Bad Teacher (2011)
Directed by Jake Kasdan
A lazy, incompetent middle school teacher who hates her job and her students is forced to return to her job to make enough money for a boob job after her rich fiancé dumps her.
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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.
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 .”
Both Bad Santa and the Bad Lieutenants (Keitel and Cage) were really bad, but they were entertaining.
"Bad Teacher" immediately brings " Bad Santa " to mind and suffers by the comparison.
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.
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.
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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.”
Diaz, who made a stunning feature debut in “The Mask” (1994) opposite Jim Carrey and went on to score again in the modern comedy classic “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), is Elizabeth Halsey, a very bad, blond bombshell and Chicago-area middle-school teacher who is more than happy to say goodbye to her underpaying job to marry her rich fiance.
The sexy, fresh image of her entering the bank where Jim Carrey works in her screen debut in The Mask, and her inconspicuously spiked hairdo in There’s Something About Mary.
(Consider her in The Mask, There's Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich , Charlie's Angels , In Her Shoes , etc.) What is Miss Halsey even doing there?
In "The Mask," her debut, she just seemed surprised to be on a film set and somewhat delighted by the whole thing.
If you’ve never seen Bad News Bears, Bad Santa, or one of a dozen other better movies about adults being mean to kids with the word “Bad” in the title, maybe you’ll think this is the funniest thing since Adam Sandler pissed his pants on a field trip.
Wielding its title like a blunt instrument, Bad Teacher plainly evokes The Bad News Bears and Bad Santa, two other black comedies about profane, selfish, ill-mannered cranks who work with children but lack the ability (or the interest) to censor themselves in their presence.
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I still recall the wrath with which I simmered through “Dead Poets Society,” “Dangerous Minds,” and—heaven preserve us—“Mr.
“Bad Teacher” starring Cameron Diaz is a lot like “School of Rock” with Jack Black ‒ only minus the humor, the heart, the bitchin’ rock ’n roll soundtrack.
Jake Kasdan ’s “Bad Teacher,” written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg , has its lewd funniness, though not often enough to make it worthy of not only “Bad Santa” but, more to the point, “ School of Rock .”
So it ends up trapped in a nowhere middle-ground, somewhere between Bad Santa and the equally hilarious but family friendly Jack Black movie School of Rock.
If you're looking for a funny comedy about a cynical, hard-partying school teacher transformed by his students into a paragon of pedagogical awesomeness, skip Bad Teacher and go rent School of Rock instead.
Given its most obvious predecessors — the aforementioned Bad movies, plus the much more family-friendly School Of Rock — its brand of slacker irreverence seems a little stale at times, particularly when it confuses shock value for comic value.
“Bad Teacher” starring Cameron Diaz is a lot like “School of Rock” with Jack Black ?