Rushmore (1998)

Max (Jason Schwartzman) is not a dumb teenager. It's just that his extracurricular activities take up so much time that he doesn't pay attention to his studies. This is not a good thing, as he attends an exclusive private school, and the headmaster, Dr. Guggenheim (Brian Cox) has had enough of Max's schemes. One day, an rich former student of Rushmore School, Herman Blume (Bill Murray), makes a speech at an assembly. Blume wasn't always rich, and he talks about "rich kids not being able to buy backbones". Max is impressed.

Blume has a pair of sons who are overpriviledged brats. He comments that he "never believed he would ever have kids like them". The rich man is missing something in his life, namely happiness. Blume sees something in Max that he likes and befriends him. Their friendship is strained when Max falls for Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), a widowed teacher whom Blume, a married man, falls for, too.

I liked the quirky characters: Max's over/under achieving ways; his dad, Bert (Seymour Cassel) who accepted his eccentric son for who he was; Blume's world-weary view of life; little Dirk Calloway (Mason Gamble) and his hero-worship of Max; smart Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka) who saw something different in Max. Like a friend of mine said, she was glad the movie ended the way it did. Any other way might have been false.

Bill Murray was a member of the first cast members of TV's legendary "Saturday Night Live". Seymour Cassel's early film career included appearances in director's John Cassavettes' movies, including Shadows (1959). Mason Gamble had the title role in Dennis The Menace (1993). Olivia Williams was in The Postman (1997).

Trailers

I used to be able to pick out a good movie based on the trailer, or preview, I had seen. That's not the case anymore. The movie studios' marketing machine take the most interesting, the funniest, the most scary, etc. parts of the film and put them in the trailer. Then the audience gets to the theater and realize they have been ripped off, as the whole product is subpar.

I love watching trailers for movies made way back in the day. There was more truth in advertising then, and they really made audiences want to see the film. The trailers were flashy, but they didn't give away the whole plot like so many trailers of today.