Seymour: An Introduction (***)

The title of the movie may grab J. D. Salinger fans who know it as the title of one of Salinger’s better known short stories. They’ll be disappointed to learn that, while the movie too is a character sketch, it’s of the wholly unrelated Seymour Bernstein, a successful pianist turned piano teacher and composer in New York City. This Seymour gave up the limelight for contentment, and it’s that sentiment that strikes you in Ethan Hawke’s documentary.

Hawke includes conversation with others in the film, but it’s the footage of Bernstein, nearing 80, interacting with his younger students that is most captivating. These students are advanced, already capable of playing the right notes, but if you’ve wondered what things make the difference between a very competent musician and a truly excellent one, you get some idea here. Listening to one student chop away at the keys, Bernstein notices not the student’s hands but his shoulders. Placing his own hands on those shoulders, he has the student play it again, now more relaxed. It’s these kinds of small observations, but also his manner, that must make Berstein a fine teacher. He is the opposite of the teacher in Whiplash, inspiring with calmness, confidence in the student, and even a little humor. “Not all notes can be passionate,” he say after hearing one loud performance.

But Hawke is not a piano student, and it’s not the technical skills that drew him to his subject. Both acting (notably in the partly improvised films of Richard Linklater such as Boyhood, Tape, and the Before trilogy) and in interviews, he’s struck me as someone who is maybe thinking too much, who never seems relaxed. Maybe he envies Seymour Bernstein, who strikes me as someone who is thoughtful but not overthinking; he’s gained wisdom with age and simplified the things he prefers not to think about, like where to live. (So he’s been in the same apartment his entire adult life.) Whether you are a music fan or not, he may inspire.

IMDb link

viewed 3/26/15 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 3/30/15

Blue Is the Warmest Color (***)

This film caused a sensation at Cannes, where it won the Palm D’Or, both for its storytelling and for the lengthy sex scenes featuring the two female leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. Also reported was the grueling shooting schedule to which director Abdellatif Kechiche subjected them, but he certainly got results. Exarchopoulos plays Adèle, the a teenage girl who meets the older Emma (whose dyed hair presumably supplies the film’s American title) and is lured by her confident attitude. With a characteristic open-mouthed expression, Exarchopoulos projects an combination of innocence, curiosity, and nervousness. Kechiche favors an improvisatory style that comes across as much in the introductory high school scenes, where Adèle gossips with friends and, briefly, acquires a boyfriend, as in the later, more intimate, ones.

The characters are stronger than the story, which simply carries the two women forward in time, skipping over some potentially dramatic turf, like anything much about the reaction of Adèle’s parents to either having a lesbian daughter or the older girlfriend. Mainly, the film is not about sexuality, but about the intensity of a first crush and the indelible stamp it tends to leave.

IMDb link

viewed 12/18/13 7:35 at  posted 1/24/14

Won’t Back Down (**3/4)

This starts out like Waiting for Superman, the Davis Guggenheim documentary about parents hoping to win the lottery-style drawing that will let their children get into a charter school. But Jamie (Maggie Gyllenhaal), single mom to a poorly taught third-grader, loses one such lottery, and Nona (Viola Davis), who doesn’t trust the Pittsburgh school where she teaches to educate her own son, doesn’t even get to enter. So when Jamie hears about a law that might allow her to turn the school into a charter, she enlists Nona as her natural ally. To succeed, they’ll have to get half the parents and half the teachers on board. That’s a touch of dramatic license; the small number of states that have such laws don’t include Pennsylvania, and most only require parent signatures. But requiring both gives the movie twin dramatic arcs and a window into the teachers’ perspective, and the state is actually considering such a law.

While sympathetic to teachers, this is not a movie that fans of teachers’ unions are likely to embrace. True, a couple of characters, in a couple of scenes, do praise their historical protective function — one even name-drops United Federation of Teachers founder Albert Shankar — but, it would seem, only so to make the larger point that they’ve outlived their usefulness. Yet the problem is not union bashing, although the film gilds the lily a bit — the one in this movie won’t even let teachers voluntarily stay late to help students—but rather that it’s more overfamiliar underdog story than a thoughtful critique of the educational system.

