Usually I come to bury movies, not to praise them, but I just saw a film that restored a tiny piece of my faith in the movie industry.

Rushmore. Oooh baby.

First off, I have to say what everybody else said coming out of this movie.

"It wasn't as funny as I thought it was going to be."

That being said, it wasn't a bad thing. It was bait-and-switch marketing.

The preview for Rushmore made it look like it was going to be some kind of wacky slapstick Meatballs kind of Bill Murray film. Kind of like the way that the preview for The Truman Show tried to make you think that it was another Dumb and Dumber step in Jim Carrey's downward spiral.

Don't get me wrong, Rushmore did indeed have its funny parts. However, as a whole, the movie was a brilliantly constructed story of love gone awry in the hands of people too immature to handle it. Listen to me, I'm practically getting weepy.

This was a great movie, and as the chainsaws show, I highly recommend it. As usual, I don't have that much to say about movies that I like. Just go see it, you won't regret it.

Max Fischer is my new hero. I mean, you see people in movies all the time that you want to be. Indiana Jones. Han Solo. Rick Deckard. And a few that Harrison Ford didn't play too. But we can't be these people. Never will any of us fly the Millennium Falcon, retrieve the Arc of the Covenant, or bust a Replicant. The bar is too high.

Max Fischer is a hero for the everyman. His skills aren't action and adventure, they're fiction and wit. He proves that a person can be brilliant, and still flunk out of school.

He's what Ferris Bueller would have been like in reality.

Max never seems to be thinking of Miss Cross in a sexual way. In fact, he first becomes interested in her through only an inspirational quote written in a library book, not a pair of full, glossy eyes and a sensual European accent.

He has a deep (though perhaps unjustified) love for her, and his schemes and plans never come across as a way to get into her pants, but a way to get into her heart.

Though he isn't popular amongst his peers or his elders, he doesn't have the self-esteem issues or the ego-of-denial that one typically sees in this kind of character. He is who he is, he wants what he wants, and he uses what he has to try to get it.

Only when drunk and heartbroken does he start to rant about how he is a brilliant playwright. Obviously he is, but it isn't the crux of his character. It's not like that Good Will Hunting piece of crap where the struggle is the tired old "But if I have these powers I should use them for good" story, but merely a facet of who he is and how he works.

If he is going to win the affection of Miss Cross, it is going to be through his elegant schemes, not through swinging on a whip over a fallen rope bridge.

In fact, my biggest complaint with this movie is his pairing with Margaret Yang at the end, not because of the actual act of them getting together itself, but because of the way that it transpired.

Obviously the concept of the movie ending with the solemn teacher running off to Bermuda with the fifteen year old prodigy would have been completely ridiculous. That wasn't the ending that I wanted either. In fact, I think that Margaret was written as an excellent partner for him.

The problem is that he never seemed to really warm up to her, yet at the end he seemed happy about her being his girlfriend. I would have liked to have seen the same script, but directed more so that Max ends up with this terrific girl who is perfectly matched to him, yet really in his heart still feels like he is "settling" for her.

You know, just to round out the whole tortured genius motif.

But that's a small complaint. It's like saying that geologic time is nice, but the last ten minutes are nothing to write home about. A tiny insignificant smirch on a vast masterpiece.