio is a 2003 American biographical sports drama film directed by Mike Tollin, who also produced with Herb Gains and Brian Robbins. It was inspired by the 1996 Sports Illustrated article "Someone to Lean On" by Gary Smith.[1][2] The article and the movie are based on the true story of T. L. Hanna High School football coach Harold Jones (Ed Harris) and a young man with an intellectual disability, James Robert "Radio" Kennedy (Cuba Gooding Jr.). The film co-stars Debra Winger and Alfre Woodard. It was filmed primarily in Walterboro, South Carolina.
In the 1970s, James Robert "Radio" Kennedy, a 23-year-old intellectually disabled man, lives alone with his mother who, as a nurse, spends much of the day at work. Radio spends much of his day roaming the town and pushing a shopping cart, which he uses to collect anything interesting he finds. Radio often pauses to observe the local high school football team in their training sessions, led by Coach Harold Jones. During one such session, the football falls out of bounds, allowing Radio to collect it and haul it away in his cart. A group of players retaliate the following day by tying Radio's hands and feet, locking him in the gear shed, and throwing footballs at the door to scare him.
Coach Jones frees Radio and punishes the wrongdoers by making them run extra wind sprints after practice. Jones takes it upon himself to assist in Radio's care, and gives him his nickname due to his penchant for listening to the radio. Radio begins assisting Coach Jones on the football team, and inspires the team before each game as a mascot-type figure. Radio's increased attention from Jones is faced with resistance from the football team's parents, who see Radio as a distraction from their own sons' successes.
Upon the end of the football season, Jones involves Radio with several activities within the high school, and winds up neglecting his daughter Mary Helen, who is a member of the high school's cheerleading squad. At a Christmas mass, Radio receives several gifts from the townspeople. Mary Helen confides to her father that while she does not blame him for neglecting her, she cannot understand the reason for his interest in Radio.
The following day, Radio distributes the gifts around town. He soon encounters a suspicious police officer, and his impaired ability to communicate leads to his arrest on the charge of possessing stolen property. However, the other officers recognize Radio and he is released. To make up for the wrongful arrest, the arresting officer is forced to ferry Radio around town to finish delivering the gifts. Following the holidays, Radio begins taking classes in the high school to complete his formal education. One of the football players who had previously tormented him tricks Radio into entering the girls' locker room. Radio is reluctant to tell Coach Jones who set him up, but Coach Jones determines the player's identity by interviewing other players and punishes him by benching him for a decisive game.
Radio's mother suddenly dies of a heart attack, and Radio finds himself living alone until his absent older brother Walter finally returns to care for him. That same evening, Jones reveals to Mary Helen that his attachment to Radio and need to assist him stems from a childhood incident in which Jones, as a child making a living off delivering newspapers, did not help a mentally disabled boy his own age crying behind barbed wire. Following the death of Radio's mother, pressure from the school board to have Radio put in a specialized institution strengthens. The association between Radio and Coach Jones is further blamed for the team's inability to win.
In a meeting with the townspeople, Jones speaks of Radio being a blessing for the community by showing how people should treat one another, and announces his resignation as head coach so that he may spend more time with his family. At Radio's high school graduation, he receives an honorary diploma and a letterman jacket. The film ends with clips being shown of the real-life Radio and Coach Jones leading the football team.
On review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 36% approval rating with the consensus reading: "The story is heavy on syrupy uplift and turns Radio into a saint/cuddly pet".[4] The film holds a score of 38 out of 100 on Metacritic.[5] The film successfully grossed $52.6 million with a budget of approximately $30 million.[6] Cuba Gooding Jr. earned a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Actor for his performance in the film but also an NAACP Image Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture.
"Radio Flyer" pushes so many buttons that I wanted to start pushing back. One of the things I resisted was the movie's almost doglike desire to please. It seems to be asking: How can anyone dislike a movie that is against child abuse, and believes little red wagons can fly? I found it fairly easy. The movie pushes so many fundamental questions under the rug of its convenient screenplay that the happy ending seems like cheating, if not like fraud.
