amateur pretentious twaddle

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2015)

What happens when Max Fischer graduates from Rushmore and goes to Hollywood? He reads Stephan Zweig and makes a totally pretentious 'art-house' movie 'inspired' by a cursory reading of a few of Zweig's minor novellas. In his own imagination Max Fischer is a great director/playwright (and also master of calculus) but in the real world he is an industrious but dim-witted student whose grades are so low he fails to graduate from high-school. On a subject which he knows something about, which is documenting the torment of his daily life at Westchester High or describing the interactions of the members of his very odd family the level of writing/directing is what one might say juvenile (that is written by a juvenile, and in this case for a juvenile audience) but decent. Now, the young Mr Fischer with a few movies under his belt may well imagine (as he is prone to) that he is the next Dostoyevsky, but that does not make it so. Just as he might imagine himself to be the next Einstein of mathematics when in the real world his endeavours are failed by his 11'th grade math teacher, this work is equally woeful in respect of literature. The really sad thing is that some really quite good actors have fallen for this claptrap, as have almost all professional movie critics.
So what is it about this movie that flags up amateur night most prominently? It is probably the name of the fictional country in which the film is set: the republic of 'Zubrowka'. Which is the trade name of a polish vodka, previously banned from the American market due to a toxic grass extract but which was reformulated specifically for the American market in 2011, and promoted with an equally pretentious 'art-house' advertising campaign. Can you imagine an author like Zweig or Dostoyevsky being so taken by a 30 second vodka spot that they turn it into a novel or play? And these are not Ridley Scott mid-80s European type advertisements (which have some small modicum of artistic merit), but much more run of the mill adverts for the American market (where shouting about a 'monster truck rally' is considered normal fare). At the 'monster' truck rally young Max might have seen an advert for 'my brother is facing the electric chair for a crime he didn't commit ... after his appeals were exhausted we knew there was only one way to get him out ... blam! blam! blam! ... Prison Break! Thursdays 8:30 (9:30 mountain), only on Fox!!'.
Yes dear reader, when the vodka runs out (which takes about 10 minutes) we move straight on to Prison Break. Once the protagonist has broken out of prison (which is very long and tedious, taking about half the movie) we move on to a pursuit by 'Jaws', of the Bond variety. And then it's fair to say it only goes downhill from there.
Now if Wes/Max had stuck with the pretentious pseudo-arty vodka advertisement then the resulting short film would probably have been OK, rescued perhaps by Ralph Fiennes performance. Set design is quite nice but very 'stagey'. It's a bit like one of the plays-within-the-film that Max puts on in Rushmore, which we are led to believe are fairly pedestrian but have amazingly intricate sets. What is missing is the real movie outside of this play within a movie.
For Max's next movie I would suggest a film about a very 'artsy' and pretentious Hollywood writer/director who leads a very dull drab life, is picked on by his peers and is forced to make very stupid movies about monster trucks ... which despite the prosaic subject matter are amazingly intricate and detailed (like transformers as animated by ILM) ... of which we get to see interesting fragments to punctuate an otherwise dull drab cruel world.