: Bad Teacher
I wasn’t very interested in this when it came out, but caught it on a free HBO preview and was surprised by how much I liked it. The impression I’d had was that it was just dumb, full of rude potty jokes with a “bad” teacher who was an idiot. But she’s not stupid: she’s just scheming and lazy and self-centered. She was actually quite intelligent, going to some impressive extremes to get her way.
Basically she’s a pretty girl looking for a rich man to snag. The teaching job is just temporary so she doesn’t take it seriously. When her fiancé realizes she’s just there for his money and dumps her, suddenly her job is all she has. She ends up with a quirky rival who’s trying to out her as a bad teacher, while she’s trying to cheat and skate by showing her students movies every day and sleeping and doing drugs and booze.
She’s really a horrible person who’s only nice when she needs something from another, yet as the film goes on she slowly changes into a better person. I was impressed by how this character change was handled. It’s not an easy to think to pull off realistically, and when the key to the movie’s humor is her badness, you can’t have her be an angel or change overnight.
Usually dark comedies like this are uneven (think bad santa), but this one was consistent and worked pretty well. It’s a little slow on occasion and some of the humor misses (some of the supporting characters are too weird and don’t completely work), but the movie’s far better than I expected. Yeah, it’s definitely raunchy and crude, sometimes unnecessarily, but there is humor in the concept, and I liked that not all of the comedy comes from a teacher using the f-word or smoking pot. It’s actually a surprisingly smart film with a clever plot and a satisfying ending.
Topic: [/movie] |
