Reviews

After reading a number of good notices, I looked forward to this documentary. I was extremely disappointed since it superficially reviewed the flawed education system. I realize that the focus of the film was human interest in describing the lives of children affected by the flawed education system, but this did not make the film consistently interesting as there was little context to understand why the system is failing.

As a side note: Any unions first interest is its members and the teachers unions do that. The scene at the national convention displays the hypocrisy, "the union represents the interests of children".

What is important about the failure of education is the internal politics, the external politics, and misguided exercises use education to solve other problems in today's society. Too bad that the film did not explore how this aspect of education has failed our children.

The film with its excellent leads puts its finger on the pulse of the American dream. The subject is the selling of success to would be musicians, but it reflects all aspects of the truly American confidence game. Pat Healy as Martin and Kene Holliday as Clarence are hired as a team to scout for undiscovered talent for an independent recording label, which is interested in the next big thing. Since "skin in the game" is a mark of seriousness, then the aspiring musicians should be willing to put up some cash to hedge the risks of the recording company: a perfectly reasonable request. The two leads play off each other to create a metaphor of the American dichotomy: liberal secular humanism vs. conservative unbridled capitalism. Certainly a film worth seeing.

In watching this film, and other recent films, it occurs to me that film making is returning to the era of silent films. By this I mean that scenes with minimal dialog or no dialog are becoming more common. This is not bad in itself since this is film and not a novel; however, in silent films the scenes advance the plot--in this film they do not. The silent scenes are poses that neither advance the plot nor shed insight into the characters. Poses, no matter how well shot, do not comprise a scene.

For the film to hold together, character motivations are important. This is really what is missing in this film. There was no reason presented for Briony to behave as she did, envy comes to mind but clearly this is not her motive. The original setting was 1936 upper class England, so the dialog among the children did not fit the times, which makes the transparent motive, the child's overwrought imagination, suspect.

Since I have not read the novel I can not comment on whether the characters and motivations were more clearly defined. But the film is a failure in both plot and character development.