F.F.

What are the odds that this movie ends with a quiet rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"? That song gets me every time. I'm speaking of the film "Finding Forrester", the (thus far) last in a series of movies loaned to me by a resident at the condo I work at. I'm ALSO rather a sucker for stories about writers. I hope to make a good one myself someday. But there's a lot in this movie that kicks me out of the illusion. The degree to which Connery's character is cloistered from the outside world, and the apparent switch that gets flipped allowing him to finally ride back out into the world. The tag line is: In an ordinary place, he found the one person to make his life extraordinary. Oh man! Is the line referring to Jamal meeting Forrester (Connery) or is it about Forrester meeting Jamal? Dude, could it be both?!?!?!? I'm also incredulous at the degree to which the Jamal character (or really any of the characters) could cite passages and authors at the drop of a hat. That could just be sour grapes on my part for being ignorant. Maybe. The worst though was the section when they read out the contenders for the writing contest. The one "normal" student was given an insulting short hand for mediocrity, the stumbling over his own words when reading them out loud. Was there a whole secret subplot with this character getting his work written for him, and this was the first oppourtunity he'd ever had to read the work? No? Conversely, Forrester walks in, gives part of a reading before the sound fades out and the camera scans across the dumbfounded audience, and when we cut back to Forrester we're given to understand that the words were the height of excellence... but what's this? The pulitzer prize winning recluse is now telling us that those words of wonderment were in fact Jamal's!! The movie did a fine job of telling us what was great writing, but is there any surprise that it couldn't show it to us? What is great writing? I'd imagine it's whatever provokes the greatest response, but that's the thing: what provokes one person falls flat on another, what is wonderful to one is horrible to the other, etcetera etcetera, cliche cliche (I'd have gone all out and actually put the little accent on the end of "cliche" just now, but I'm not sure I can do that on this wordpad program... too bad, I'm rarely in the mood to bother with accents). Hardly revolutionary to say, but knowing when something is terrible is easy, but knowing when it's great? Good luck. And even then, with this irony filled world, the terrible writing can slip through, too. I don't think I need to remind anyone that Twilight exists. To F.F.'s credit (Finding Forrester will now be abbreviated, for all the good it'll do me at this point) they used some kind of electronic type-writer that I thought was really cool (did you hear about the engineer who created a type-writer, uh, like USB type thing that plugs into a computer? It's pretty awesome- I think you can buy a kit to make your own for like $75). Forrester's advice that Jamal needed to "STRIKE THE KEYS!!", or something along those lines, struck ME as ridiculous. I am glad to have finally heard the famous "You're the man now, dog!" line straight from the source. I found the movie overall to be inauthentic. That's a loaded worded, but there it is. Oh, but I just remembered the last thing I wanted to mention about it (I was worried I'd have to let this nagging feeling have at me): I did like the explanation of "farther" as pertaining to distance, as opposed to "further" as pertaining to degree. So hopefully that'll stick with me. And also that I got it right.