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| Jason
Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Seymour Cassel, Brian Cox,
Mason Gamble |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Herman
Blume: Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would have children
like these...
An
eccentric student at a private school falls in love with a teacher and
develops an unlikely friendship with a morose businessman.
 Rushmore
is one of those quirky little movies difficult to classify and even
harder to judge. Drawing heavily on The Graduate in style and
tone, the movie revolves around the strange character of Max Fischer,
an unsuccessful but resourceful and energetic student whose life is
dedicated to extracurricular activities at Rushmore academy until he
falls in love with one of the teachers. Fischer is an extraordinary
and unique character, one that can only be taken on his own terms and
whose adolescent posturing can be both endearing and irritating. It's
a character so eccentric that he's always on the verge of becoming artificial,
but Jason Schwartzman's performance keeps him grounded in an odd reality,
and also manages to give this infuriatingly stubborn figure a touching
fragility.
Bill Murray's performance as weary, depressed millionaire Herman Blume
is even better: a career-best performance that turns his trademark cynical
wise-guy persona upside down into an extraordinary sadness and world-weariness
that is as funny as it is believable. These two oddball characters go
on an weird emotional journey together, in which they find themselves
sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, but always clear soul mates. The
sometimes bumpy narrative path they take together takes a little getting
used to, but grows on you as the film progresses and finally develops
into an oddly affecting comedy that takes an unusual stance and more
than a few risks, and is all the more rewarding for it. |
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A
movie-only version is available from Buena Vista for both Region 1 and
Region 2. The Region 2 release
is anamorphic whereas the Region 1 movie-only edition is not. There
is also a Criterion Edition release available for Region 1 only. This
review focuses on the Criterion edition.
The
widescreen image is framed at 2.35:1 and is anamorphic on the Criterion
and the Region 2 releases of the DVD. Both present an outstanding image
with deep blacks and a full recreation of the movie's rich colors and
expert cinematography. The Criterion version with its careful new transfer
supervised by the director is a notch above the movie-only edition,
but both provide pleasing presentations.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix is crystal clear, putting the surround
sound field to work more than one would expect from such a 'small' film.
Especially the distinctive score and the great British Invasion tunes
get an excellent treatment in this immersive audio presentation.
Rushmore
didn't really light fire to the box office, was only given a very limited
theatrical release in Europe where it soon disappeared to video without
a trace, and can be called a cult film at best. It is therefore as surprising
as it is enjoyable to find such a rich DVD edition of such a 'small'
contemporary comedy. Criterion truly went the extra five yards with
this release and gave it a superlative treatment, packing it to the
brim with more extras than one would have thought possible.
The audio commentary from director Wes Anderson, co-writer Owen Wilson
and actor Jason Schwartzman has been edited together from separate commentary
tracks and easily lives up to Criterion's high standards for audio commentaries.
All three provide witty, entertaining and informative footnotes in a
dry manner befitting the movie's tone, and point out many of the tiny
details that make the film so much fun to watch again and again.
A section called the 'Rushmore AV Club' features a short behind-the-scenes
video production shot by the director's brother (who also makes a small
appearance in the film). He appears to be even more of an oddball than
his brother, and his short documentary is the kind of off-kilter featurette
that suits this movie. There is also a storyboard section and a film-to-storyboard
comparison to be found here, along with the theatrical trailer and an
hour-long episode from the Charlie Rose Show featuring Bill Murray and
director Wes Anderson discussing several things including the movie.
The section 'Max Fischer Players Present' includes one of the most amusing
extras on this disc: a threesome of short 'Max Fischer productions'
in which he stages his interpretation of popular 1998 movies including
Armageddon and The Truman Show. They are done in the same
rich visual style of the film and are hilarious if you know and like
the movie. This section also contains some art work advertising Fischer's
original plays and audition footage of the movie's younger cast members.
Finally, the 'Archiva Grafica' features stills and other graphical material
of characters, events and props from the movie, all very nicely designed
and fun to browse through. The
Criterion edition is a unique package: the box, the disc, the inlay and
the menu screens are all done in the same pencil-drawn style as though
they had been designed by the movie's main character Max Fischer. There
is even a supplemental 'hand-drawn' map that charts the main events in
the movie as an extra surprise in the box! Taken together, this forms
a wonderful collector's box that is both imaginatively and pleasantly
designed, and is easy to use and to navigate. There is little animation
in the menu screens, but there are some sound effects including the movie's
main musical cue that loops - rather annoyingly - over the main menu screen.
Dan Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on Rushmore.
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to return to the front page.
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