‘I am elated each time I watch’: why Rushmore is my feelgood movie

The next in our series of writers drawing attention to their most-watched comfort films is a reminder of Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic 1998 comedy “Let’s hope it’s got a happy ending,” Herman Blume, played by Bill Murray in one of his best roles, says near the end of Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore. He makes the remark about an over-the-top, literally pyrotechnic school play that his teenage friend Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) has just debuted to an audience of dazed teachers and parents. But his comment stands in for the whole movie, an audacious and risky comedy that should not work, but does. I am elated each time I watch this poignant, wise and wildly funny film – and, yes, there is a happy ending. Rushmore is about children trying to act like adults and adults acting like children. Fischer is a precocious scholarship student at Rushmore, a prestigious private boys’ school. He is the sort of bright but naive young person who tries to impress an adult by telling them, with a s...

Four Letters of Love review

Helena Bonham Carter, Gabriel Byrne and Pierce Brosnan feature in sugary story of destiny and dreams, which brings together two troubled young people and a prize painting

Niall Williams has adapted his own international bestseller for this slushy romantic drama set in the west of Ireland, about love and destiny and dreams never given up on. For me, it pushed the bounds of absurdity and melodrama one step too far, though it undoubtedly has an audience. Something here reminded me of the romdram hits of author Nicholas Sparks, and particularly Message in a Bottle – although to be fair it should be borne in mind that Williams published his novel a year before Sparks’ book came out.

Two young lives unfold in parallel, fated to be brought together. Fionn O’Shea is Nicholas Coughlan, whose civil-servant dad William (Pierce Brosnan) has an epiphany at work one day when a lozenge of sunlight is blazoned on his drab desk and he abandons his job and heads west from Dublin to pursue his new vocation of painting. It is around these parts that Isabel (played by the excellent Ann Skelly, from Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s Rose Plays Julie) has been traumatised by her brother’s illness and is on the point of being sent away to be schooled by nuns and parted from her kindly parents – poet and schoolteacher Muiris (Gabriel Byrne) and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter).

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/frEvApG
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

The Fans Were Silent As 64-Year-Old Sharon Stone Appeared Topless

EXCLUSIVE: Mona Singh gears up for an intense role in an upcoming web series; Deets inside!