Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Enjoy the trip into the ugliness of a godless world entirely dedicated to the paycheck and the health coverage, in one word, the world in which there are no trump cards anymore, where the pawns you are have the obligation to navigate on a chessboard that has lost its white and black squares. We are living in a de-structured world and we believe life is a miracle in a universe of violence and death. The real miracle is that we are still here to watch such films because their logic is that the world should have been terminated long ago by its own intestine melt-down.The film is not about the school system nor the teaching profession; It is about human relations and empathy or antagonism in a mixed community, and a high school is the acme of such a mixed environment. The teachers are just pawns on the chessboard of educational politics and eventually policies. The school system is managed by people who have been teachers less and less and are politicians more and more. To bring together in New York City or in Los Angeles half a dozen or more ethnic groups, religions and other diversity like sexual orientation is like a daily miracle that can never find its balance, its equilibrium, its perfection. Do not believe it is the fact of all the students. It only takes one to three to transform a class and even a school into a real hell for students, teachers and everyone else. And what's more, they double up their systematic aggressive disruption with the menace of civil lawsuits for the negation of or infringement on their civil rights of any sorts. The film only shows boys in that bullying disruptive game, but do not believe girls are different. They just use different tools and attitudes and particularly their sex appeal as a disruptive commerce on their skin.Here a black teacher is left for dead, but he will survive, in a New York City school due to an aggression from a transferred delinquent from another school to this particular school. He moves to California and Los Angeles and becomes a substitute teacher for the greater part of a year. But the same situation and conflict will develop and it becomes a real open war between that teacher and the band of delinquent students who want to destroy him from the start. They are of Latino origin but hate the Blacks, the Chicanos, and the whites alike. If there were some Asians, they would hate them too. What can a teacher do in such a situation?Not much and the film shows there is no end but death. It is reduced at the end to the confrontation of the said teacher, Trevor Garfield, with one Latino student who has decided to come with two acolytes and shoot the teacher, but they have to show off to appear like manly masculine men, that they are not in fact. In that final scene the teacher will manage to challenge the boy in his masculinity and strangely enough, he will win.But there is something wrong in this situation. It exposes the ugliness of politicized high school management, and yet the eulogy to this teacher will be delivered by the Chicana girl he had helped because she was appointed Valedictorian speaker for graduation day. But we do not know who took the decision, and if it is a victory for the teachers or the students over the over-politicized management of the school. It implies there was somewhere some kind of a possible negotiating in-between body that could and should have filtered the conflict to solve it before its final and lethal end. That's what is missing in this film. The teacher is alone in front of openly criminal, aggressive and provocative individuals that could and should be isolated and negotiated officially by some neutral group in the school. The film shows racism and sexism as being absolutely unavoidable, impossible to mediate or moderate. And that is not true.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Robert J. Maxwell This story about a teacher challenged in a school full of dangerous and bored delinquents is set in Los Angeles, which is fast becoming for urban misery what New York was twenty years ago. See L.A. and die. Except that in this movie's panoramic views, you can't quite see the city because it's encased in a smog that approximates the true color of nitrogen dioxide. If L.A. were a duck, it would be duck a l'orange.I didn't expect much from this sort of tale. It's been done many times before. The teacher who is devoted to his job, the sexy colleague, the rude and foul-mouthed students, with one or two good ones sprinkled among them. The constant challenges, the humiliations, the keyed car, the gangs, the girl with the crush, the embittered colleagues who see their charges as beyond salvage. Watching all this familiar stuff play out on the screen is actually reassuring, comforting. It's like going to mass as a child, knowing exactly what rituals to expect. Here come the censer.I suppose the original, "Blackboard Jungle," back in the 50s, provided the framework that has now turned all but inescapable. High school movies that don't have the threat of violence are kind of dull, "Up The Down Staircase." The central problem for most of these school movies about deprived and depraved students is, "How can I reach them?" This one is different, though, and it kept me engaged throughout because the question here is, "CAN I reach them?" The answer is yes, but not without a price. Jackson's victory is Pyrrhic. It wasn't worth the price.The direction is perfectly ordinary and without distinction. The script at time stumbles all over the place, like one of those Chicano kids on tequila. At the climax, it drops dead with a speech.Jackson is a wounded saint, having been stabbed in the back in a Brooklyn school before moving to L.A. He never loses his temper, no matter whether provoked by some teen-aged moron, betrayed by his principal, or accused of murder by the blond colleague who has previously groveled at his feet and practically denuded herself in his presence.The blond, Kelly Rowan, is almost perfect in the part, though it's overwritten like all the others. She's not quite Hollywood pretty and she's at the age of near desperation. There have been a couple of truly fine black actors since Sidney Poitier and Samuel L. Jackson is among them. He's a magnetic presence. And his range as an actor is expansive. He can be a thoroughly believable savvy street gangsta, as in "Jackie Brown," or a straight teacher with glasses, as he is here. Morgan Freeman is able to do the same thing, but his age now restricts the variety of his roles. He can't be the perspicacious pimp who kicks a client in the balls anymore, as he did in "Street Smart." Now he's got to be Jung's "wise old man." I won't give away the ending because (1) it's silly and (2) it's unexpected.

Marc Davis OK, so this is not going to be Lean on Me with Morgan Freeman or even Dangerous Minds released just a year earlier. It's much darker and I have no problem with a film not following a conventional plot, in fact, I encourage it. But what should have ended as a halfway thought-provoking film fails miserably with a script and dialogue so paper thin you could shred it and horrible acting throughout from just about everyone except Samuel Jackson and John Heard. Also, for a drama film based on reality, there are some unbelievable circumstances throughout. For example, if a teacher was to appear in court as a material witness against a student who committed a crime, do you really think public school administrators would allow the student and teacher to stay at the same school, more less the same dang class?! And yet the principal of the school is always overly sensitive to the possibility that any student-teacher conflict could cause a lawsuit. Yet nobody thought to advise him on how bad of an idea that was? Someone tell me the logic in this.Anyway, the ending will leave you scratching your head while your jaw is still hanging throughout the long ending. You'll be thinking "What just happened?" Was there a lesson learned? Did this ending (or film) have a point; a story to tell? Yes, it does. The story is: There is a reason why this film has been forgotten while great films like Dangerous Minds and Lean on Me have not. Spare yourself the misery.

kai ringler what a powerhouse of a movie,, this one really rocks you to the core, especially if you have kids in high school. A dedicated High School Science Teacher get's brutally assaulted in New York,, 15 months later he moves on to L.A. and decides to give it another try to teach again,, and again he falls into teaching in the ghetto, he doesn't even get to be in a classroom with air conditioning,, he get's a trashy dump bungalow, there he meets a couple of teachers who are on his side,, one he get's involved with romantically and tries to help,, the other turns out to be a gun loving psycho. there are many cliques in this movie, unfortunately most of them are true in today's world. this is one of those movies where i think that you can take away from it that you learned something from it useful,