Bully (**3/4)

Thanks to the ratings controversy surrounding the inclusion of a few words that virtually anyone seeing this would already have heard many times, this documentary from Lee Hirsch (Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony) arrives with more fanfare than most. It’s probable that the subjects of the film, none old enough to see an R-rated movie alone, would have heard the words actually directed at them many times. That’s what’s happening when we watch Alex, the most prominent “star” of the film, get harassed and punched on a school bus. Also prominent are Kelby, ostracized in her high school for being a lesbian; Ja’Maya, a 14-year-old whose bullies drove her to an impulsive, foolish act; and two other boys whose parents or classmate must speak for them, because they committed suicide. (For whatever reason, all of the students profiled are from small-to-medium-size communities in the South and Midwest.)

Alex, whose large mouth has gotten him tagged with the name “fish face,” is unique in that Hirsch was actually able to film him on the bus, in school, and at home, his refuge. His social awkwardness is more apparent than with the others. Besides the scenes with his middle-school classmates, we see administrators failing to address the problem. In a scene sure to provoke the most discussion, the vice principal at Alex’s school tells another boy that his refusal to shake hands with his tormentor means they’re alike. Sensibly, he replies yes, but I don’t hit him.

Would that there had been more insight into the ways in which bullying persists. Hirsch eschews an academic approach and so does not present any “experts” on the subject. But, given that the problem of bullying has been getting increasing attention for a few years now, perhaps he could have visited a community that has truly made an effort to address the problem. Perhaps he could have interviewed the kids who bully, or who did in the past. One kid, the best friend of an eleven-year-old suicide victim, does admit that he was a bully in second grade, but stopped as he saw the effect it was having. But he does not explain what was satisfying about bullying or why he began to feel empathy for his victims.


Bully is film that is sure to provoke empathy, and seems almost wholly directed to that goal. Perhaps even bullies will identify with the victims, should they see the movie. Adults may identify with the grieving/helpless parents, or maybe even the vice principal. She is certainly exasperating, perhaps even clueless, but she is also genuinely at a loss as to how to help. No doubt she is like many other administrators in many schools. (Kelby tells a different story; she encountered outright hostility from faculty as well as students. Although the film does not make this point, combating anti-gay harassment may require another sort of strategy.) In the end, the film is silent as to what, in fact, a sympathetic administrator should do to combat bullying. Its solutions begin, and end, with community awareness.

IMDb link

viewed 4/9/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/10 and 4/12/12

The Karate Kid (***1/4)

I suppose the title will irritate some, given that Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han teaches the kid (Jaden Smith) kung fu, not karate. The kid’s mom (Taraji P. Henson) confuses the two, and even after watching this movie I’m not sure of the differences myself, but Chan is Chinese and the movie takes place in China, where kung fu is the reigning martial art. Even so, there’s an unmistakable fidelity to the 1984 film of which this is a remake.

Both characters feature handymen who employ repetitive tasks as ways to build strength and discipline. And both save the boy from a bully trained by a cruel master, only to train him for an inevitable showdown. In the 1984 version, Pat Morita’s Miyagi says: “Karate for defense only.” Han says that kung fu is for “making peace with your enemy.” As Han, Chan displays far less of the physicality than in his straight action (or action-comedy) roles, but is extremely likable. In the title role, Jaden Smith has very much the cocky-yet-charming persona of his dad, Will Smith. The only other prominent role, a quasi-love interest for the boy, is charmingly played by Chinese newcomer Wenwen Han.

There’s no getting around that the storyline is still completely formulaic, though that won’t bother the target audience. The message of nonviolence is nice, even if the kids will probably forget about it as the movie builds up to the inevitable revenge ass-kicking. But the novel element that most justifies the remake is the transplanted setting. While the Americans attend an English-language school, and most of the dialogue is in English, you can, more than in most Hollywood films set abroad, surmise that there are interesting places different from the United States, people who don’t speak English, and faraway places worth visiting. (The locations include both Beijing’s Forbidden City and the Great Wall.) Perhaps Chan’s participation—or the Chinese government’s—ensured that the Chinese come off as neither quaintly charming nor wisely exotic, excepting that Han seems to have magic healing powers.

Silly title or not, the new Kid’s all right.

(My rating is kind of from the point of view of a younger person, but the movie was still fairly enjoyable as an adult.)

