Detroit columnist Bob Talbert once wrote, “Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.”
Of course he wasn’t talking about actual dollars, but the emotional cost of a sketchy education. He could also have been talking about the new Cameron Diaz movie, Bad Teacher, in which she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average.
Bad teachers are nothing new on the big screen.
In Animal House, Donald Sutherland played stoned-out college professor Dave Jennings. Sutherland said he has regrets about the film.
Not that he had to parade around dressed only in a shirt and effectively moon the audience, no, he bemoans that he didn’t accept a percentage of the box office as payment. “(Director John) Landis phones up and says, ‘I’m going do this movie called Animal House, and they want to give you two-and-a-half per cent of the profits.’
“And I said, ‘No way! I’ve got to have my daily salary everyday.’ So I got paid for one day’s work and threw way $2 million!”
Probably the worst teacher ever appears in Class of 1984, a trashy school drama starring Roddy MacDowell as Terry Corrigan, a fed up teacher who threatens his unruly class with a loaded gun.
Director Mark L. Lester claims the scene was based on a real event, although a follow-up sequence showing an unbalanced Corrigan attempting to run down his students was pure fiction.
Due to excessive violence the movie was banned in several countries but is of interest to Canadian audiences for a performance by Hamilton, Ont. punk band Teenage Head.
One bad movie teacher actually redeems himself. When we first meet Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) he’s prone to saying things like, “What is this fascination with truancy?” to his students, but near the end of the movie he softens and even pulls out all the stops to help his worst student, Spicoli (Sean Penn), graduate.
Ray Walston, so memorable as the uptight Mr. Hand, almost didn’t get the part, however. It was originally offered to Munster’s star Fred Gwynne who declined over objections to the film’s sexual content.
The road trip is part of the American psyche dating back to the young men (and women) who took Horace Greeley’s famous advice—“Go west young man!”—to heart and left the east for the frontier. Hollywood saw the allure early on, recognizing that road movies offer opportunities to inject exciting secondary characters and interesting scenery into stories each time the leads stop in a new town. Add to that the sexy appeal of two people running for their lives and you have a new genre—the fugitive couple movie.
Whether it is the doomed Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney on the lam in 1937s You Only Live Once or Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz’s worldwide trek in this weekend’s Knight and Day, the idea of runaways on the open road has been irresistible to filmmakers.
On early fugitive road movie is Persons in Hiding, a nasty 1939 film based on J. Edgar Hoover’s best-selling book of the same name. J. Carrol Naish stars as a small-time hood on the run with Dorothy Bronson (Patricia Morison). Together they rob banks and even kidnap a hapless stranger all to appease Ms. Bronson appetite for champagne and furs. Of course, this being based on Hoover’s book, the pair isn’t mythologized à la Bonnie and Clyde. No, the heroes here are the FBI who use their “infallible” methods to bring the couple to justice.
Better known is The Getaway, Sam Peckinpah’s violent love letter to criminal behavior. Based on a 1959 pulp novel by Jim Thompson, it stars Steve McQueen as a cocky safecracker who hits the road with Ali MacGraw following a botched holdup. Panned on its original release—Roger Ebert called it “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy”—it was a box office success, partly because of the ruckus the tabloids made when MacGraw left her husband, producer Robert Evans, for McQueen during production.
More recently crime and scandal were at the heart of Natural Born Killers, a satire of media sensationalism and America’s love affair with violence. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play married murderers—“the best thing to happen to mass murder since Manson”—on a cross country killing spree. Named the 8th most controversial movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly it earned mixed reviews—Movieline called it “mindless” while Peter Travers named it “one of my all time favorite movies.”—and may be the wildest fugitive couple movie ever made.
I had a couple of questions after seeing “The Box,” a new existential thriller starring Cameron Diaz.
First: What the hell was that?
Second: Is it possible for a once promising director to completely forget how to make a movie?
Here’s the scoop. Diaz and James Marsden play Norma and Arthur Lewis. They’re a regular family; he wants to be an astronaut, she’s a teacher specializing in existential literature who lost four toes in a horrible X-Ray incident. One day, early in the morning, a mysterious box is delivered to their door. Inside the box is a device that looks like the “Deal or No Deal” buzzer along with a note that reads “Mr. Steward will call on you at 5 pm.” At precisely five the doorbell rings and the bringer of the box, Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) is at the door. He’s a nattily dressed charmer, but there’s something strange about him. For starters he has a facial disfigurement that makes Harvey “Two-Face” Dent look like a Fabio. But there’s more. He calmly explains that she has twenty-four hours to make a decision. If she presses the button she’ll be given one million tax free dollars. There’s a hitch though. Someone, somewhere will die. If she doesn’t press the button he’ll return in one day, collect the box and that will be that. From that point on it is a story of buttons, bloody noses and prosthetic feet. Oh yeah, it’s also about choices and consequences.
“The Box” wants to be a deep multi-layered horror fantasy about the human condition, the afterlife and fate but bites off more than it can chew. The button test is meant to reveal not only the essence of human nature but apparently, the very heart of what it is to be human, or something like that. I’m not exactly sure because by the time we got to that point in the story I was already thinking about what I wanted for lunch the next day. No thrills, no chills, just bored sighs.
Cameron Diaz’s performance made me long for the days when she danced in her underwear in the first reel of all of her movies and Frank Langella is clearly slumming it for a paycheque here but “Donnie Darko” director Richard Kelly is the real problem. It’s looking more and more like “Darko,” the stylish sci fi mystery that rightfully earned Kelly a cult following, was a fluke. “The Box” is so painfully dull, so silly and overwrought it’s as if there was no director.
Like the movie suggests, there are consequences for every action. I wonder what the consequences will be for making a movie as bad as “The Box.”
In the new Cameron Diaz movie, “Bad Teacher,” she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average.
Diaz will never be the funny, fresh face she was in “There’s Something About Mary” and “The Mask,” and in “Bad Teacher” that’s a good thing. The very slight patina of age and experience in her manner adds some extra desperation to Elizabeth, who is pretty on the outside but ugly underneath.
It’s a daring character to build a comedy around, and luckily, as good as Diaz is, she is leading a well cast ensemble. English actress Lucy Punch (last seen over here in the Woody Allen film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) brings some off kilter energy to Amy, a tightly wound teacher uses cute sayings,–like “I have weapons of math destruction.”—to teach her class. Also strong are “The Office’s” Phyllis Smith, Justin Timberlake, who performs the year’s most uncomfortable sex scene, and Thomas Lennon, but the movie’s heart and soul belong to Jason Segal who brings a easy humor and a great deal of charm to the role of gym teacher Russell. His warmth is a nice, and needed counterbalance to Diaz’s caustic gold digger.
The supporting cast don’t exactly rescue this movie–it doesn’t need rescuing–but without them “Bad Teacher” wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. “Bridesmaids” is still the funniest movie of the summer, but it is heartening to see another female lead comedy score so well.
