The Doo Bop Song

“Finding Forrester” is basically a movie about the friendship between an older, white writer (played by my favourite, Sean Connery) and a black student he takes on as an apprentice to enhance his superlative writing skills. The story, as told by Gus Van Sant (who also did Good Will Hunting, another story of a high-potential kid from the wrong social setting – turned into brilliant mathematician), walks the line between being just another anti-racism manifesto and falling into the juicy American dream story. Although Robert Brown as Jamal Wallace doesn’t really convince me as the Bronx teen who suppresses his natural gift just to gain his social acceptance from the basketball he is playing with friends, the story gains its realistic twist from the “shkottish” way Connery is supporting his part. We must take further steps in understanding why he is hiding from both himself and his past. Author of a highly successful and meaningful book, the senior writer retreats into his Bronx apartment and denies the world any further contact. The pain that follows creation is greater and more lingering with him, the prolonged feeling nothing else that great could be produced again determines a self-imposed isolation in which the only signs of life are the basketball games of the Bronx teens and filming birds. That life can be hurting and that sensibility can be killed in contact with other minds, rough enough as not to care about the colours and sounds that exist beyond their dull everyday existence is something every sensitive person needs to cope with. Still, buds of green (such as mentoring a young man into the adulthood of his writing and of his life) can let that inner feeling of greatness spring again, can help one find the path back to himself.
This is how creation begins – from contact with people and from the uniqueness of moments we care/dare to take a closer look at.

I see skies of blue..... clouds of white
Bright blessed days....dark sacred nights
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world.
(Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World, from the FF OST)