Jake Kasdan
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Speaking of movie teachers, Liz gladly cedes her job to a string of them, starting with Edward James Olmos (“Stand and Deliver”) and Morgan Freeman (“Lean on Me”).
She likes to nap at her desk while letting her students watch classroom related movies like "Stand and Deliver."
Class with her consists of playing DVDs of goodish Hollywood movies like “Stand and Deliver,’’ “Lean on Me,’’ and “Dangerous Minds,’’ movies about brown kids fighting to subsist in bad situations, while she texts or drinks or sleeps.
Staggering into the classroom nursing hangover after hangover, "educating" her students with an array of school-themed movies on DVD that begin with " Stand and Deliver " and devolve to " Scream ," she's a classroom disaster, and her colleagues make a very complementary array of foils.
We’ve seen that in movies like “Stand And Deliver” and “Lean On Me” – movies she plays in class rather than teaching – and “Bad Teacher” is here to puncture those clichés.
It's cute that Elizabeth initially shows up to class each day and pops on a movie?subject-appropriate titles like "Stand and Deliver" and "Dangerous Minds" eventually segue to " Scream "?but her drunken, hung-over histrionics never comfortably coalesce with what she is like otherwise.
Bad Santa (2003)
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
influenced Bad Teacher (2011), Sex Tape (2014)
Themes Plot
Segel and Diaz have reunited here with director Jake Kasdan, who all worked together on Bad Teacher, which was itself a Bad Santa ripoff set in middle school.
Segel, Diaz, and director Jake Kasdan teamed up a few years ago on Bad Teacher, a Bad Santa derivative with an appealing raunchiness, and Segel and his frequent writing/directing partner, Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors ), co-wrote the script with Kate Angelo.
Inevitable comparisons can be drawn with Terry Zwigoff's 2003 movie "Bad Santa."
Taking the "Bad Santa" skew to the classroom, Cameron Diaz is the "Bad Teacher" of the title, a rotten apple of an educator if ever there was one.
The bulk of Bad Teacher isn't so subversive – Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg's script is basically Bad Santa's public-school analog – but it is consistently funny.
The game plan of “ Bad Teacher ” is quite simple – create a middle school variant on “ Bad Santa .”
In this case, it’s Cameron Diaz as Elizabeth Halsey, a middle-school teacher who doesn’t bother to learn her kids names and spends class time showing them movies about teachers (“Stand and Deliver,” “Lean on Me”) and guzzling from airline-size bottles of liquor she keeps hidden in a false bottom of a desk drawer.
Speaking of movie teachers, Liz gladly cedes her job to a string of them, starting with Edward James Olmos (“Stand and Deliver”) and Morgan Freeman (“Lean on Me”).
As for actually teaching students, it’s enough to pop “Stand and Deliver” or “Lean on Me” into the DVD player before she succumbs to the crippling hangover she habitually wakes up with.
Class with her consists of playing DVDs of goodish Hollywood movies like “Stand and Deliver,’’ “Lean on Me,’’ and “Dangerous Minds,’’ movies about brown kids fighting to subsist in bad situations, while she texts or drinks or sleeps.
“Lean on Me”? “Dangerous Minds”?
“Dangerous Minds,” “Stand and Deliver,” “Lean on Me” — movies about heroic teachers changing students’ lives, and all movies shown in Miss Elizabeth Halsey’s seventh grade English class at John Adams Middle School.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Plot
Everything else is a proficient retread of what we saw before, with newcomer Awkwafina adding a little spice and director Jake Kasdan ( Bad Teacher ) again doing a fine job channelling his inner Indiana Jones (his father, Lawrence Kasdan co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark , as well as The Empire Strikes Back ).
There are elements borrowed from “Mad Max,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
So is the title retro video game, ready to suck our heroes back into another magical adventure, this time one that resembles “Raiders of the Lost Ark” crossed with “Game of Thrones.”
Look, I cut my cinematic teeth on Raiders of the Lost Ark, to which these movies owe an immense debt even as they utterly fail to capture any of those Indiana Jones thrills.
Kasdan is the son of writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, whose writing credits include “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Add your own wisecrack.
It plays into almost every trope that parodies like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story satirize without an iota of self-awareness, coming across as high-budget condescension geared towards playing the hits for doe-eyed fans stuck in the 80s.
Walk Hard lampooned it nearly 20 years ago (“Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays!”) but the music biopic limped on at its most formulaic…
Completely inured to Walk Hard‘s critiques, Michael indeed begins with MJ thinking about his entire life before he plays, waiting to go onstage to promote the release of 1987’s Bad and thinking back to his childhood in Gary, Indiana.
I used to believe that Walk Hard, Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow’s pitch-perfect parody of movies like Ray and Walk the Line, should have killed the conventional musical biopic.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Directed by David Lean
influenced Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Visuals Music
Visually speaking, the cinematography of the sand dunes echo that of Lawrence of Arabia .
Kasdan also makes clear that he's not taking any of this too seriously, and little asides -- like a riff on the "Lawrence of Arabia" theme during a desert sequence -- underscore that point.
Yet for the most part the set pieces (which include giant ostriches chasing dune buggies and airborne encounters with snarling monkeys) have an enjoyable grandeur, emphasised by Henry Jackman’s score, which cheekily invokes Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia theme during an early desert sequence.
Grumpy Old Men (1993)
Directed by Donald Petrie
influenced Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Themes Plot Dialogue
It’s no longer just the teenagers learning life lessons anymore; now an elderly duo, sporting a “Grumpy Old Men” vibe (along with themes from “City Slickers”), takes over half of the show.
