Under Review
This week: A movie about high school in Paris, the pinnacle of Reese’s, Beastie Boys redux, lackluster Watchmen, and Joss Whedon’s newest project.
By Campus Progress
March 27, 2009
Thoroughly Class-y fare. (Courtesy Haut et Court)FILM
The Class
Haut et Court
Released: September 2008
The Class is a movie about the relationship between a teacher and his students, but it is no Dead Poets Society. There is no triumphant Robin Williams-like figure and no boys standing on desks to declaim Walt Whitman. Instead, there is the reality of an average Parisian high school in all its frustrating and challenging glory. In the film, which takes place predominantly in Monsieur Marin’s ninth-grade-equivalent French class, students of immigrant families tangle with the powerful forces of assimilative French culture, and Marin struggles to teach them not just knowledge of the imperfect tense and The Diary of Anne Frank, but respect, pride, and manners.
The Class is distinctive and compelling for its moral ambiguity: It’s clear that Marin is genuinely devoted to educating his students as best he can, but his insistence on respect of authority for authority’s sake will surely seem troubling to anyone who has ever chafed at high school’s constraints. Marin is revealed as the imperfect human that he or any other high-school teacher is: not a saint, but a man who can lose his temper with his students, as anyone has surely seen their teachers do on occasion. This is what makes The Class so arresting and so memorable. Its nitty-gritty, documentary-esque realism makes it required viewing for anyone involved in education, whether as a teacher or a pupil.
7 out of 10 belligerent French students
–Emily Rutherford
The true meaning of Easter: Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs. (Courtesy the Hershey Company)
Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs
Released: Annually, around Easter
To this point, the Reese’s franchise has been fraught with conflict between two admirable goals: accessibility and authenticity. The gold standard is, of course, the original peanut butter cup. It has just enough peanut butter, just enough milk chocolate, and an endless variation of eating methods. (I like to pop out the middle, wear the edge as a ring, and nibble it off my finger.) But it is also shielded from its rightful place in my belly by a frilly paper liner, a piece of cardboard, and the wrapper. Being a tremendously lazy person, removing those is just too much effort for me. There has to be a better way.
Enter Reese’s Pieces. Requiring no more than a swift tear of the wrapper before eating, they couldn’t be more accessible. But what they gain in convenience, they lose in authenticity as a Reese’s product. They have barely any chocolate, and the dose of peanut butter is entirely too small to provide an adequate approximation of the original cup’s taste. There are indeed pieces, but not true Reese’s.
Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs have, through a devastatingly simple seasonal gimmick, combined the best elements of its two ancestor products. As the name implies, these pastel eggs are Reese’s Pieces, but in the color and shape of an Easter egg. But the eggs are at least twice the size of a typical Reese’s Piece, with a commensurate boost in the peanut butter content. They are as true to the original Reese’s flavor as a miniature peanut butter cup, but far more convenient. My only gripe is that the chocolate content is a tad low, but that is just a quibble. Reese’s has finally found a way to be true to itself without making eating cumbersome. Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs are the highest form of Reese’s.
9 out of 10 pieces of the Reese’s
–Dylan Matthews
This album will never get old. (Courtesy Capital Records)MUSIC
The Beastie Boys
Paul’s Boutique
Capital Records
Released: February 10th, 2009
Twenty years after Paul’s Boutique was first released to critical praise and (short-lived) commercial failure, the Beastie Boys have finally released a remastered edition of this immensely influential hip-hop classic. By the standards of most re-releases, this new edition of Paul’s Boutique is sorely lacking; all you receive is the CD, plus an audio commentary and a small poster/lyrics insert. There are no bonus tracks, alternative tracks, or live versions, and even the packaging is a bit lackluster. As far as the remaster is concerned, it’s good—the audio is clearer, richer and louder—but not markedly different.
In fact, considering the cost of the album and the paucity of extras, this would be a rip-off if it were another album from another, less-talented relic of hip-hop’s golden age. The fact is, though, that Paul’s Boutique is a classic for good reason; its impressively dense pastiche of semi-obscure samples (mostly from the 1970s) and cultural references has spawned books, articles and dozens of websites. More importantly, the album is simply really good. The Beastie Boys’ lyrical inventiveness (by this point they had basically perfected group rapping) is matched with the Dust Brothers’ incredible sample-heavy production. If you’re interested in hip-hop, or popular music more generally, you owe it to yourself to give Paul’s Boutique a listen.
