Kids vs. Rushmore
Jason Schwartzman, as Max Fischer, will never have a better performance. Murphy, as Herman Blume, is good, of course, he fits this all-too-common exaggeratedly understated comedic character perfectly. Rushmore is fun, don't get me wrong, but what is going on with the film? Max and Herman fight over a woman, Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), "She is my Rushmore". If all the world is a stage, as the film seems to imply, then the world's women are props. Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka) is in a similar pickle-as-a-prop. The leaning on the soundtrack doesn't really work for the film, though it seems to want it to; I typically don't fall for this style of film-making. Herman's speech in the chapel is a strange anomaly in the film as far as I can tell, the bit about putting the "rich boys in the crosshairs and taking them down" - no idea.
I'm not sure why Larry Clark's Kids isn't talked about more often, maybe it is just too raw. The film follows a bunch of scantily clad kids having sex, drinking, using drugs, talking crassly - doing whatever it is that proper folks would imagine improper kids doing. There are plenty of interesting, and fairly obvious, questions the films raises, what interests me most is the metaphor of these kids as the US. Added bonus: Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and Leo Fitzpatrick (Marcus, from Storytelling) (among others) all got their starts in this film.
Sorry for the brevity. I still have the Goodfellas vs. Safe commentary hanging over my head, I just wanted to spit this one out.
Clearly Kids kicks Rushmore's proverbial ass.