I saw two good “writer” movies yesterday. One is called MENTOR, with Rutger Hauer, the other is called REPRISE, a Norway-ish film.
Rutger Hauer plays a famous writer/professor, Sanford Pollard (great name!) with a young female graduate student lover 30 years his junior (of course). But he’s impotent, so finds a promising young male writer grad student to take his place in bed — for her, to keep her happy; except she has an ectopic pregnancy and has to get a hystorectomy…
Reprise is about two young guys who vow to get their first novels published before age 25; they send their novels out at the same time. They are best pals. Both novels get published, but one is a flop and other becomes a superstar writer…it is about jealousy, fame, how the fame is not what the one expected…tho the other covets that fame…
Good writerly movies…not as good as Wonder Boys or Bright Lights Big City…and Mentor has the worse soundtrack/design I have ever heard in my life…on IMDB, people talk about seeing it in festivals in 2006, and here it is 2008 before it makes the Love Channel on cable…and underdog film, despite the music it’s pretty good… (and Californication is also a good writerly tale).
The movies interest in me at this point because the long novel I am working on, Lunch on the Grass (I expect to not finish it until this time next year) is about teh relationship between a semi-famous writer/professor and a young student, and follows their interactions over 30 years as semi-fame turns to Fame, and the younger of the two works on he biography of the writer.