9 out of 10 funky-fresh old-school rappers
–Jamelle Bouie
This guy wasn’t as blue as the film goers. (Courtesy Legendary Pictures)
Watchmen
Legendary Pictures
Released: March 6, 2009
It is universally acknowledged that a novel, be it graphic or otherwise, will always be better than the film version. I knew Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen wouldn’t be as good as Alan Moore’s critically acclaimed graphic novel. But I wasn’t quite prepared for how shudder-inducingly awful it is. Usually, after I see a film adaptation, I head home to lovingly flip through the book from which it was based, but the sheer horridness of Snyder’s film made me doubt the original. I returned to the source material not with delight, but with dread.
Before an angry mob of my fellow nerds runs me out of town on a rail, I’ll say that upon rereading Moore’s Watchmen I found it as good as I’d remembered (although Dr. Manhattan’s existential musings still sent my chin drifting towards my chest). Scenes that made me pray for an electrical outage when seen on the big screen didn’t even elicit a grimace when safely returned to the grainy pages of the graphic novel.
The original was wonderful because it created a thoroughly absorbing alternative America that was made believable by the immense detail packed into every frame. A host of minor characters lived out their lives in the background, providing an everyday mirror to the grotesque events unfolding around them.
Snyder is leadenly faithful to basic plot and dialogue of the original, but film is an inherently reductionist medium, and it cannot adequately capture what made the comic great. The film tries to build Moore’s hideously captivating alternative America, but without the same level of meticulous detail he cannot make us believe, and because the audience can’t buy into the setting the story becomes ridiculous and unpleasantly silly.
The Cold War setting Moore uses to ratchet up the suspense falls flat under Snyder’s dead hand. The same is true of nearly every other element: The romance feels forced, the dialogue stilted, the symbolism overly obvious. Moore’s comic is too intricate and interconnected to be properly filmed, and Snyder’s removal of a few strands from the intricately woven story causes the whole thing to unravel.
2 out of 10 massively disappointed die-hard fans
–Jake Blumgart
Rejoice, Whedon fans. (Courtesy Fox.)
Dollhouse
Fridays at 9:00 p.m. EST on Fox
Premiered: February 13, 2009
Before Dollhouse, every Joss Whedon show required a heavy investment from its viewers. While placing his shows within elaborate, self-contained universes has produced an intense cult following, it has also tended to alienate those who might not have 100 spare hours to spend getting to know the Sunnyvale vampire-fighting scene.
At first glance, Whedon’s newest project seems high-concept enough to require similar dedication. It stars Whedon favorite Eliza Dushku as Echo, a woman who has been transformed into an “Active,” a blank slate onto which wealthy clients can imprint whatever personality they desire. If a client’s daughter has been kidnapped, Echo becomes a hostage negotiator. If a client wants a date for white-water rafting, Echo is flirty and athletic. She and her fellow Actives live in a facility called Dollhouse, staffed by executives who recruit clients, scientists who imprint the requested personalities, and “handlers” who make sure nothing goes awry (spoiler alert: stuff goes awry).
But intricate as that premise is, Whedon seems to be trying very hard to make the episodes as standalone as possible. The nature of the Active business lends itself to such a set-up; each episode is structured around one client, and whatever version of Echo they rent. But while this pattern has certainly made the show more accessible than Buffy or Firefly ever were, it loses much of what made those shows great. The philosophical introspection of Whedon’s past shows is crowded out by the details of each of Echo’s assignments, and his trademark wit seems to be confined to the Dollhouse’s nerdy head scientist, Topher Brink (Fran Kranz). Dushku promised that the show would get more Whedonesque in its sixth episode. It did, and it’s a trend I hope continues. The first few episodes, by contrast, were tremendously clever—all Whedon shows are—but distressingly formulaic.
7 out of 10 personality-less Actives
–Dylan Matthews
Jake Blumgart is a Campus Progress editorial intern. Dylan Matthews, Emily Rutherford, and Jamelle Bouie are Campus Progress contributors.
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