help with a rushmore question
10-13-03, 12:07 AM
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help with a rushmore question
My sister is doing a paper for her film-lit class and is using a scene from rushmore to do this. She asked for my help, but I've only seen this movie once and it's been quite some time. She picked the scene where it shows his first play (serpico maybe) and into the dinner scene where he says "O.R. are they?" She needs to come up with the themes of the film....and she said she has come up with jealousy, ambition and maybe one or 2 more...i forget now. Also, she need to come up with how the mise-en-scene is used to develop the characters in that scene and i guess just how it used in that scene....so if anyone had any suggestions that would be great....thanks
jason X.
jason X.
10-13-03, 01:26 AM
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Originally posted by groovrbaby
a counter question: WHAT THAT HELL IS A MISE-EN-SCENE?
a counter question: WHAT THAT HELL IS A MISE-EN-SCENE?
10-13-03, 02:11 AM
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mise-en-scene: a) the staging of a play, including the setting, arrangement of the actors, etc. b) the direction of a film, emphasizing the image created by setting, props, lighting, actors' movements, etc.
10-13-03, 01:21 PM
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yeah i had never heard of mise-en-scene eather before she told me about it yesterday. Well, her paper is due tomorrow so if anyone has any thoughts that would be cool...thanks
Jason X.
Jason X.
10-13-03, 09:56 PM
#8
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Here's something crucial. The joke is pronounced "O.R. they?" Not "O.R. are they?" A nitpick, but not really a joke if said incorrectly.
10-13-03, 10:50 PM
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I would add Individuality and Responsibility to the list of themes...
Anyway here's two thoughts I had on the scenes you mentioned...
Using the Serpico play scene as an example of ambition, or in the case of Max, over-ambition, the mise-en-scene is the entire set itself. There is a elevated train in the windows out of the back of the stage for goodness-sakes. What high-school play have you been to that has that kind of production values? Of course this is summed up with a Gun battle, again not something we expect to see in the theatre...
The dinner scene has Max drinking and trying to belittle Luke Wilsons character is almost a pinnacle of childhood jealousy expressed. The fact that this is played out in a resturant (a public place) allows use the audience not only to sympathize with Maxs immediate need to express his jealousy but also feel the embarrassment of public humiliation. Bill Murray (Herman) and Olivia Williams (Rosemary) probably do more work selling the awkwardness of the scene than Max since he is supposed to be drunk and theoretically blissfully unaware of his actions...
Ignore my typos and Good luck.
Anyway here's two thoughts I had on the scenes you mentioned...
Using the Serpico play scene as an example of ambition, or in the case of Max, over-ambition, the mise-en-scene is the entire set itself. There is a elevated train in the windows out of the back of the stage for goodness-sakes. What high-school play have you been to that has that kind of production values? Of course this is summed up with a Gun battle, again not something we expect to see in the theatre...
The dinner scene has Max drinking and trying to belittle Luke Wilsons character is almost a pinnacle of childhood jealousy expressed. The fact that this is played out in a resturant (a public place) allows use the audience not only to sympathize with Maxs immediate need to express his jealousy but also feel the embarrassment of public humiliation. Bill Murray (Herman) and Olivia Williams (Rosemary) probably do more work selling the awkwardness of the scene than Max since he is supposed to be drunk and theoretically blissfully unaware of his actions...
Ignore my typos and Good luck.
10-13-03, 10:50 PM
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Originally posted by spainlinx0
Here's something crucial. The joke is pronounced "O.R. they?" Not "O.R. are they?" A nitpick, but not really a joke if said incorrectly.
Here's something crucial. The joke is pronounced "O.R. they?" Not "O.R. are they?" A nitpick, but not really a joke if said incorrectly.
10-13-03, 11:26 PM
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Originally posted by TELawrence
I would add Individuality and Responsibility to the list of themes...
Anyway here's two thoughts I had on the scenes you mentioned...
