Finding Forrester: Losing reality

May 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)


Finding Forrester is above all a shameless attempt to cash in on phony Hollywood sentimentality.  A distant cousin and knock-off of the infinitely superior Good Will Hunting, it runs on a weak script that provides little more than contrived situations and uninspiring characters.  Gus Van Sant, director of Hunting, can’t come close to saving it.

Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), growing up in New York, is both a basketball star and talented writer.  He tries to keep his intellect hidden, confining his thoughts to notebooks.  William Forrester (Sean Connery) wrote one great novel and then became a reclusive hermit.  He spends part of his endless free time spying on the boys playing basketball near his apartment.  One day, Jamal takes a dare and sneaks into Forrester’s apartment, accidentally leaving behind his backpack in his haste to escape.  Before long, the two become friends, with Forrester helping Jamal with his writing.

This template has been done before, and Forrester adds nothing to the genre.  The Boo Radley persona of Connery’s character feels contrived to me, especially since we never really learn anything about him.  His relationship with Jamal is, naturally, the film’s center, but neither of the characters ever achieves a depth beyond that which you could have learned from a biographical sketch.  The film strives to equalize the two, rather than making Jamal dominate, but they’re both bland.  We’re supposed to believe that Forrester accepts his first friend in decades because he likes his writing, but that doesn’t come through—to me, he just seems bored.

Jamal, on the basis of his strong test scores, transfers to a white-bred prep school in Manhattan, where he feuds on the basketball court with an obnoxious student, flirts with a more appealing one, Claire, (Anna Paquin) and faces derision and slander from a teacher, Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham).  Not one of these storylines comes to a satisfying conclusion or enhances Jamal’s character in any way.  The punishment for Jamal’s sparring on the basketball court comes in the form of a free-throw shooting contest that just feels fake.  His relationship with Claire is straight out of screenwriting school and goes nowhere.  And giving Jamal an artificial villain, while drawing the battle lines in such black-and-white strokes, further erodes the film’s credibility.

Many critics compared the ending, where Forrester emerges from his seclusion to defend Jamal, to that of Scent of a Woman; I never made the connection in my mind, but regardless of whether you see a similarity, Pacino’s flick handled the situation much more smoothly.  Sure, the principal in Scent was a bit of a clown, but at least you could have made the argument that Chris O’Donnell’s decision, which Pacino was defending, was in fact the wrong one, which made things more interesting; furthermore, Pacino’s conclusive speech proved what his weekend with Chris had meant to him.  And the prep school moment in Scent was almost an after-effect: the true rising action in the film concerned Pacino’s relationship with Chris.  Jamal’s battle with Crawford, on the other hand, distracts from his relationship with Forrester and becomes the film’s centerpiece, but it neither illuminates his character nor complicates the film in any meaningful or provocative way.

Likewise, in comparisons with Good Will Hunting, Forrester makes all the wrong decisions.  The mentor and protégée in this movie are far less interesting than their Hunting counterparts, and Matt Damon (who, interestingly, has a cameo in this movie) did not have to battle any villains.  His job, with Robin Williams’s help, is to transform his life; Jamal’s task, apparently, is to prove his worth to snotty and curmudgeonly English professors.

Finding Forrester isn’t an awful movie.  But Mike Rich’s script too often produces lines that no one would say in real life, the actors don’t do enough to bring their characters to life, and almost every key moment feels forced.  We’re supposed to believe, for example, that a group of tough black street teenagers would be terrified of an old recluse living in an apartment?  Or that Forrester stopped writing because he didn’t like critics were inferring from the first book, even though it was widely praised?

Such questions are bothersome, but ultimately, the film fails because it tries to be a character study and falls short.  Jamal is far too balanced at the beginning to change much, leaving that burden to Forrester, but he’s shaded too thinly for us to care anyway.

I’m sure plenty of people like this movie.  I just didn’t buy most of Jamal’s interactions with Forrester, or the role of the arrogant professor at school, or most of the script.  Does that make Finding Forrester a bad movie?  You can decide that on your own.

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Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Well, that settles that

May 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 4)


There’s not a teen movie made after Fast Times at Ridgemont High that doesn’t owe its existence to it, and there hasn’t been one since that’s any better.  Fast Times captures the spirit of high school in ways that most movies about teenagers don’t even bother to try, which is just as well, since it’s probably already been done as well as possible.  Beyond that, Fast Times is far more substantive than it looks on the surface and gets better and better upon repeated viewings.

