With Honors

With Honors is a 1994 comedy movie that stars Joe Pesci, Brendan Fraser, Moira Kelly, Patrick Dempsey and Josh Hamilton. Gore Vidal co-stars as the conservative and eltist faculty advisor to Monty.

Related Topics:
1994 - Joe Pesci - Brendan Fraser - Moira Kelly - Patrick Dempsey - Josh Hamilton - Gore Vidal

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Monty (Fraser) is a brilliant, albeit cycnical, young man that has gotten himself into Havard without any money ties and is about to graduate as a political science student if he can put the finishing touches on his senior thesis that argues that America government can no longer be the voice of the common man, i.e. the poor and ethinic minorites. When his harddrive crashes, he has only one printed copy of the thesis--which he loses. Simon Wilder (Pesci), a homeless man, finds the thesis and has some fun with Monty--and teaches him and Monty's roomates some life lessons by quoating extensively from Walt Whitman and other poets.

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Monty's roomates come from wealthy families and include the cool college disc jocky Josh Hamilton, the nuerotic and sissified Patrick Dempsey, who is studying to by a gyngolgest, and the attractive Moria Kelly, who has been waiting these past four years for Monty to kiss her. Like, Money, the roomates eventaully come around to viewing the homeless Pesci as a friend and wise philosopher only to find out that he abanonded his own family, as Monty's father had done to him, and is dying from inhaling asbestos while working as a merchant marine.

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At the film's end, Monty has rewritten his thesis to argue that advances in technology will allow the American House of Representatives to become a pure democracy, but because he spent the day helping Simon find track down his grown son and die in peace, he does not graduate from Harvard with honors because the thesis is handed in late.

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Despite being released in 1994, much of the film's political jokes are directed at earlier Reagan-Bush era Republican such as Dan Quale and the Savings and Loan scandle. The film also has some brief mention of Havard's "open admission" policy and a large New Deal Poster with a picture of President Franklin Roosevelt is featured in the students's apartment. Furthermore despite the film's homage to Walt Whitman, homosexality is reduced to a one liner joke and the ethnic minorites that the film's liberal slant seems to be championing are kept safey in the background.

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The theme song is one of Madonna's greatest hits, a ballad called

Related Topics:
"I'll Remember" - DVD

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