FILM REVIEWS - Miscellaneous - http://maxpages.com/aeazine2/ISSUE_11_FILM_REVIEWS

The Perfect Score (2004)
Directed by Brian Robbins
MTV Films

In 1999 Paramount Pictures and MTV Films helmed a scathing satire on the educational system in Alexander Payne's "Election," a parable of corrupt teachers, corrupt students who become corrupt politicians and a sea of students who simply drift through their formative education as indifferently as after graduation. Five years later, if you are not Tracy Flick, drifting through life indifferently won't get you far regardless of how much or how little the educational system is fulfilling the responsibility of preparing the young for a job market that grows increasingly competitive. The biting twist of "The Perfect Score" lies in the students retaining a sharper instinctive knowledge of this than their professors.
"Election" asked whether underprincipled students or crooked teachers were worse than the other. Similarly, "The Perfect Score" asks the same question about students who consider it okay to cheat their way through an education and a school system that considers it okay to leave students behind who don't meet the expectations they demand of everyone, regardless of what unique talents they may have. At the same time it makes room for the students who try to fool the system to decide what's right and wrong for themselves, without having such a choice forced upon them.
Released earlier this year, "The Perfect Score" is being referred to as a "Breakfast Club" for the 2000's because of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the principal characters who, each for their own reasons, plot to raid the Princeton Training Center and steal the answers to their upcoming SAT exam, ensuring they will achieve perfect scores (hence the title). In keeping with the times, the difference between "The Perfect Score" and "The Breakfast Club" is that these odd kids out have greater awareness of their direction. To them, the SAT is an impersonal barrier standing in the way of following their potential as individuals; an impersonal blanket of uniformity it's better to sidestep. The only problem is this would lead most to believe they don't care about the scholastic requirements they need to go on to college.
This movie could be one of the first that takes underachievers seriously on their own terms, as opposed to one that would refuse to at the start, cutting him slack only when he has an experience that results in him realizing his previous ideas about the world were wrong and changes accordingly. If Jeff Spicoli happened to appear here as a successful surf shop owner, it would fit well with what scriptwriters Marc Hyman and Jon Zack have to say about preconceived notions. They don't treat underachievers as underachievers, but as people who see school as a place to develop the talents they're most adept at. They ultimately see perceived losers as winners waiting to emerge from underneath.
"The Perfect Score" respects its characters while clarifying they're seen as underachievers for different reasons. It likewise seeks to undermine the reasons why they would be seen this way, as the demographic of students who feel threatened by the SAT is not relegated to any one culture or ethnicity. The six seniors who are the main characters are only categorized as underachievers due to a common disinterest in the SATs. But as we meet them we begin to realize their stories differ. Some are more underachieving than others; some only appear to be underachievers, some feel as if there's no choice but to develop their talent, and some are simply seeking a chance to make their own decisions in life.
