Finding Forrester Review

Finding Forrester is a heart felt movie produced by Columbia Productions and directed by Gus Van Sant.  It was released on December 19th 2000.  The main characters are Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), William Forrester (Sean Connery), Professor Robert Crawford (F.  Murray Abraham), and Claire Spence (Anna Parquin).  This film is written by Mike Rich, and is 136 minutes long.

This movie is about Jamal Wallace, who loves to play basketball and write.  He is intelligent when it comes to tests, but his grades are low to keep up his reputation with his friends.  Jamal gets accepted into a new school where he meets a girl named Claire.  Throughout the movie Jamal meets William Forrester and they become like family while William helps Jamal improve his writing talents.  He also is introduced to his teacher Mr.Crawford who put him through many challenges that Jamal overcomes in the movie.

Finding Forrester reminds me a lot like the film The Blind Side.  It reminds me of this because in The Blind Side, the main character is treated differently because he’s black, does really well in school and loves to play football.  Although in Finding Forrester the sport is really the only difference, instead of football its basketball.  The storylines are relatively the same, and as a fan of The Blind Side I could really understand the point this movie was making and made it that much more better of a movie to me.

The good qualities about this film that I enjoyed was the music/soundtrack and the acting.  I found that Sean Connery and Rob Brown did an excellent job in their acting that really allowed people to connect and understand the emotion and troubles throughout the movie.  The music in the movie was really well placed as well, there was never a song that never fit in the scene.  Music such as “Save Me” by Hanson, and “You’re So Cool” by Hans Zimmer really played well with the emotions of the scene.

    The theme is the most important part to this movie, as well as other movies but this one really stands out.  My opinion of the theme that is trying to be shown is that family is important to everyone, and even though we don’t always get along and lose family, we can make friends that in the end we treat like family.  It’s these kinds of friends that allow people to bring out the best in each other, like William and Jamal did in this movie.