|
Thank God there is HOME SCHOOLING for kids that can't take that kind of schooling and for dedicated parents who see the need to stay home and teach their own children with the Bible and all the schooling they need to enter Higher Learning.
Hilary Swank is pretty good anyway, butwith an Arena Football 1 connection inhere, I had to give it @ least threestars. Any mention of the sport in thepopular culture is worth picking up on.Signed, An Arena Football Original,Rich Salzer, Chicago and Miami
The story is very predictable but who cares, Hillary Swank is on top of her game as a young naive teacher in an inner-city school in LA. She bucks the system and realizes that failure is not an option.She reaches out to the children by having the read "The Diary Of Anne Frank" which shows her kids that they are not alone on feeling like they are victims in an unforgiving world.You will need a box of kleenex to get through this movie and even though his role is very small, Scott Glenn shines through as Hilary's father who stands behind his daughter and realizes that he too has much to learn from her students.This movie will make a great stocking stuffer. Without trying to sound like Roger Ebert, I am going to keep this review simple. She has the forgotten children, warehouse them and hope they drop out before senior year.
In the Californian article, you are aware that Hillary is playing a role, competently enough, but playing nevertheless, when all is done and dusted. Put simply, in the superior French cinematic experience you don't feel the seperation between actor and audience. In this sense, the movie is condescending to whatever audience it has in mind. Place this next to,The Class, a Parisian film with a teacher of literacy with students of not dissimilar disadvantages and issues of racial vilification, and you'll understand that the whole tone of the American product is pitched with a radically varying perspective. Though you might shed the occasional tear for the young student's moments of self-realisation, and feel compassion for the Freedom Writers, there is none of the realism and cathartic whack delivered by its French counterpart. Its stylistic pitch is in search of a populist market and consequently reveals the difference between adulthood and adolescence.
Dropped into the free-fire zone of a school torn by violence and racial tension, teacher Erin Gruwell battles an uncaring system in a fight to make the classroom matter in her students' lives. Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank stars in this gripping story of inner-city kids raised on drive-by shootings and hard-core attitude-and the teacher who gives them the one thing they need most: a voice of their own. With electrifying from its all-star cast, including Golden Globe Award Winner Patrick Dempsey (Grey's Anatomy)and recording star Mario, FREEDOM WRITERS is based on the acclaimed best-seller, THE FREEDOM WRITER DIARY. Of this movie "Who Magazine" says, "The scripting and performances are taut and intense". Again, about this movie, "Moviehole" states, "A masterful achievement that engages the mind and touches the heart". Now, telling their own stories, and hearing the stories of others, a group of supposedly "unteachable" teens will discover the power of tolerance, reclaim their shattered lives and change their world.
|