IMDB link

viewed at UA Riverview [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2/2010

New Boy (***1/2) [2009 Oscar-nominated shorts program]

An African boy confronts a slur-slinging bully on his first day at his new Irish elementary school. This charming adaptation of a Roddy Doyle story covers comedy, drama, politics, and racism in a mere 11 minutes.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/11/09

Let the Right One in (***)

It’s boy-meets-girl in this not-so-cuddly Swedish import, in which the main characters are two twelve-year-olds. Oskar, chosen victim of the school bully, wonders why his new friend Eli doesn’t know her birthday, why she doesn’t wear a jacket, and why she doesn’t like candy. He doesn’t pry too much, but we know better, having seen another of her kind dispatch one of the locals and drain his blood. I've never completely understood the enduring appeal of vampire movies, and can have trouble suspending my disbelief. I mean, if vampires were really roaming about Sweden, how come the country’s murder rate was so low? Yet this one draws you in as much with drama as horror.

The movie is not highly stylized, or particularly rich with vampire lore. I have no idea whether Eli is afraid of garlic. The minor characters—Oskar’s divorced parents, the older vampire, who may or may not be Eli’s father, the bully—barely register. What does is the wintry desolation of the setting, an apparently isolated town near the Soviet border, some time during the Brezhnev era. Not all of the scenes are in darkness, but nearly all evoke the mood of a lonely twelve-year-old. Like nearly any good vampire movie, the violence escalates, but it’s the mood that will haunt.

IMDB link

viewed 11/13/08 [screening at Ritz Bourse]; reviewed 11/18/08

My Brother Is an Only Child (***1/4)

For young Accio, as for so many, it’s lust that steers him away from seminary. Mildly reprimanded for having been caught masturbating, he regards the episode not so much as a personal failing as a failure of the church to stamp out his desire. And so he searches for another ideology worthy of his allegiance, and finds…fascism. It is small-town Italy, nearly two decades after Il Duce’s fall, and this puts him at odds with his communist-leaning siblings and his working-class parents, who long for the new house the ruling party has promised to build them. Accio’s nickname means “bully,” but mostly he comes in for beatings at the hands of his older brother.

Skipping from 1962 to roughly a decade later, this adaptation of a novel follows Accio’s struggles with desire and ideology, which come into conflict when he meets his brother’s girlfriend. Part coming-of-age story, part dysfunctional family tale, it’s a colorful, nearly comic film quite different from Hollywood fare, but one that‘s nonetheless fairly accessible. It’s much more the story of a small-town family than a political movie—ideological differences aside, neither brother's politics appear too sophisticated. Yet the idea that such people even have political views would be unusual for an American film. The zigzagging plot’s conclusion is a reminder that it doesn’t always require sophistication to effect change.

IMDB link

viewed 5/14/08; reviewed 5/16/08

Drillbit Taylor (**3/4)

First of all, this isn’t as stupid as you’d think from its title. It’s less stupid than The Adventures of Pluto Nash, or Fred Claus, and much less stupid than Joe Dirt. It comes from a story by John Hughes, a 1980s teen-movie guru before he started writing movies about talking babies, and has a screenplay co-written by Superbad’s Seth Rogen. Thus it’s not too surprising that the heroes are two teenage dweebs targeted by a bully on their first day of high school. Drillbit is a homeless guy, an amiable bullshitter who answers their ad for a bodyguard and is willing to work cheap. Played by Owen Wilson, who has made a specialty of playing amiable bullshitters, Drillbit schools them in little-known self-defense techniques. The humor isn’t too crude; as with You, Me, and Dupree, Wilson walks the line between amusing and annoying. The kids who play the leads, skinny Nate Hartley and chubby Troy Gentile, look the part. It’s not as realistic as 1980’s fine My Bodyguard, but there’s some truth to the story. It’s not super, but it’s not bad.

IMDB link

viewed 3/22/08; reviewed 3/27/08

Charlie Bartlett (**3/4)

In Drillbit Taylor, bullied high schoolers recruit a bodyguard. Charlie (Anton Yelchin), a misbehavior-prone rich kid who’s exhausted the local supply of private schools, decides to make friends with the bully. I had trouble buying Charlie’s quickie transformation from clueless transfer student (he wears his insignia jacket to his first day at public school) to cool-kid confidante. The inverted relationship between Charlie and his hapless mother (Hope Davis), who’s more like his best friend, is better. So is the one between Charlie’s love interest and her dad, the hapless school principal. Robert Downey scores as this sympathetic antagonist, and I expect to see more of Kat Dennings, as the daughter. The humor is mostly understated (i.e., rarely laugh-aloud funny), and psychiatrists may object to the portrayal of their colleagues as credulous pill-pushers. (Charlie appropriates their peculiar skills to ply to his classmates, in return for that most precious of teen commodities, popularity.) Still, some originality makes it worth watching for those tired of typical teen comedies.

