Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...feels like a high-budget soap opera, with so many characters and thin, unoriginal dialogue. Each relationship is basically stereotypical, with some clever little twists sprinkled in from time to time. There are so many names and details to remember that the director often provides scenes that reiterate redundant plot developments for the less observant or the temporarily narcoleptic viewer. First, there are Paul (Connery) and Hannah (Rowlands), as older married couple experiencing conflict on the eve of the reconfirmation of their wedding vows. Trent (Stewart) is a slick lawyer pursuing Meredith (Anderson), a neurotic theater director. Strangely, these...
...director deals with one aspect of the multiple mini-plots very well. The issue of introducing each character's name and personality presents a promising opening to the film. Carroll throws the personas at the audience in a whirlwind of brief conversations and interactions for each character clinched with their written name appearing on the screen. It is obvious that the director understood the confusion that could result from a menagerie of seemingly unrelated stories and effectively compensates with the introduction. Unfortunately, this only keeps the knotted plot untangled momentarily, as you quickly become mired in the intrinsic flaws associated...
Furthermore, Gluck is quick to switch narratorial perspectives, writing call and answer poems in which she is only sometimes the subject. Her opening poem, "Vita Nova," begins, "You saved me, you should remember me." A plot and an addressee are suddenly implied and then dropped, and the poems that follow are similarly oblique...
...word about the plot and the criminals. I can't say I know what would be naturalistic or socially real in the underworld, and maybe it's just that all the baddies learn from TV these days anyway (see James Wood's vague gestures toward 70's Scorsese things in Another Day In Paradise). But, offering to help Liam pay a debt to the local hooligan head honcho, Joe does actually get to deliver A Package, ostensibly just driving a car back and forth, and, yes, Joe is not allowed to pull out of the deal once...
Rushmore is not a film with a clear, distinct plot. Rather, it works with a story that is continually shifting gears. What begins as Max's struggle to maintain his self-identity while facing "sudden death academic probation" quickly changes into his dogged pursuit of a charming first grade teacher, Ms. Cross (Olivia Williams, free from the purgatory known as The Postman). Hoping to build an aquarium to impress her, Max enlists the help of Blume, a Rushmore benefactor whose vindictive speech against rich kids wins Max's friendship early on. Unfortunately, in a rather predictable twist, Blume also falls...