Writer Cameron Crowe went undercover in a high school for days to garner information for his book upon which the movie was based, and his depictions are scarily accurate.  The movie chronicles the lives of a few students at Ridgemont High, each with different hopes and fears but all cut from the same mold of insecurity and restlessness that strikes most teenagers.  Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) is a shy teddy bear, so naturally, as these things go, his close friend is the outrageous and pride-less Damone (Robert Romanus), who takes it upon himself to help Mark find a girl.  Brad (Judge Reinhold) is in love with his car, less so with his girlfriend or the fast food jobs among which he rotates all year long.  Stacey, Brad’s sister, (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Linda (Phoebe Cates) are preoccupied with their relationship issues, some fantasy, some so obvious that, sure enough, only they can’t see them.

Then there’s Jeff Spicoli, played in a career-breaking way by Sean Penn, a bleached-blond California surfer who “has been stoned since the third grade.”  It’s impossible to count the number of subsequent movie characters that have been based on Spicoli, but he is the real deal for a number of reasons: the writing and acting are fresh and funny, and he has a foil—history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston).  Spicoli battles the buttoned-up Mr. Hand for the right to cut class, eat pizza, and even attend the end of year dance.  What makes Mr. Hand so memorable is that, on one hand, he reminds everyone of a teacher he’s had, and on another, he’s quirky enough to be unique.  You may have had poor grades read out loud if you were unlucky, but your class schedule probably hasn’t been ripped up in front of you.

One could not make a “teen movie” without a constant eye towards sex, but most of them nowadays treat it like a fun little game played by everyone and anyone with no real consequences.  And sure, Cates offers up the most frequently rewound topless scene among teenage males in cinematic history here, but note how both times Stacey has sex, she is clearly shown as uncomfortable and regrets it afterwards.  The second time leads to multiple disastrous consequences for her and Damone.

Furthermore, how many teen movies even bother to give their kids jobs?  In Fast Times, they are an integral part of students’ days, mainly because they scour their workplace for datable members of the opposite sex.  Aside from Brad’s misadventures, Stacey and Linda work as waitresses, Mark at a movie theater, and Damone as a concert ticket scalper, all in the same very-80s mall, making their interactions a maze of converging lines.

Above all, though, this movie is riotous.  Damone is responsible for the most quotable lines, usually in the course of his relationship advice to Mark.  If you don’t find his five-stage plan for winning over a girl (concluding words of wisdom: “When it comes to making out, whenever possible, put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.”) brilliant, then I can’t help you.  And that’s without mentioning Penn’s Spicoli, at whom you can laugh even though he’s not trying to be funny.  Seeing him coming to class shirt unbuttoned with a bagel stuck in his pants, or smiling coyly at Mr. Hand’s look of shock at his attendance one day, is priceless.

Above all, most of the teenagers are, simply, nice guys, which is all too rare nowadays.  Brad proves his worth late in the movie by helping his sister out of a delicate situation; Mark refuses to compromise his principles to get a girl; and you can root for Stacey because, despite her predilection for falling for bad boys, you know she’s a softie at heart.  Even Damone comes around by the end and admits his flaws.  To create such vivid, interesting people that are compassionate at heart speaks to Crowe’s talents—and foreshadows Jerry Maguire.

The point of Fast Times is not to conclude with a conventional climax.  It runs through the school year, but it understands that the character’s lives don’t end there.  Some of the relationships may achieve closure, but the underlying tone suggests that they’re just as likely to fluctuate in the future as they did throughout the previous year.  My opinion of the movie’s quality won’t suffer the same fate.

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Dazed and Confused: Great memories that you may not remember

May 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

When I finished Dazed and Confused the first time, I didn’t really know what I thought of it.  But after some reflection and a second viewing, I understand its goals and can see how skillfully it achieves them.  Dazed follows nobody’s rules.  It’s flawed, unconventional, funny, and completely outrageous.  That’s the best way to describe it: completely outrageous.  It revels in its absurdity and takes great risks, more than a few of which work.  It doesn’t try to mitigate its outrageousness in the hopes of eliciting a bigger audience, but it knows what it’s doing.

Written and directed by Richard Linklater and starring a host of oh-yeah-I know-them actors, Dazed has virtually no structure, which is part of its charm.  It’s the last day of high school, 1976 (the movie was made in 1993).  Students, naturally, have big plans for commemorating the occasion, from terrorizing freshmen to throwing parties away from unsuspecting parents’ eyes to finding one last hook-up, and the film races almost chaotically from event to event, person to person.  There’s very little character development, not that we care, because there are so many characters that we can’t possibly get to know them well.