Kyle (Chris Evans, "Not Another Teen Movie"), seeking enrollment at Cornell to pursue a career in architecture, leads the other five students in their scheme to break into the Princeton Testing Center's computer mainframe to steal the SAT answers. Matty (Bryan Greenberg), has no apparent goals and is only interested in joining his friend's plot so he'll make it into the University of Maryland where his girlfriend goes. Rich, privileged salutatorian Anna (Erika Christensen, "The Banger Sisters"), is being pressured by mom and dad to enroll in Brown University, although the goals she has in mind are far loftier. Desmond Rhodes (the NBA's Darius Miles), pressed by a single mother to attend a decent college on his way to playing pro basketball, is only interested in achieving the necessary SAT score that will get him enrolled there.
The other students who join the Princeton Heist either saw an opportunity to beat the system or were more intelligent than anyone gave them credit for being. Francesca (Scarlett Johanson, "Eight Legged Freaks"), the neo-anarchist who criticizes the system at the kids' high school as actively as her divorced father's propensity for dating younger women, lends a hand to the others just for the thrill of striking out against the system. Roy (Leonardo Nam, "Hacks"), a hopeless pothead, is part of the plot because he happened to be in one of the bathroom stalls when Kyle and Matty brainstormed the idea, believing no one could hear, and threatened to rat them out to the powers that be if they didn't let him in.
The film begins with a modern feel provided by Fefe Dobson's "Everything," as Roy gives you a rundown of how an SAT score is powerful enough decide a student's future, whether it starts in community college or a place like Harvard. When he describes SAT as initials for "suck ass test," it may sound as if he is spouting mindless stoner talk, but it does seem unnerving as he points out that although Kyle's grade point average is 3.7, his practice-SAT results, which would be taken into more consideration classify his potential as average, which would endanger his enrollment at Cornell U. It is enough to give him nightmares, only the incentive to play dirty comes not from him but from his best friend.
Only when Matty explains to Kyle how the system works do they decide to go ahead with their scheme. Some fancy footwork ensues as they make efforts to draft co-conspirators, without much success at first. As Kyle, Matty and Roy pool their resources casing the Princeton Training Center, the others slowly coalesce until their inevitable meeting. They begin to realize they have similar dilemmas that center on the SATs, particularly how the test tends to single out certain groups of students, which leads them to conclude they become convinced they might actually pull it off. Mapping it out, they decide the easiest way to avoid security and make off with the scores without getting caught in the process.
The entire tone of the movie changes as the students put the plan into action, though it keeps its earlier tone with the moments where the kids get to know one another. The impressive thing is, while it can be assumed we are watching a bunch of 17 and 18 year old kids, for the most part they fulfill their roles as professionally as the cast of TV's "Mission: Impossible," albeit with their fair share of bumbling. There are no explosions or elaborate stunts involved, but then again we're dealing with what would happen if this was real life. Still, things go wrong at the end, and one kid goes down in a finale to the caper that sets the stage for soul-searching for the students, and the decisions they end up coming to.
All these actors play off each other well, but two members of the supporting cast come close to stealing this movie from those who set out to steal the SATs. Tyra Ferrell ("The Cape") as Desmond's mother expects more from her son than he was prepared to put in to his own future and Matthew Lillard ("Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), who as Kyle's older brother is the one character Kyle never wants to end up like, but offers Kyle worthwhile advice when we least expect him to offer anything worthwhile. Blowing a hole in the students' image of themselves, this reiterates the same idea that "The Perfect Score" had been challenging you to think about: not to judge a book by its cover. - Dave Wolff