That is, it’s a lot like the crusading teacher movies (Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers), possibly with a touch of Norma Rae, ironically, about a crusading labor organizer, except that here we have a crusading mom, plus some stirring speechifying, swelling music, cheering, and late inning heartstring-tugging parent-child melodrama, which Davis totally sells, but still…. What we don’t have much of is what it actually takes to improve a school and teach difficult kids. We don’t have much insight into the things — violence, lousy parents, chaotic family arrangements—that make the job of teachers and administrators alike in tough neighborhoods difficult. This is not to say those things can’t be overcome, only that this movie makes it as simple as really really wanting to do it. To be sure, there is a plan, but we don’t get to see it. If there are no union contracts, how will it be decided what teachers will be paid? On what basis will their performance, or that of their students, be rated? How will the children actually be taught differently? And so on.

Of course, systemic obstacles to change are real, too, and the film gets about a B in terms of showing those. It does suggest that when employees, teachers in this case, are not allowed to innovate or deviate, and when they see mediocrity rewarded, it can beat them down, decreasing performance. It shows how nervous people can be at the notion of change. By making people aware of parent-trigger laws, the movie may even inspire such change. But, notwithstanding the vague basis in fact, there is too much programmatic gloss on the story, something that could not be said of director Daniel Barnz’s previous film, the far more subtle teacher-student story Phoebe in Wonderland. This is geared to make people cheer at the end, but replacing the superteacher as savior with the superparent as savior is not necessarily a hopeful message. It suggests that rescuing students in our worst schools is a herculean task, one that will need to be done one school at a time. It suggests that, in their hearts, parents really are waiting for Superman.

IMDb link

viewed 9/13/12 7:30 pm at UA Riverview [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/13/12 and 9/27/12 and 9/29/12

Jane Eyre (***1/4)

Haven’t seen the 1943 version with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as wealthy Mr. Rochester. Haven’t seen the 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version with Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt (and Anna Paquin as the younger Jane). Nor have I seen the 1970 TV movie (Susannah York, George C. Scott), nor the three different miniseries versions, nor, certainly, the multiple silent versions, or any other of the 22 versions listed on IMDB. Who knew? Haven’t read the Charlotte Brontë novel for that matter.

So I kind of lump in the Brontës with Jane Austen and English period pieces generally, which all seem to have a giant house—nay, an estate—a plucky put put-upon heroine, and a a lot of genteel, old-money folks, often contrasted with their lesser-born and/or poorer countrymen. Sure enough, Jane is a poor lass, orphaned as a pre-teen, sent away to boarding school by her aunt for being a little too plucky. The film begins with Jane at a literal crossroads—one of several striking uses of imagery by director Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), and dispenses with this part of the story (in flashback form) in a few minutes. The main plot follows Jane’s employment as a French child’s governess in, yes, a large estate, and her relationship with its genteel, wealthy, but sharp-minded owner, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). The screenplay is by Moira Buffini, whose other recent adaptation was Tamara Drewe.

It’s notable that so many of these English period pieces are proto-feminist in their way, with convention-defying heroines, yet one of the few ways to express the heroine’s independence is in her choice of man. In fact, though, Jane doesn’t even do that. She states her mind, and he makes the choice to become intrigued by her. In the title role, Mia Wasikowska conveys an incredible expressiveness with her face that shows through her character’s shell of propriety and stoicism.

Although I can’t speak to what was left out of the novel, the movie weaves a credible story line without obvious omissions or the sense of trying to cram too much into the story. The plotting is simpler than Austen, and the movie is devoid of the fancy social functions in adaptations of Austen and others. The role of society and culture is present, but not so prominent. For the most part, though, this was a drama that was what I expected it to be, mostly a good thing.

IMDB link

viewed 3/31/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/4/11

Mademoiselle Chambon (***1/4)

A married builder (Vincent Lindon) and his son’s schoolteacher (Sandrine Kiberlain, Lindon’s ex-wife) find an unexpected intimacy in this French drama. And it is intimacy, more so than passion, that is the subject. Having hired him to fix her window, she admires his craft; having completed the job, he takes a few moments to look at the artwork in her apartment. Director and cowriter Stéphane Brizé lets the camera linger while the two observe each other, often without dialogue. Some will thus find the movie slow. Others may not care for the sympathetic view of a married man who at least contemplates an affair despite, as far as we can tell, having a happy home life. But it’s exactly this subtle, sympathetic storytelling that drew me in.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed

World’s Greatest Dad (***)

There are two Robin Williamses, one the manic comic who gained fame with Mork and Mindy, and the other the Oscar-winning star of serious dramas such as Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, and One Hour Photo. I never found his zaniness all that funny, and his comedies have tended to dreck like License to Wed and Death to Smoochy. Now he’s teamed up for a comedy with writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait, another former stand-up comic I was never wild about. (I’m not one for annoying voices either.) So what do you know, this is pretty decent.

