This YouTube clip is the opening few minutes of my favorite movie of all time, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. It’s only three minutes long, and I include it here for the first minute and a half, in which 15-year-old protagonist Max, an elite prep school’s charity case, attempts to solve what is “probably the hardest geometry equation in the world.”
The flavor of the whole movie is captured here. Max’s insouciance, his morning paper, his demitasse cup, the teacher’s magnificent deadpan… It’s all classic.
Best of all, the problem Max works is on the board is, like everything else Max writes in the movie, written in gorgeous calligraphic script.
Homo Logisticus Organizus 
Probably my favorite scene in this movie. There are two bits I love here. One is, of course, the faux surprised expression on Max’s face when we first see him looking up from his newspaper. And then there’s that earlier tease where the camera, in a POV move, pans away from the “hardest geometry equation in the world” when the math teacher says: “Oh that? Don’t worry about that.”
Professor Adams is played by Deepak Pallana, who was in Wes Anderson’s first three films. As was his father, Kuram Pallana. Kumar’s biggest performance was as Pagoda in the Royal Tenenbaums. Kumar teaches yoga on the second floor of Dallas’ best vegetarian cafe, the Cosmic Cup (I think he’s still there). I know two people who were in his classes, and yet they never knew his other life. And one of them was a film student.
I keep having to remind myself that some good has come out of my home town.
There aren’t a lot of movies I can watch and re-watch at any time. But Rushmore is certainly one of them. The genius of the whole Max Fischer persona is in the manner in which how Jason Schwartzman tosses off those cliched adult lines. “Yes, that’s true. But I’ve been out to sea for a long time.”
LOL thanks for the the Pallana family update. Deepak is so great as the professor.
I have watched this clip like 4 times today. It’s even funny with the sound off in the math lab. Jason Schwartzman’s expression when he finishes the problem is magnificent. Major props to Schwartzman. NO ONE could have done the role better.