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Plot Summary
Based on the personal memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a wickedly funny, brave and moving tale of surviving a most unusual childhood. Augusten's (Joseph Cross) mother (Annette Bening) is a deluded aspiring post with bipolar disorder whose marriage to his dad (Alec Baldwin) is in ruins. Soon, she is seeing a very eccentric therapist named Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), while Augusten is left in the care of Finch's wackly family, including his tightly-wound daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow). Abandoned by his parents and adopted by the Finches, he finds a kindred spirit in youngest daughter Natalie (Even Rachel Wood) and motherly support from Finch's long suffering wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh). Constantly recording the events of his life in his journals as a way to cope, Augusten finds himself avoiding school, learning about love from an older man (Joseph Fiennes), and making big decisions at the tender age of fifteen.
Credits
Director
Screenwriter
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
31%- Reviews Counted: 130
- Fresh: 40
- Rotten: 90
- Average Rating: 5.0/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Rotten: As dysfunctional family movies go, this is one skip. It doesn't just run with the scissors, it falls on them.
Rotten: If the book was deadpan, the movie is more -- or less -- dead.
Rotten: Someday Annette Bening may find a movie that precisely matches the performance she gives. Unfortunately, Running With Scissors isn't that movie.
Rotten: This is an Igby Goes Down without the laughs, a morbid miscalculation of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou size.
Customer Reviews
rent!
please let me rent this!!! i have wanted to for a long time, i would be quite grateful :)
Running With Scissors
First of all, I have to say that I loved Augusten Borrough's memoir. It was incredible. It helped me get through the rougher part of a year that had plenty of rough patches. I had heard that the movie was good from several reliable sources... Who are no longer considered to be as reliable. What happened? How can you mess up the translation between the memoir and the movie? There is almost literally nothing interesting here. The quirky parts of the novel that made it onto the screen were not as quirky as they could have been. Some of the laughably disgusting parts of the novel were just made to be disgusting in the movie. What makes everything even worse was that nothing flows. This movie is just one crazy occurance after another based on what the director thinks the audience wants to see. There seems to have been no effort into coming up with any sort of way to link the events together. I guess you're just expected to take things the way they're put on film. There were some borderline decent aspects of this film, lying mostly in the performances. Annette Benning makes the movie worth watching in some scenes, though if you've seen American Beauty, you'll probably already know fifty percent of the character she plays. Brian Cox is good as the doctor, though he is by no means excellent. The rest of the actors are mediocre at best, but that lies within the heavily edited characters they play. The one good scene in this movie features Augusten and Natalie decide they want a sunroof and destroy the kitchen ceiling. The rest is almost utterly forgettable. This is a terrible movie. What stands now seems to glare in the face of everything it could have been.
wow
i absolutely love this movie!!! i love the cast and i think its amazing that he actually went through all this and it was only up until he was 15 years old. if you like the movie you definetly need to read the book as well it's very different and they took some things out of the movie that were in the book.
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