Vanity Fair (2004)
Directed by Mira Nair
Focus Features

Mira Nair's (Monsoon Wedding, Hysterical Blindness) film version of William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is actually the novel's eighth; the first film version was released all the way back in 1911 and the most recent before this aired on TV in 1998. So why bother remaking a movie that has already been remade seven times across the space of a century? Not just because Reese Witherspoon is one of the more talented actresses to appear on the front cover of major women's magazines in the past couple years, or because Mira Nair is spearheading the Bollywood industry that similarly threatens to move in on Hollywood, offering female sexuality not seen since the golden age. Perhaps it's also because "the dream" seems harder to reach than ever, and many people are searching for something to believe in.
2004's "Vanity Fair" does not exactly see its heroine reaching "the dream" as heroines in other movies have with greater ease and less wits than Becky Sharp displays, but at least she doesn't lose sight of who she is and what she desires most out of life, even if she doesn't behave as honorably as heroines are expected to. If the public can admire villainesses for not having scruples they can at least understand a heroine for the same once you read the interviews explaining how the character was translated into today's age of girl power. In this sense, Becky Sharp has become a thinking man's anti-heroine, who goes through upper class society in her climb to the top out of bare necessity.
Like Elle Woods in "Legally Blonde," Becky Sharp is a complete turnaround from all of Reese Witherspoon's previous roles. Rising from poverty to gain as much as possible while ascending London's class structure, Sharp has no qualms about resorting to devious means to achieve status. As Witherspoon pointed out in interviews; and I believe she's done the same interpreting her character, Sharp isn't motivated by traditional cruel intentions (to coin a phrase), but rather by the times she was living in, living poor in the streets of London and watching how they behaved in the upper classes. Witherspoon said in interviews she wanted Sharp to relay her motivations in a way modern audiences would relate to.
The release of "Vanity Fair" is a unique development in itself, since it has caused waves in Hollywood without even so much as a nod from the Golden Globes or an award from independent film festivals. As many of Witherspoon's pre "Legally Blonde" films, it's a favorite of respected critics even if it's not as successful at the box office. In many ways it's the first of its kind, mostly because Mira Nair ("Monsoon Wedding") is among the first foreign directors whose work Hollywood has looked to in recent years to revitalize its industry. Nair has made the boldest move Hollywood has seen in some time by bridging two vastly different worlds of filmmaking. The results have had mixed reactions everywhere.
There were reviewers who failed to make sense of the connection between England and Bollywood this movie had included scenes from. Until "Vanity Fair" was released, British-Indian relations were exclusive to Bollywood filmmaking (Ashutosh Gowariker's 2001 film "Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India" and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2002 film "Devdas" are excellent examples of how Bollywood had influence on "Vanity"). Though it hasn't been publicly acknowledged as much as actresses' performances in the likes of "Kill Bill" have been, Witherspoon was referred to as a "retro goddess" in a Boston Herald article, and may well have contributed to expanding Hollywood's range as well as her own.
I was aware of Witherspoon's range as an actress since before "Legally Blonde." If you ask me, she should have at least been nominated for a Golden Globe since she has transcended that range. Up to now she had fans thinking she was adorable. After "Vanity Fair," they could actually fall in love with her. Perhaps if it had had more backing, it would have been lauded as a huge step forward for her. Being basically an independent film, and the only one released last fall to incorporate elements of English and Bollywood filmmaking, you can as easily say it was ahead of it's time. Most of the time, a movie that tests the waters of something new first is going to catch the greatest amount of flack for it.
Nair takes the liberty of placing more emphasis on Britain's relationship with India in her version of Thackeray's story. As to whether the integration of the Bollywood style into the making of "Vanity" works, in one Bollywood-inspired dance sequence Nair brings out an animal magnetism in Witherspoon that turns out to be far more entrancing than all the exposed skin and swinging hip gyrations of the American pop diva world combined. This alone, however brief the sequence, is something both Hollywood and MTV would do well to take a lesson from.
A review of "Vanity Fair" in Interview magazine regarded Becky Sharp as a social mirror for the MTV generation. Not too far from the truth to make such an assessment, as pop divadom has taken a drastic, almost desperate, turn toward narcissism for as long as independent cinema has gained a foothold on American society. I'm not going as far as to say that Witherspoon's Sharp is a kind of superheroine dedicated to fighting corporate evil; however Graham Fuller saw an aspect in Sharp that reflected on the concept of pop diva as modern day goddess. The difference in "Vanity," and from Witherspoon's past roles, is that Sharp doesn't bother to pretend her social ascent is for the betterment of society.
Nair does a commendable job at establishing contrasts between each of Becky's environments with a budget most Hollywood producers would openly balk at. From the Bollywood movies I've seen, directors have a flair for using color and song to enhance plot developments, giving them theatrical presentations that rival the extravagance of movies like Moulin Rouge. Nair doesn't get to demonstrate this aspect of Bollywood filmmaking until later; however, the manner in which she translates this vision to the dirty streets, elegant mansions and vast countryside of London is no small feat. Nair's use of different textures helps solidify the vast difference in environment that must have unfolded before Becky Sharp's eyes as she came from London's streets to London's upper class; in essence an entirely new universe.
Andrew Davies' adapted script easily lays speculations that Witherspoon's costars are cast as props for her to rest. This is most evident when it comes to Sharp's relationship with Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai of "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights"). As one of the few decent people Sharp meets, and her only close companion, her presence is respected by the script instead of interpreting her innocence as making her a ripe target for betrayal. For all Sharp's efforts to outwit the upper class, she senses this innocence and make an effort to protect her during her own climb to the top. When it's apparent Sharp may have broken that friendship, Witherspoon makes her motives seem more protective than malicious.
The supporting cast ensures that their characters, while outwardly respectable, have odious qualities making Sharp resemble an angel, especially the males. Yet they respond to Sharp with varying levels of outrage as she cuts through the complex, money-and-status-driven betrothal system that was common in the British upper class then. The behavior the Osborne family (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Sophie Hunter and Jim Broadbent) and the Crawly family (James Purefoy, Douglas Hodge, and Robert Pattinson) display in their affluent mansions has as much to do with why we feel for Sharp as it does with Witherspoon's portrayal of her. In most cases here, the rich show they're not so honorable themselves. - Dave WolfF

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