The School of Rock (2003)
Directed by Richard Linklater
Fired from his band and hard up for cash, guitarist and vocalist Dewey Finn finagles his way into a job as a fifth-grade substitute teacher at a private school, where he secretly begins teaching his straight-A students the finer points of rock 'n' roll and the power of sticking it to the man. But as the school’s stern principal closes in and the Battle of the Bands looms, Dewey must risk everything to prove that rock 'n' roll can change lives.
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Among other things, this music-based comedy borrows from such diverse cinematic sources as "Dead Poet's Society," "Fame," "The Bad News Bears" and "Catch Me If You Can."
White’s script holds few surprises – it is at its core The Bad News Bears with musical instruments, with Jack Black as Walter Matthau – but that doesn’t dilute or render the film’s wonderful momentum one iota.
Richard Linklater, director of "Slacker" and "Before Sunrise," is not a filmmaker you'd expect to be making a studio movie that sounds, on paper, as formulaic as "The Bad News Bears."
It's not just that our hero, Black's quack supply teacher Dewey Finn, is to all purposes a headbanging jackass who can't even spell his claimed name ('Schneebly'); nor that his tutoring style has all the selfless delicacy of Brian Glover's football refereeing in Kes.
This is a barnstorming performance, as wry as Bill Murray's in Meatballs (1979), but without the protective irony: He knows he's reaching out to a panoply of younger, awkward selves.
But there are rare formula pictures—the bicycle movie Breaking Away (1979) was another—that seem to be arriving at the formula from the inside, with a kind of naive hopefulness that seems as much a product of movie-love as it is of a desire to reach a mass audience.
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It plays even more like a bent version of Meredith Willson's The Music Man for the new millennium.
With a plot reminiscent of eye-rollers like Dangerous Minds and Music of the Heart, this is the most conventional movie of Linklater's eclectic career.
It's Sister Act meets Dangerous Minds, with the most galling qualities of both in bas-relief.
In the "Dangerous Minds" and "Wildcats" world of filmmaking, screwed-up kids haze shell-shocked teachers, who think about quitting before gutting out the job and earning trust.
The mix of those ingredients yields a disarmingly high-concept cocktail: think of it as Zero for Conduct by way of Tenacious D.
Films like Zero for Conduct, If . . .
She's as funny as she was in "In & Out" and her reaction to Black's arm-flapping rendition of "Edge of Seventeen" ("Just like a white-winged dove ...") is priceless.
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This is still a conventional movie that's not particularly deep or daring, with some underwritten supporting characters like Joan Cusack's strict principal who "used to be funny" (just like Cusack's character in "Say Anything") or Sarah Silverman's nagging girlfriend-from-hell, but these are nitpicks for what is by far the funniest film I've seen all year.
There is, for instance, an uptight school principal (Joan Cusack) who must eventually loosen up and appreciate the band Dewey forms with the kids; but Joan Cusack plays her as an update of her harried mom in Say Anything, of whom Lloyd Dobler said "You used to be warped and twisted and hilarious."
A cathartic class comedy for kids of all sizes, it's Bugsy Malone in rock pomp, Slacker meets Spy Kids.