Using the Serpico play scene as an example of ambition, or in the case of Max, over-ambition, the mise-en-scene is the entire set itself. There is a elevated train in the windows out of the back of the stage for goodness-sakes. What high-school play have you been to that has that kind of production values? Of course this is summed up with a Gun battle, again not something we expect to see in the theatre...
The dinner scene has Max drinking and trying to belittle Luke Wilsons character is almost a pinnacle of childhood jealousy expressed. The fact that this is played out in a resturant (a public place) allows use the audience not only to sympathize with Maxs immediate need to express his jealousy but also feel the embarrassment of public humiliation. Bill Murray (Herman) and Olivia Williams (Rosemary) probably do more work selling the awkwardness of the scene than Max since he is supposed to be drunk and theoretically blissfully unaware of his actions...
Ignore my typos and Good luck.
I would add Individuality and Responsibility to the list of themes...
Anyway here's two thoughts I had on the scenes you mentioned...
Using the Serpico play scene as an example of ambition, or in the case of Max, over-ambition, the mise-en-scene is the entire set itself. There is a elevated train in the windows out of the back of the stage for goodness-sakes. What high-school play have you been to that has that kind of production values? Of course this is summed up with a Gun battle, again not something we expect to see in the theatre...
The dinner scene has Max drinking and trying to belittle Luke Wilsons character is almost a pinnacle of childhood jealousy expressed. The fact that this is played out in a resturant (a public place) allows use the audience not only to sympathize with Maxs immediate need to express his jealousy but also feel the embarrassment of public humiliation. Bill Murray (Herman) and Olivia Williams (Rosemary) probably do more work selling the awkwardness of the scene than Max since he is supposed to be drunk and theoretically blissfully unaware of his actions...
Ignore my typos and Good luck.
10-14-03, 06:10 AM
#12
DVD Talk Godfather
From the DVD booklet
The title of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore refers to the ivy-covered prep school attended by the film’s central character, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman). Max, with his bushy eyebrows and imposing glasses, loves his school beyond reason and is Rushmore’s number one go-getter—editor of the school paper, president of the French club, organizer of the calligraphic society, proud member of the wrestling team. He is also, as the school’s headmaster notes, “one of the worst students we’ve got.” In his eagerness to succeed, Max is failing. It is his one character flaw, and the organizing principle of a profoundly American comedy in the direct tradition of Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain used his adolescent hero to provide an outsider’s viewpoint on a rapidly stratifying American society, a republican dream pulling apart into divisions of age, income and race. Rushmore is also about class divisions—Max, the son of the local barber (Seymour Cassel), is attending the exclusive school on a scholarship—but Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson, more wishful thinkers than Twain, use comedy to imagine the healing of those divisions, the reweaving of relationships across the lines of class and generation.
An American dreamer who refuses to allow reality to limit his aspirations, Max conceives a passionate crush on Rushmore’s lonely, lovely first grade teacher, Miss Cross (Olivia Willliams) and befriends the local self-made millionaire, Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a melancholic steel magnate who has lived out his dream and found it empty. Out of the unlikely triangle that develops among the three characters, Anderson develops a deeply moving interplay of abandoned hopes and rekindled aspirations, of reality and romanticism.
Rushmore has some strongly autobiographical elements: it was shot at St. John’s, the Houston prep school that Anderson attended (he later went to the University of Texas at Austin, with future collaborator Wilson). Like Max, Wilson was expelled from school and Anderson used the school auditorium to stage his own plays: action epics with titles like The Five Maseratis and The Battle of the Alamo. On another level, Max is, perhaps, representative of all artists who use their work to arrange and control the world around them. A play will be his way of reassembling his life, of bringing Blume and Miss Cross back together, of reintegrating a whole range of broken friendships and incidental enmities, into a balanced community.
Anderson uses symmetrical widescreen compositions to give the film just a slight air of stylization, and long, graceful camera movements to tie together seemingly disparate characters and incidents. There are some marvelously subtle moments of expressive editing, as when Anderson uses ellipses to suggest that Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka), Max’s would-be, more age-appropriate girlfriend, has arrived on the scene in her radio-controlled model plane, and later departs the same way.