It’s a little more edgy than many films Williams has done. He’s the well-intentioned single dad to a teen (Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids) who’s truly obnoxious, and not in a snarky, Ferris Bueller sort of way, but in a creepily sex-obsessed, nobody-likes-me sort of way. Right when it seems like the movie is going to be about Williams’s milquetoast, teacher/unpublished author trying to bond with this hard-to-love boy, it turns into something else. It would be a disservice to give away the key plot point, but it gives the middle-aged man an unexpected way to achieve his literary ambitions, and the boy an unexpected, and probably undeserved, reassessment by his classmates.

From a comic drama it becomes an almost over-the-top satire of American culture at its shallowest. If you don‘t mind the change in tone and some crudeness (i.e., Dad discovering his son’s autoerotic habits), Goldthwait and Williams have created a fairly funny look at perception and self-perception.

IMDB link

viewed 8/11/09 [screening at Ritz Bourse] and reviewed 9/10/09

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (***)

Does this movie need to be reviewed? Maybe not, but anyway…. This is neither my favorite nor my least-favorite of the series, but was enjoyable enough. Steve Kloves, who authored the screenplays for all of the movies except 2007’s Order of the Phoenix, has returned, and David Yates directs his second straight entry in the series. As with the last one, a new teacher (Jim Broadbent, yet another Oscar-nominated British thespian) at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is the impetus for the main storyline. Not as obviously evil as Imelda Staunton’s character in Phoenix, Broadbent’s potions professor is nonetheless mixed up somehow with Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape; Snape is mixed up with Harry’s nemesis and fellow student, Draco Malfoy; and Malfoy is mixed up with Lord Voldemort. I already can’t exactly remember the details, but I mostly followed it as I watched, although a better memory of the other films would have helped.

Voldemort used to be called “He who must not be named,” but Harry and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) are getting too old for euphemisms. Old enough to have romantic desires, certainly, and even to feel jealous. The increasing maturity of the main characters plays naturally into the increasingly dark feel of the series, yet provides comic relief as well, notably in Ron’s having to contend with a bubbly classmate’s florid crush. While action and fantasy elements, like a luck potion and an exciting quidditch match, continue to play a part in the events, ordinary human desires create the real magic of the series. There is too much going on for the films to create the depth of characters that would make me love them, or that the J. K. Rowlings novels perhaps inspire (I’ve not read any), but there’s enough that I want to see what happens next.

IMDB link

viewed 7/17/09 at AMC Marple; reviewed 8/6/09

The Class (***3/4)

This is, and isn’t, another movie about an idealistic young teacher trying to lift up a bunch of high school kids in a tough neighborhood. Mr. Marin won’t remind you of Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds, Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Hillary Swank in Freedom Writers, and so on. Movies like that suggest that with a little tough love and a tough-but compassionate teacher, even poor kids in rough neighborhoods can all succeed. Even if we accept this as true, it’s also the case that there aren’t enough of these superhero teachers to go around. The Class, the story of a non-superhero, is based on a book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who more or less plays himself in this drama directed by Laurent Cantet (Time Out, Human Resources).

Mr. Marin will probably seem more familiar than the superheroes, even if you didn’t go to school in a poor, multi-ethnic, Paris suburb. He’s the sort of teacher you might’ve thought was a good guy when you had him, then mostly forgotten about after that. He’s a well-meaning liberal who tries harder than most of his colleagues to engage the students, but still gets tripped up from time to time, reminded by the students that no matter how hip he tries to be that he is not one of them. The students are a mixture of types and ethnicities, including Arab and African immigrants and one awkward Chinese kid. It’s a small picture of a racial and social dynamic that’s a little bit different than in the United States, but like Mr. Marin we only get part of the story. Everything that happens is entirely within the school walls, so what we see is nothing more than the teacher does. (Nor do we learn anything about the teacher’s personal life.)

Cantet takes a somewhat detached approach to his characters—the film is like a documentary—but that works well here because it highlights the process as much as the characters. That is, we see the way the teacher is fighting a thousand tiny battles to hold the attention and respect of these students, who sometimes see through his strategies, and sometimes are too busy arguing with one another to notice what he’s doing. There are no great moments of uplift, or great defeat either (although the end has the suggestion of both). Heavy plotting there is not. But this cast of amateurs still had me amused, angry at them, feeling sorry for them, identifying with their boredom, and generally riveted.