"Radio Flyer" begins with the compulsion, common to so much children's literature and film, to place its little heroes in a cruel and heartless world. Like all those cartoon characters who lose their parents, are kidnapped, or have their homes burned down or their families lost at sea, this one begins on a sad note, with a divorce. The central characters, Mike and Bobby, are then taken by their mother to California, where she marries a sadistic, drunken bully who wants to be called The King. When Mom isn't around, The King likes to beat little Bobby, who gets black and blue welts as a result.
The mother (Lorraine Bracco) is a strange case, an engaging, intelligent, hardworking woman who somehow fails to notice that she is married to a monster. She also misses the welts on Bobby's back, and of course her kids, feeling untrusted and abandoned, do not tell her about the beatings. Instead, they begin to plan an escape for little Bobby, by outfitting his Radio Flyer wagon with wings and an engine, so it will fly, and he can leave town and never come back.
They have some reason to think this plan will work. A kid named Fisher once coasted his wagon down a hill and up the slope of a barn, and he flew through the sky so high he was almost able to hitch a ride on the tail of a plane that was taking off from the valley. Of course, Fisher also suffered a terrible fall, and when we finally meet him, late in the picture, he is crippled, but there you have it: Heroes have to take chances.
I will not regale you with the details by which Bobby's maiden flight takes place. I was so appalled, watching this kid hurtling down the hill in his pathetic contraption, that I didn't know which ending would be worse. If he fell to his death, that would be unthinkable, but if he soared up to the moon, it would be unforgiveable - because you can't escape from child abuse in little red wagons, and even the people who made this picture should have been ashamed to suggest otherwise.
Who was this movie made for? Kids? Adults? What kid needs a movie about a frightened little boy who is at the mercy of drunken beatings? What adult can suspend so much disbelief that the movie's ending, a visual ripoff from "E.T.," inspires anything other than incredulity? What hypothetical viewer could they possibly have had in mind? "Radio Flyer" was a famous screenplay by David Mickey Evans, before it was a movie. It was one of the hottest screenplays in town, maybe because of the incongruity of its elements. If somebody at a story conference didn't describe this movie as "child abuse meets Peter Pan," they were missing a bet. It is utterly cynical from beginning to end, and never more cynical than in its contrived idealism. Was the screenplay so sought-after, so expensive, that no sane voice was heard, raising fundamental objections? Hollywood fought tooth and nail to spend a fortune on this screenplay. Was the movie launched in some kind of mass hysteria? I know that the voice-over narration suggests that maybe this wasn't the way the story really happened, and is only the way Mike, the older brother, now remembers it as an adult. OK, but then what did really happen? Did Bobby fall to his death? Did the cops haul away The King? Did Mom wise up? "Radio Flyer" is a real squirmarama of unasked and unanswered questions. At the end, there's an 800 number you can call if you want information on child abuse. I imagine the volunteers at the other end would have some pithy observations about this movie.
Outside of the attractiveness of the character the Babadook, the monster is actually quite famous for another reason. In the year 2016, The Babadook movie attracted a wider audience due to viral tweets and Tumblr posts about potentially being LGBTQ+. This theory was later unintentionally supported by Netflix placing The Babadook in its LGBTQ+ movies section. The rest of it is history.
Twenty to twenty-five percent of the homeless suffer from a mental illness. Mental illness was reported as the third leading cause of homelessness for single adults according to the top 25 cities in the United States. For much of the movie, Radio is living on his own in the woods and out of a shopping cart. No one looks for him not even his brother or his mother. Later in the film his mother has a conversation with Coach Jones. She tells him she is not home a lot so she does not really know what Radio is up to or what he does. This is also kind of a ploy to draw the reader in using emotion and sentimentality which is also used well throughout the film.
I really liked how you showed that the problems in this movie are still present today by using statistics. In the conclusion, you made it clear that this movie had a chance to influence society but failed. What do you think should have been included to make the movie more powerful?
It is interesting to read how a film about a man with a mental disability, misrepresents disability so badly. I have seen this movie before, but now I see it in a very different light; and you leave me rethinking my whole impression on the film as a whole.
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