The all-ages spread stretches its predecessor's nostalgic, Breakfast Club -style premise to accommodate Grumpy Old Men -like routines: cue jokes about hips and hairlines.
This sequel swaps The Breakfast Club out for Grumpy Old Men , which doesn’t work as well, especially when the movie tries to do both at the same time.
We’re barely given time with them before they get sucked into the game, and their Grumpy Old Men -style dialogue gets old quickly, especially because we all know how their storyline is going to develop before it even starts.
Surprisingly, chuckles do come from choice bits of parental nerdiness; one stupefied neighbor, hearing of their three-hour sex bout, compares it to the movie Lincoln.
They decide (and yes, this is, for some reason, a fairly significant plot point) to use the "Joy of Sex" as an inspiration, going through every single sexual position in the four-decade-old sex manual, which gives their sex tape a real awards season-scope (one characters jokes that, at 3 hours, it's longer than "Lincoln.").
Here's one anyway: It's about Annie (Cameron Diaz) and Jay (Segel), the people who made said home movie—a three-hour epic that their pal Robby (Rob Corddry) says is as long as "Lincoln"—and how unintentionally posting it to the cloud nearly becomes social and professional suicide.
As best friend Robby (Rob Corddry) points out, that's the length of the movie "Lincoln".
Of all the movies to follow the Bad formula — a collection that includes Bad Grandpa, Bad Teacher, Bad Santa, and that has somehow retroactively enveloped Abel Ferrara’s not-like-the-others 1992 Bad Lieutenant — Bad Moms clearly features the lowest standards for what constitutes misbehavior.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- In the tradition of similarly named movies -- "Bad Teacher," "Bad Bosses" and even "Bad Santa" -- comes the Mila Kunis comedy project "Bad Moms."
Bad Santa, Bad Teacher, Bad Grandpa (Dirty Grandpa), Bad Lieutenant, Bad Boys, Bad Girls, Badlands, Superbad, Very Bad Things — etc.
Of course, it’s been shown that when a movie has “bad” in the title and features a true celebration of bad behavior (“Bad Santa,” “Bad Teacher”), it may just have a commercial edge.
But in the pantheon of “Bad” movies—“ Bad Santa ,” “ Bad Teacher ,” “Bad Grandpa”—this one’s actually pretty good.
Five years after Jake Kasdan’s Bad Teacher found easy jokes in the then-taboo sight of middle-school teacher Cameron Diaz showing up to work hung over and mocking her students, the pocket genre of films and TV shows about women in positions of authority shirking their responsibilities (“Bad Judge,” anyone?) seems to have hit a peak.
It’s no longer just the teenagers learning life lessons anymore; now an elderly duo, sporting a “Grumpy Old Men” vibe (along with themes from “City Slickers”), takes over half of the show.
"Sex Tape" sets itself up as a zany, "up-all-night" comedy-adventure in the tradition of 1987's endlessly entertaining "Adventures in Babysitting" and 2010's smartly funny, romantically resonant " Date Night ," but then does surprisingly little with its premise.
If the narrative had been positioned in a slightly different way, it could have resembled something like "After Hours" or maybe "Adventures in Babysitting" – a seemingly impossible scenario, stretched out across an endless night, with increasing levels of danger or unpredictability.
It's a valiant effort, and there is something, though very little, of Cary Grant's scampering in "Bringing Up Baby" to Segel's mishaps around the CEO's mansion.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Directed by John Hughes
influenced Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Characters Plot
While the scale of its success might have been a little unexpected — apparently it is the highest-grossing domestic release in Sony Pictures history, a fact I find to be hilarious — those of us who watched that trailer before every other movie for months foresaw that the concept was a winning one: Watch a quartet of cliché high schoolers straight out of The Breakfast Club (the Nerd, the Jock, the Outcast, the Debutante) get turned into the Rock, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, and Jack Black!
This sequel swaps The Breakfast Club out for Grumpy Old Men , which doesn’t work as well, especially when the movie tries to do both at the same time.
It was like “The Breakfast Club” with a 21st-century twist, where the nerd becomes Dwayne Johnson’s brawny hero, the popular girl winds up stuck in Jack Black’s body, and so on.
In a scene lifted from “Cool Hand Luke,” she also washes cars in a pair of mini-shorts, under the eyes of salivating males, yet she fails to win the love of the new teacher, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake), who prefers Miss Squirrel.
Everything else is a proficient retread of what we saw before, with newcomer Awkwafina adding a little spice and director Jake Kasdan ( Bad Teacher ) again doing a fine job channelling his inner Indiana Jones (his father, Lawrence Kasdan co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark , as well as The Empire Strikes Back ).
“Sex Tape” was directed by Jake Kasdan (son of “Big Chill” and “Body Heat” director Lawrence Kasdan) and its screenplay is credited to Segel, Kate Angelo and Nicholas Stoller, all purportedly adult native speakers of English.
Bad Teacher director (and son of Star Wars legend Lawrence Kasdan) Jake Kasdan gives us the basic story of the sinister board game that traps its players in a nightmarish jungle world, but aside from a brief nod to the late Robin Williams, a new and unwitting viewer need have no idea that Hollywood is raiding the '90s classics cupboard again.
Remember when everyone wondered why on earth Universal would let Chazz from Airheads front a remake of a horror classic, and we ended up with Brendan Fraser's wild-ride take on The Mummy?
While there is the hint of a better, more ruthless movie lurking here (Gus Van Sant�s To Die For would be an excellent role model) what Bad Teacher delivers is still satisfyingly snarky.
Yes, Miss Halsey is the anti-Louanne Johnson, that inner city teacher-crusader played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the insufferable “Dangerous Minds.”