IMDB link

viewed 2/14/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/16/09

Happy-Go-Lucky (***1/2)

Screenwriters and directors like to talk about story and character arcs, the processes by which a movie takes its characters and its audience from point A to point B. But Brit Mike Leigh, who is both writer and director, has made a comedy drama that arguably has neither of these. Leigh is best known for downers such as Life Is Sweet (bittersweet, really), Secrets & Lies, and Vera Drake. (To be fair, there was also the rousing Gilbert & Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy.) But here the title—and her name—fairly describes Poppy (Sally Hawkins), its main character. She’s chipper at the start and chipper in the end. If there’s a story arc, it’s the one anchored by a series of driving lessons with a humorously bitter instructor, whose no-nonsense demeanor barely discourages her from chatting him up.

Dressed like a box of crayons, in boots, Poppy seemed ditzy at first, but she’s not. What she is is another unique creation by Leigh and actress Hawkins, who is completely believable as the sort of quirky character that can seem artificial in lesser hands, or with a lesser script. (Leigh uses improvised rehearsals to flesh out his characters.) Unlike with most of Leigh’s other films, one character is the center of attention, and Hawkins, though not beautiful, commands it with wide eyes and mouth askew. And big boots. There are a lot of other characters: Poppy’s flatmate; her sisters; her doctor; a homeless guy who shows up for ten minutes, then isn’t seen again. To the homeless guy, she offers food. To the doctor, she offers to text him where it hurts. For a while, you may wonder where it’s all going, before concluding that it doesn’t matter. It’s to the film’s credit that one of the funniest scenes also turns out to be the most touching. No, there’s not much forward movement in the story. The forward momentum comes from the way Leigh and Hawkins bit by bit reveal the layers of her character. Like the driving instructor, our reaction to her changes as the film progresses. I had the thought that Poppy’s further adventures would make a great TV series. But I’ll settle for this.

IMDB link

viewed 10/15/08 [screening at Ritz Bourse]; reviewed 10/21/08

Hamlet 2 (**3/4)

Well; the first thing about this R-rated comedy is that it’s quite silly, as silly as, say, the concept of writing a sequel to Hamlet (in which almost everyone dies). That’s what an odd Tuscon drama teacher resorts to when the school board votes to cut off funding for his program. He also finds himself with an unexpected influx of new, rowdy students to go along with the two faithful stereotypical nerdy types who came back from the year before. So everything is set up for a certain sort of underdog-triumphing-with-the-help-of-tough-but-tender-high-schoolers sort of comedy. And it is, but within that framework is some goofy, possibly amusing stuff, and a pretty fine job of wringing out all the humor by Steve Coogan, who tranforms from a nutty nebbish to just a nut. (Catherine Keener is also funny as his equally off-kilter wife.)

Flustered by the possible funding cutoff, dealing with the new students, and bad reviews of last year’s Erin Brockovich adaptation by the school’s pint-sized drama critic, the teacher pours his untalented heart into a magnum opus that promises to offend standards of both taste and decency, in which a time-traveling prince, Hillary Clinton, and a bare-chested Jesus Christ somehow come together. There’s some typical slapstick humor, like the running gag about one student who keeps getting hit in the head. But a lot of the movie is just weirdness that seemed to have different parts of the audience laughing at different bits, whether it was the group singing a ditty about being “raped in the face” or the teacher wearing a loose-fitting caftan as some sort of inspiration to the students. We never exactly find out why Jesus and the Danish prince inhabit the same play, although they both have father issues, but this, the climax of the movie, seems entertaining enough to sell the premise. The songs, including centerpiece “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” are catchy, and the men’s choir rendition of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” is genuinely lovely. Like the musical within the movie, Hamlet 2 isn’t exactly “good,” and it flags in the middle, but it may entertain if you’re not looking for anything sophisticated.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East and reviewed 9/10/08

The Happening (***)

People are going to disagree with me about this M. Night Shyamalan movie, I realize that, but I liked it. They’ll disagree because it has pretty much no ending, more pseudoscience than an astrology textbook, and precious little action. But I still marveled at Shyamalan’s ability to conjure up creepiness out of stillness and silence, out of amber Pennsylvania fields and widescreen Americana. Even the opening, a time-lapse shot of clouds moving against a darkening sky to the James Horner score, is creepy.

