"Bad Teacher: and how Not To Make Movies"

Title: Bad Teacher

Year: 2011
Genre: Comedy
Director: Jake Kasdan
Runtime: 92min
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Justin Timberlake
Prod.: Columbia Pictures, Mosaic Media Group
Budget: $20 million approx.

If we were to think for one second in all the good scripts that once could have become a reality, but that ended up being rejected given this reason or that, we would probably be surprised.

In my case, after seeing Bad Teacher I was taken aback, but for understanding that, the fact that if I was watching this movie meant that some guy, who happened to call himself a producer, had thought before that it was worth approving the project.

What happens here is that, at first, there is nothing wrong with the premise that we are told: a rude and ruthless teacher, who after being left by her fiancé decides to start a crazy plan to conquer a rich man to whom get married with and be maintained.

The little story is simple and perfectly affordable in many ways.

However, the staging that is given ends being nothing more than teasing the American educational system.

In each scene the movie parodied hundreds of respectable and certainly well intentioned teachers, who each day seek to nurture of knowledge the minds of their students. Basically, I think that when making a comedy set in the educational environment should at least respect the people who are going to ridicule, something that us viewers can laugh about “with them” (the characters, therefore, teachers) and not, "at them".

Just to remember Cameron Diaz remember playing the lead role, it strikes me that deserves to be nominated for the Razzie Awards (the "anti Oscars", which reward the worst in film) as worst supporting actress. I also wonder how excited she must have been when, through her signature, confirmed her participation in a film which would then require a zero effort of interpretation.

Another of the characters that stuck with me was the one of Lynn Davies (Phyllis Smith). This teacher seems to suffer from "different capacities" to those of her colleagues, and if with them she behaved like a half mindless woman, I wonder what she would be like with her students.

Finally, and to close to my "teachers" section, I also put the case of Justin Timberlake, whose character is described to us as an honest guy, good-hearted, positive-minded and who fully believes in the inner beauty, but who we see it as a fool for whom everything is pink and whose degree of naivety and innocence is such that´s even scary.

There were two scenes that stood out in Bad Teacher as pathetic. The first is that which takes place on Christmas Eve, when Cameron Diaz, sitting in the living room of one of her students, his name Garret (Matthew J. Evans), witnesses with his parents how he recites a romantic poem dedicated to a girl, but that´s terribly corny, and it almost seems that she would like to hang the poet or throw up.

The other is more towards the end of the movie, and not to reveal too much I’m just going to say that is the most bizarre “sex” scene (in case you could call it something) I've ever seen in my life.
In short, what more can I say? Do not see it.

My rating: 1/10

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