Sunday, May 19, 2013

Movie Review + Trailer: The English Teacher - AARP

Enter Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano of Almost Famous and Haywire), some years earlier a brilliant student of Sinclair's who has returned home to small-town Pennsylvania after supposedly failing as a playwright in New York City. Sinclair reads Sherwood's play, a dark family drama called The Chrysalis, and falls in love with it. (Start counting the minutes until the transference occurs.) She shares the manuscript with her colleague, drama teacher Carl Kapinas (more than once a joke is made about the pronunciation of his last name), played by the overly fey Nathan Lane.

Sinclair and Kapinas then join forces to convince their principal and vice principal (the very physically humorous Jessica Hecht of Sideways, and Norbert Leo Butz, who appeared recently in Disconnect) to allow them to make The Chrysalis into the next student theatrical production. Unbeknownst to Sherwood, who already is reluctant about the proposition, Sinclair and Kapinas agree to alter the play's violent ending on the ultimatum of their superiors.

My biggest problem (and there were several) with the film is that what we see of the play ? the supposed work of a genius student ? is utterly preposterous. A complete bomb! Couldn't the filmmaker come up with something better than nonsensical melodrama?

Meanwhile, I sort of enjoyed the main subplot, during which Sinclair enters into a sparring feud with Sherwood's dad, a physician played by the affable Greg Kinnear. Sinclair's got it in her mind that Dr. Sherwood is the model for the abusive father character in his son's play, and that now he's quashing Jason's creativity and forcing him to go to law school. As we all know, appearances are deceiving, and Moore and Kinnear actually create a sizzling on-screen chemistry.

Source: http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/movies-for-grownups/info-05-2013/the-english-teacher-movie-review.html

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