Folktales review – taking on tyranny of social media as teens learn to live like hunter-gatherers

In this documentary, high schoolers camp out in subzero temperatures, making their own fires and driving sledges in the wild The Pasvik Folk high school in remote northern Norway teaches teenagers to grow as young adults and escape the pressures of toxic social media by challenging them to get back in touch with their “stone age brain” and live like hunter-gatherers in the snowy wild. This is the subject of a documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Over winter months of almost continuous darkness, the teens cleanse themselves with tasks such as camping out in subzero weather, making their own fires and driving sledges with huskies. Prior to all this of course is presumably a solemn promise to do without their phones, tablets and laptops, although there are no scenes of the kids actually having to surrender these gadgets (this isn’t rehab, after all). They have to swim in icy water; and they make it look like fun. What doesn’t look like fun is the camping out and there is one t...

‘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 straight face, that he plans to apply to Oxford and the Sorbonne for university, with Harvard as a “safety.” In fact, Fischer spends more time planning lavish plays and starting school clubs than studying. He is one of the school’s “worst students,” his headmaster (Brian Cox) sighs.

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