Saw "Finding Forrester" last night. Gus "runs for cover" in the wake of "Psycho." A script (by a sharpie named Mark Rich) of total slosh that the creator of "My Own Private Idaho" lavishes an inordinate amount of taste and imagination on.
UberDaddy Sean Connery plays a super-reclusive novelist who has hidden from the world for 50 years after writing a single book that remains a classic. He lives in a very large library-like apartment (fabulous art direction) near a basketball court where our hero -- the fetching Rob Brown -- shoots hoops with his pals. On the side the kid's a voracious reader and intellectual, which he tries to hide from his friends (it's a black thing, etc.) But his SAT score, and his hoop skills, catch the attention of a private school. He meets Connery when he breaks into his apartment on a dare from his pals who think the old man has some sinister secret he's hiding. They become freinds. The kid finds out who his new friend really is. Anna Paquin (as a school bigwig's daughter) flirts decorously with our hero. There's a literary competition at and the evil english professor (F. Murray Abraham),an old nemesis of Connery's, accuses him of cheating and--
Oh why bother to go on? I can hear the suits at Columbia tlaking to Larry Mark (who produced -- smart fags stick together!) "It's about sensitive misunderstood youth -- This looks like a job for Gus Van Sant !"
Gus holds up his end of the deal in minor ways. "Deep Night" is reorchestrated for a full jazz band (If you really know Gus you'll understand it's totemic significance) and he works in widescreen for the first time with great visual assurance.
Plus in the finale there's a Special Guest Star appearance by a certain Oscar-winning actor/screenwriter. . .
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