In the 1960s, the term “happening” gained currency as a term applied to large gatherings of people for some hip purpose. Here, something is attacking large crowds and turning them into suicidal automatons. The movie’s R rating comes from some of the gruesome ways they off themselves. As for the cause, I won’t give that away, and really, the movie doesn’t either with any degree of specificity, which is one of the things that will probably annoy a lot of people. Let’s just put it this way. Mark Wahlberg is supposed to be a science teacher at “Philadelphia High School,” and in one of the first scenes we see him telling his students that nature is something “beyond our understanding” and that reasons science posits will be “just a theory,” thereby echoing the language creationists use to disparage evolution. At this point I rolled my eyes, and not for the last time. This is a science teacher?

Yet I was enthralled by the way Shyamalan depicts the frightened people trying to figure out what is happening as they fan out from Philly to the countryside, where loonies live. (That’s the director’s apparent opinion, not mine.) Shymalan focuses primarily on the teacher and his googly-eyed wife (Zooey Deschanel), who seem to have grown apart. To Shyamalan, a continental catastrophe is worth years of $150-an-hour counseling. At least he doesn’t (overtly) suggest that it was God’s plan, which just ruined Signs for me (along with lame aliens). Think of this as Signs with an anticlimactic ending instead of a stupid one. I mean, you don’t even get to see how many people die. All that matters is whether one married couple get over their rough patch.

My suspicion that this would be a polarizing movie was confirmed by looking at the IMDB score, which confirmed a higher-than-usual percentage of both 1 and 10 ratings. I admit that the movie is dumber than Britney Spears’s last baby, but the small details and atmosphere made it work for me. Or maybe I was just glad not to be re-watching Shyamalan’s last effort, the godawful fairy tale Lady in the Water. Sometimes these things are just beyond understanding.

IMDB link

viewed 6/14/08; reviewed 6/17/08

Then She Found Me (***)

Actress Helen Hunt makes her directorial debut with this comedy-drama that ponders the meaning of family. She also stars as 39-year-old April, who during the opening credits has just married a fellow teacher (Matthew Broderick) in a small Jewish ceremony. Adopted herself, she still longs to have a kid the old-fashioned way. In short order, however, her husband leaves her, her birth mother contacts her, and the single father (Colin Firth) of one of her young students asks her out. Bette Midler shines as the mother, a walking self-help manual who hosts a local talk show in New York and whose brassy personality contradicts that of her daughter. Firth, keeping the English accent, plays the same sort of silver-tongued suitor, confident yet self-deprecating, as he seems to specialize in, though just when you think he’s too perfect, he does display some mildly rough edges.

Adapting a novel by Elinor Lipman, Hunt wrings humor and and pathos from a story that winds up, mostly, where you think it will, but takes a few interesting detours. It’s stronger in showing the characters’ personalities than in illuminating their interior lives. Just what, for example, is the hold that April’s boyish soon-to-be ex has on her, such that her reaction to his announcement that “I don’t want this life” is to immediately seduce him? Still, Hunt seems to sense the difference between heartwarming and sappy, making her new career path a welcome one.

IMDB link

viewed 4/28/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 5/2/08

Freedom Writers (***1/4)

? Written and directed by Richard LaGravenese (writer of The Bridges of Madison County, The Horse Whisperer, and Beloved) Freedom Writers dramatizes the story of real-life high school teacher Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank), whose first job is at a recently integrated school in Long Beach, California, where the student body isn’t so much diverse as Balkanized into racial identity groups.

+ I’ve seen other movies like this, but they don’t always seem genuine, and this does. One thing I liked about this was that you get a sense of the new teacher feeling her way in the job. She’s not an ex-marine like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, instantly in command. Even after she earns the respect of the students she seems a little nerdy when she tries to be hip. She gets by on sincerity, not attitude. In the most affecting moments, the students react to learning about the Holocaust, about which few had heard. This is another great role for Swank. Patrick Dempsey and Scott Glenn play her husband and father, respectively. The reactions of these strong supporting characters provide dimension to the main character.

- This is the latest in a genre that goes back to The Blackboard Jungle 50 years ago and includes more recent movies like Stand and Deliver and, most obviously, Dangerous Minds. Even movies like the dance-oriented Take the Lead incorporate the same formula of having a deeply caring, creative teacher inculcating middle-class values in a bunch of kids who seem like thugs to everyone else. There’s always a pigheaded person of authority who gets in the way and insists the kids are incorrigible. So does this movie tweak that formula? Not a lot. The reactionary authority figure is ably played by Imelda Staunton, but, true-to-life or not, she’s a cliché. Even though the movie is based largely on the writings of the students, the teacher is far and away the most significant character. The movie is largely from her view, the one with which most of the audience is likely to identify. The most developed of the student characters is a girl named Eva who’s been asked to lie in court about having seen another Mexican American commit a shooting, but you figure out quickly where that story’s going. To be fair, people go to see movies like this because teachers like Erin Gruwell seem like rarities as against many thousands of at-risk students who won’t be able to rely on getting teachers willing to chuck their social lives to show them another way.