IMDB link

viewed 3/26/08; reviewed 3/27/08

The Ant Bully (**1/2)

A cartoon boy sees things from a new perspective after being shrunk to insectoid proportions, but as far as originality, you’ve seen it before.

It took me half an hour to get over the ick factor watching this movie full of screen-filling, if animated, insects. Angular, shiny, and purplish, they’re almost realistic, to the extent that that’s a good thing. Seems like it was only a few years ago (1998, actually) that both A Bug’s Life and Antz appeared. Where Antz was a Marxist allegory, this version of a kid book merely aspires to being a cartoon version of an After School Special. A preschool special, more accurately. A boy gets bullied, then “bullies” some insects by spraying their anthill with a hose. How was he to know that these were brainy, English-speaking ants whose voices are those of Julia Roberts, Nicholas Cage, and even Meryl Streep? By shrinking him to their size, they teach him a Valuable Lesson. He uses his knowledge of humans to help them combat their insect enemies as well as the mighty exterminator (Paul Giamatti.) The ants have built a whole god-devil mythology. We never learn much about the god part, but the exterminator is the devil. (He works for Beals-a-Bug pest control, which is about as funny as it gets.) The boy also learns that thinking positively will help you accomplish things. True to a point, but, to paraphrase Dusty Springfield, wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ won’t get you suction cups on your arms to help walk up walls or provide you the skills to persuade your fellow nerds to unite against the local thug. But it’s nice to think so, and so this is a nice movie to park the tots in front of and admire the amazing CGI footage.

IMDb link

Hoot (***)

A faithful, modestly likeable version of Carl Hiassen’s teen novel about a Florida kid who stumbles his way into some activism of behalf of endangered owls.

“Tween” novels don’t get made into movies that often (Holes is one that comes to mind), so this faithful adaptation of Carl Hiassen’s 2002 tale is welcome. Roy Eberhardt, the hero of the tale, is the new kid in the town of Coconut Cove, Florida. In short order he’s become the target of the school bully, pissed off a girl called Beatrice the Bear, and gotten hit on the head by a golf ball after chasing a barefoot kid. In another subplot, a local cop (Luke Wilson) is trying to figure out the source of some petty vandalism at a construction site. Turns out it all has to do with a pancake house and some owls competing for the same slice of real estate. The Florida in this movie isn’t the one of Disney World or CSI: Miami, but the quainter version found in Hiassen’s novels and the songs of Jimmy Buffet. Not surprisingly, Buffet, one of the film’s producers, provides much of the soundtrack and plays a science teacher. I wouldn’t have minded a little more of the whimsy of Hiassen’s adult novels; unlike those, Hoot gets less quirky as things progress, settling eventually into a straight pro-environment, teen-empowerment mode. Adults may find the corporate villain one-dimensional as well. Almost all of it is straight out of the book. Perhaps dismayed by the reception afforded the only other film made from one of his novels (Striptease), Hiassen wrote the script himself. There are more original films, but by virtue of likable characters and having no competition at all, Hoot is the junior-high semi-comedy of 2006 (so far).

IMDb link

posted 8/20/13

The Benchwarmers (*1/2)

--> --> This root-for-the-underdog baseball film is a lazily plotted compendium of physical humor geared toward 12-year-old boys, starring David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Jon Heder.

From the writing and acting talent that has already produced one other not-screened-for-critics comedy in 2006, Grandma’s Boy, comes this baseball story. To say that it strikes out would be trite, yet in keeping with the unoriginal spirit shown here. The plot is, one day a guy (Rob Schneider) decides to pick up his old mitt and gets his misfit pals (David Spade and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder) to challenge some pre-teen bullies in a tournament. Heder’s character is basically Napoleon with a lower IQ and a better haircut. Spade is basically himself with a worse haircut. Schneider is the normal one, as well as the only one who knows how to play baseball. As for the jokes, here’s a sample. Heder: “What’s steroids?” Spade: “Something that makes your peepee smaller.” To be fair, though, The Benchwarmers is more of a visual comedy, and it’s a nose-picking, bug-eating, face-farting, face-spitting, head-banging, crotch-smacking, pants-pulling, projectile vomit lover’s dream. I’m awarding this half a star extra purely on the basis that the ending was mildly surprising. I never actually laughed. As this movie taught me, it’s not nice to laugh at a loser.

IMDb link

posted 9/3/13