Rather hollow effort.
Finding Forrester (2000)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:10
Fresh:6
Rotten:4
Average Rating:6/10
Consensus: Despite the predictability of its plot and its similarity to Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester has an honest, solid feel to it and good rapport between Connery and Brown.
Runtime: 2 hrs 16 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Director Gus Van Sant brings to the screen this moving story of a grizzled recluse and an inner-city teenager brought together by their shared passion for writing. Like Van Sant's Oscar-nominated... Director Gus Van Sant brings to the screen this moving story of a grizzled recluse and an inner-city teenager brought together by their shared passion for writing. Like Van Sant's Oscar-nominated GOOD WILL HUNTING, FINDING FORRESTER earnestly explores the struggles of a youthful genius whose position in society (underprivileged kid from the wrong side of the tracks) makes him seem destined for failure until he forms a relationship with a gifted but introverted mentor who helps him see the light.The youthful genius is a talented urban basketball player named Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), who in his spare time reads everything he can get his hands on, secretly scribbling prose and poetry into a composition pad. The introverted mentor is William Forrester (Sean Connery), who took the literary world by storm with his debut novel, AVALON RISING, 50 years earlier but now spends whole days shut inside his Bronx apartment looking out the window onto a basketball court where Jamal hangs out. Buoyed by excellent performances from Connery and newcomer Brown, FINDING FORRESTER paints a compelling, alluring portrait of friendship while offering intriguing insights into the heart and soul of the dedicated writer. [More]
Starring: Sean Connery, Rob Brown, Anna Paquin, F. Murray Abraham
Starring: Sean Connery, Rob Brown, Anna Paquin, F. Murray Abraham, Busta Rhymes, Michael Nouri, Tom Mullica, Lil' Zane
Director: Gus Van Sant
Director: Gus Van Sant
Screenwriter: Mike Rich
Producer: Laurence Mark, Sean Connery, Rhonda Tollefson
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Reviews for Finding Forrester
The leaden screenplay can be fingered for many of the film's faults. But what happened to the off-kilter film-maker last seen at work in To Die For?
An intelligent, subtle, in short remarkable take on growing up, being true to yourself and fighting the odds.
Although it's familiar territory, Van Sant gives the material a new spin and the result is off-beat, low-key and guaranteed to lift spirits with its easy charm.
Movies about writers are notoriously hard to do, since writing by its nature is not cinematic. Finding Forrester evades that problem by giving us a man who wrote one good novel a long time ago, and now writes no more.
Finding Forrester is 100 percent bogus, from its high-concept characters whose resemblance to real human beings is distant at best, to the 'lessons' it imparts on everything from courtship to writing.
There is a smooth, practiced charm to all of this, but, even with Connery fulminating for all he's worth, it wears thin.
When either or both [Connery and Brown] are on screen, you can almost forget that these entertaining performances serve such a pat, predictable story.
When was the last time a Hollywood movie portrayed the acts of reading and writing in such a gratifying and fulfilling way that it made you want to read a real book rather than an 'airport' bestseller?
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