= ***1/4 This movie has nothing new to say, but it says it well and will probably be a tearjerker for some of the audience and essentially a feel-good movie for most of it. The question it begs is, if teachers like this are so rare that they make movies about them, what hope is there for all the other kids growing up in violence-ridden neighborhoods?

IMDb link

Notes on a Scandal (***1/2)

? Judy Dench plays the character who was the narrator of Zoë Heller’s novel of the same name. A teacher of history to surly adolescents, she writes copiously in her diary, eruditely but witheringly sizing up her fellow faculty, including the new arts teacher (Cate Blanchett). Seemingly as honest about herself as others, she’s aware of her reputation as respected, but not liked, and so welcomes the friendship offered by the most recent hire. But when she discovers her married colleague’s affair with a fifteen-year-old student, she sees it as a betrayal that it had been kept secret from her.

+ This movie works as a thriller but more so as a morality play that looks at its characters more deeply than the Jerry Springer premise would suggest. The two women are very different, but both cross social boundaries and pay the consequences. The heavy dose of narration that introduces the story could have seemed tedious were it not for the crisp, tart voice that screenwriter Patrick Narber has created for her. Dench’s performance is a tour de force that slowly peels away her character’s vulnerabilities and flaws. She’s the clearest villain of the piece, but she’s a little pathetic as well, which you don’t expect at the outset. The supporting characters are also noteworthy, Blanchett of course but also Bill Nighy as her significantly older husband. This is the sort of movie where you can have a wonderful time afterward dissecting it and arguing about how blameworthy each of the women is, how society should treat adult affairs with teenagers, and so on. Narber’s best known for the play and screenplay Closer, which tackled certain similar themes relating to trust, but this is a warmer movie with a more linear plot structure and a higher emotional peak. 
- It certainly didn’t ruin it for me, but a pivotal scene near the end requires an uncharacteristic sloppiness on the part of Dench’s character that seemed more convenient than likely.

= ***1/2 I found this movie, which has earned Oscar nominations for Dench, Blanchett, Narber, and composer Philip Glass, quite riveting. It’s unusual to see a movie that so particularly examines some unsavory behavior and yet expresses human desires that everybody has in some fashion.

IMDb link

School for Scoundrels (**1/2)

? A wimpy New York traffic enforcement agent (John Heder) signs up for a crash course in manliness whose teacher is played by Billy Bob Thornton. A return to the theme of “what it means to be male” for Old School director Todd Phillips and collaborator Scot Armstrong. Jacinda Barrett (of The Last Kiss) is Heder’s would-be girlfriend. A remake of a 1960 film based on novels by Stephen Potter.

+ Why is watching Billy Bob Thornton and his teaching assistant (Michael Clark Duncan) berate a bunch of 30ish wimpy white guys funny? I’m not sure, but it probably helps that Thorton is so convincingly degenerate.

- I wasn’t as big a fan of Old School as some people, but this expends even less effort than that movie at making its silly premise believable, or making a noteworthy sociological comment that such a story actually could have. Thus this new School’s appeal rests purely on gags, and on that basis it’s somewhat wanting, lacking as many memorable set pieces of the Old sort. In some ways, it’s like a rehashed Revenge of the Nerds.

= **1/2 Of obvious appeal to Old School fans, who’ll probably like it a bit less, and Thornton fans. Best if you like your comic characters exaggerated and don’t mind a silly plot.

IMDb link

Half Nelson (**3/4)

An antidote to all the movies about heroic teachers in inner cities, this tells the story of a Brooklyn teacher (Ryan Gosling) who is himself in need of rescue. Shot in a subdued style suitable to the portrait of a junkie Gosling convincingly plays, it tells the story of the teacher and one of his eighth-grade history students, who’s also on the girls’ basketball team he coaches. The low-key approach is appealing. The classroom scenes, which show the teacher as engaged, well-liked, and liberal, lack the showiness of other teacher movies. For example, when the students read aloud they do it in the monotone typical of the way most thirteen-year-old kids would, not in a polished acting style. The filmmakers leave it to the viewer to decide what to think about a seemingly successful teacher with an illegal personal life. Even though I liked the minimalist cinematic approach, I wished the story had been edited and shaped into something that said a little more faster.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/13/07

viewed on DVD