Like the great Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka), Anderson has learned to pack a maximum amount of information into a minimum amount of screen time. Entire characters are established by a gesture, an accent, a detail of costume; when the camera, in the climactic sequence, surveys a row of spectators at Max’s new play, we have the feeling that we know them all, even though some of them are appearing for the first time.
But technique can only go a small way toward explaining the effect of a film as intricate and vivid as this, with its simultaneous sobriety and eccentricity, its love of grand gestures and its respect for the tiniest fluctuations of emotions, its underlying sadness and great, bursting hopefulness. That is the stuff of poetry, and in this, only his second film, Wes Anderson has shown himself a poet of the first order.
Dave Kehr’s film criticism has appeared in many anthologies and publications including The New York Times, Premiere, and Entertainment Weekly. He is also a contributing editor at Film Comment.
The title of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore refers to the ivy-covered prep school attended by the film’s central character, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman). Max, with his bushy eyebrows and imposing glasses, loves his school beyond reason and is Rushmore’s number one go-getter—editor of the school paper, president of the French club, organizer of the calligraphic society, proud member of the wrestling team. He is also, as the school’s headmaster notes, “one of the worst students we’ve got.” In his eagerness to succeed, Max is failing. It is his one character flaw, and the organizing principle of a profoundly American comedy in the direct tradition of Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain used his adolescent hero to provide an outsider’s viewpoint on a rapidly stratifying American society, a republican dream pulling apart into divisions of age, income and race. Rushmore is also about class divisions—Max, the son of the local barber (Seymour Cassel), is attending the exclusive school on a scholarship—but Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson, more wishful thinkers than Twain, use comedy to imagine the healing of those divisions, the reweaving of relationships across the lines of class and generation.
An American dreamer who refuses to allow reality to limit his aspirations, Max conceives a passionate crush on Rushmore’s lonely, lovely first grade teacher, Miss Cross (Olivia Willliams) and befriends the local self-made millionaire, Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a melancholic steel magnate who has lived out his dream and found it empty. Out of the unlikely triangle that develops among the three characters, Anderson develops a deeply moving interplay of abandoned hopes and rekindled aspirations, of reality and romanticism.
Rushmore has some strongly autobiographical elements: it was shot at St. John’s, the Houston prep school that Anderson attended (he later went to the University of Texas at Austin, with future collaborator Wilson). Like Max, Wilson was expelled from school and Anderson used the school auditorium to stage his own plays: action epics with titles like The Five Maseratis and The Battle of the Alamo. On another level, Max is, perhaps, representative of all artists who use their work to arrange and control the world around them. A play will be his way of reassembling his life, of bringing Blume and Miss Cross back together, of reintegrating a whole range of broken friendships and incidental enmities, into a balanced community.
Anderson uses symmetrical widescreen compositions to give the film just a slight air of stylization, and long, graceful camera movements to tie together seemingly disparate characters and incidents. There are some marvelously subtle moments of expressive editing, as when Anderson uses ellipses to suggest that Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka), Max’s would-be, more age-appropriate girlfriend, has arrived on the scene in her radio-controlled model plane, and later departs the same way.
Like the great Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka), Anderson has learned to pack a maximum amount of information into a minimum amount of screen time. Entire characters are established by a gesture, an accent, a detail of costume; when the camera, in the climactic sequence, surveys a row of spectators at Max’s new play, we have the feeling that we know them all, even though some of them are appearing for the first time.
But technique can only go a small way toward explaining the effect of a film as intricate and vivid as this, with its simultaneous sobriety and eccentricity, its love of grand gestures and its respect for the tiniest fluctuations of emotions, its underlying sadness and great, bursting hopefulness. That is the stuff of poetry, and in this, only his second film, Wes Anderson has shown himself a poet of the first order.
Dave Kehr’s film criticism has appeared in many anthologies and publications including The New York Times, Premiere, and Entertainment Weekly. He is also a contributing editor at Film Comment.