O’Bannion (Ben Affleck, lol) and his gang of seniors target freshmen to haze, in particular Mitch (Wiley Wiggins).  David (Matthew McConaughey, before he got obnoxious) is on the lookout for freshman girls, even though he’s well past his glory days.  Michelle (Milla Jovovich) and other senior track stars plan out-of-control methods of humiliating the up-and-comers.  Meanwhile, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) has no interest in signing the affirmation his football coaches are forcing on him that he will not do drugs, drink alcohol, or engage in risky sexual behavior.  I mean, hell, why play football in high school without those things?

There are other characters, but don’t bother spending too much time trying to figure them all out.  You’ll soon understand the designations, understand how the freshmen spend their days in fear of getting spanked by the seniors and plot ways of getting revenge, understand how the parents are predictably clueless about everything going on, and understand what everyone’s point is: to make the end of the school year as memorable as it can be.  That is, as the tagline says, if they can remember it afterwards.

The film follows an episodic structure with several memorable moments.  The best occurs when one popular student, Slater (Rory Cochrane), plans to throw a party at his house once his parents leave on vacation.  Unfortunately, the man delivering the kegs shows up early, when his parents are still home, forcing Slater to tell him that, hey, sorry, you’ve got the wrong house, buddy.  But that’s too late; “unpack your bags, honey; we’re not going anywhere” his father says (Slater’s reaction to which is perfect), and there is a succession of hilarious scenes of students showing up at the house and running away, appalled, when the father answers the door.

These being resourceful high schoolers, though, someone will find a way to gather enough support for a party elsewhere, one that features climbing up a water tower, hopeless boys trying to impress girls, hopeless boys trying to fight obnoxious bullies, and lots of drinking and drugs.  (Note: If none of these things appeal to you, don’t watch Dazed and Confused.  But that’s unlikely.)

Dazed may not be Fast Times at Ridgemont High—the characters are less distinctive and it doesn’t have the heart of Cameron Crowe’s movie, which did a better job of presenting kids that deep down were good people.  But anyone who’s seen Dazed will be able to quote its lines—“If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself”—especially those that are delivered with suave coolness by McConaughey: “You should ditch the two geeks you’re with and come with us, but we’ll worry about that later”; and, of course, the classic: “That’s what I like about these high schoolers—I get older, they stay the same age.”

All in all, anyone’s who lived through high school should be able to relate to something.

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The Breakfast Club: They can dish it out, but can they take it?

September 7, 2009 By 3 Comments
Since this Labor Day represents the unofficial end of summer and start of the school year, it seems the perfect time to explore a beloved–but imperfect–movie about the difficulties teenagers face at school: 1985′s The Breakfast Club.  This also serves as a partial homage to the recently deceased John Hughes, who wrote and directed numerous quality films in the 1980s.  Further explorations of his movies will follow.
The Brat Pack, in all their glory
The Brat Pack, in all their glory

Rating: two 1/2 stars (out of four)

John Hughes’s The Breakfast Clubhas become something of a cult classic in the decades since its 1985 release, equaling or surpassing other pictures from this talented writer, at least in the public’s eye.  In it, five high school students, who conveniently represent a few of their student body’s cliques, have been forced to spend one precious Saturday in detention.  There’s the jock, Andrew (Emilio Estevez); the princess, Claire (Molly Ringwald); the brain, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall); the weirdo, Allison (Ally Sheedy); and the criminal, Bender (Judd Nelson).

As a film, The Breakfast Cluboccupies a critical point in movie history.  The actors were all “Brat Pack” regulars—for Hughes favorite Ringwald, this bracketed Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, and Sheedy, Nelson, and Estevez would star, with others, in the awful St. Elmo’s Fire later the same year.  As Roger Ebert pointed out, it’s an “all-star cast” of younger actors, and the film is worth watching for anyone about to enter high school, but not as much as, say, Mean Girls.  Ultimately, it’s a frustrating, contradictory movie, not nearly as consistent as other Hughes works Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or as heartwarming as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.   

The stereotypical classifications of the main characters are meant to represent both the way the school principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) and their fellow inmates view them.  The entire movie takes place at school during the day, almost all of that inside the library, where these five challenge each other’s misconceptions of themselves.  Learning tolerance, Hughes tells us, is a lot easier when you want others to view you more sympathetically. 

The de facto leader of the group is Bender, the obnoxious, loud, arrogant, and generally rebellious student who manages to infuriate everyone within about 15 minutes.  Bender, though not uninteresting, is a bit of a contrived character.  Judd Nelson does what he can with the character, and it’s not unrealistic for a high school detention to feature someone like him, but some of his antics feel forced, thrown in by Hughes to keep the plot moving.  

Though I’ll give the movie credit for not going the route of The Graduateby refusing to anoint the adults with first names, it’s difficult to deny that the principal is a hopeless caricature.  I suppose that’s the point, but it makes for quite a one-sided viewpoint.  Some of the things Vernon says to Bender have merit—in particular “You ought to spend a little more time trying to do something with yourself and a little less time trying to impress people.”—but it’s tough to take them seriously when he follows them with a promise to start “cracking skulls” the next time they misbehave.  Likewise, his fighting words to Bender later on in the film feel as out of place as the fight between Richard Gere and Lou Gossett at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman.  Andrew fighting Bender makes sense; the principal taunting him doesn’t.

A more balanced perspective is shown towards the faceless parents of the students.  Though everyone, naturally, professes to not get along with his or hers—If I said that I did, says Andrew, “you’d think I was an idiot.”—they’re not necessarily the problems in the kids’ lives.  Brian, we can infer, has supportive, loving parents; they may be overly concerned about grades, or he may just think they’re overly concerned about grades.  Likewise, Claire doesn’t like her parents, but it becomes clear that she has bigger issues with her friends and her school. 

A little less credible, though, are the personas of Andrew’s father, who demands athletic success from him, or Bender’s, who abuses him.  Those stock types could be believable if the film did something with them, but they’re just slipped in towards the end to try to make us view each person a little more sympathetically.

Hughes adds a few nice touches along the way to keep things interesting.  I admire his willingness to keep the entire film moderately paced, in one setting, with no special effects whatsoever.  I also like the use of music, as the students dance, whistle, or air guitar to the songs playing in the background.  Credit is also due to his inclusion of one of my favorite characters in movies, period, the “weirdo” played by Ally Sheedy.  The film’s most satisfying moments almost all involve her—when she empties her bag onto a couch and explains its contents, when she reveals why she’s in detention (a truly fantastic moment), and when Claire transforms her appearance to uncover physical beauty that had lain dormant.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t manage to quite transform anyone emotionally quite as much.  Because of its lack of special effects and series of conversations between people attempting to get under the other’s skin, it reminded me in some ways of Closer, but it manages to convey neither that film’s great sense of atmosphere and mood nor its heart.  Closer revealed the emotional breaking points of all of its characters, but nothing in The Breakfast Club strikes that deeply.  My love for Ally notwithstanding, I can’t deny that we don’t really get to know anyone that well. 

And Hughes, though he makes some good choices, adds too many distractions to the story.  In my opinion, the film never should have left the library once the principal put them in there.  By giving us Bender running around the school and needless conversations with the principal and janitor, Hughes ruins the atmosphere of the film.  I liken this to Cast Away, which would have crashed and burned if Robert Zemeckis had ever cut away from Tom Hanks while he was on the island to go back to Memphis.  Hughes spends about 90% of the time in the library and suddenly decides to roam to the principal’s office, the gymnasium, and Bender’s locker; a bolder move would have been to keep the students in one place the whole time.

The Breakfast Club also falters because its writing is not perfectly sharp.  When Claire is berating Bender for his refusal to get involved in the school, she expresses scorn for the academic clubs of which Brian is a member, and Hughes misses the opportunity for Bender to point out the hypocrisy in Claire’s viewpoint.  This is microcosmic of the film’s problems: a few of the conversations that take place are substantive—addressing sex, cliques, popularity, authority—but the movie never really goes anywhere with them.  I never got the impression that the students have learned anything or changed in any meaningful way from their day.  When Claire eventually falls for Bender, for example, it doesn’t feel like something stemming from a change in her attitude towards him; it just feels like a sudden and unexplained plot twist.  There has been little previously to indicate that her feelings for him have softened.    

It may seem as though I dislike this film, but the truth is that I point out its flaws only because it intrigues me so much.  I think it could have been a great film, but instead it’s merely decent.  I love the set-up, and I laugh out loud numerous times in it.  I can relate, at least partially, to Brian, Andrew, and Ally, and Nelson’s Bender eventually turns around from being a mere simpleton to the character least afraid of telling the truth.  His comeback to Claire about supposedly not having any purpose at the school has real bite, and even if his parents represent a bit of a stereotype, Nelson just about makes it work, thanks to his spot-on acting in scenes such as the one when he describes his last Christmas: “It was a banner fucking year at the old Bender family.  I got a carton of cigarettes–the old man grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, smoke up, Johnny.’” 

Such scenes have edginess and power.  Unfortunately, the resolutions are somewhat pat and underdeveloped, which is why The Breakfast Club is best enjoyed with low expectations; otherwise you won’t be able to shake its tentativeness and unwillingness to make a strong statement.  There is a moment when the five students discuss whether they’ll view each other differently come Monday—but I’m not so sure they will.  The likelihood that Hughes is making a statement with that fact is all but impossible.

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