So I saw Bad Teacher, and I was pleasantly surprised. There were some fun characters, a few moments of genuine laughter, and some gratuitous T&A. That’s far more than I thought I would get from this movie, which I expected to be historically bad.
The story is silly, with Cameron Diaz playing a gold digging teacher that is teaching due to circumstance after being dumped for, well, being a gold digger. No Kanye, you won’t see her messing with no broke negro. She couldn’t care less about her job or her students, and is intent on acquiring breast implants as a means of latching her claws onto another rich man. As noble as that idea may be, she comes to realize that the loser gym teacher is better for her than the rich dork. That’s pretty much the movie in a nutshell, and the script is a paint-by-numbers job.
This movie has a terrific cast. It also has Justin Timberlake in it. He’s AWFUL- acting is not his thing. I would also venture to say that singing is not his thing either, but I’ll at least listen to your arguments on that one. He has zero comedic timing, no ability to sell a joke, and appears to not understand what was supposed to make his character funny. I blame all of you that still think the “Dick in the box” sketch was funny. It’s just a clever video for an old joke that’s been done better (see the courtroom scene in the Drew Carey musical episode for one example). It was never a fresh new idea, because as long as there have been boxes, some jackass has thought about sticking his dick in one and having a woman open it. So please, stop encouraging Justin Timberlake.
The rest of the cast is really good, especially Phyllis Smith (from The Office), Eric Stonestreet (from Modern Family), Thomas Lennon (from Reno 911), and Lucy Punch (who is hotter than Cameron Diaz by far). And that is one of the problems with this film- the producers need to realize that Cameron Diaz looks fantastic…for a middle aged woman. You can’t parade her around and act like she’s the hottest thing in town, when there is a better looking woman in the same movie playing her nemesis. There’s Something About Mary came out in 1998- and now there’s something about Cameron, most notably crows feet, bags under her eyes, and wrinkles. She claims to have been born in 1972, but I believe her birth date about as much as I believe the ages that baseball players from the Dominican Republic give to major league scouts.
The cast got as much out of the material as was possible, and even the kids were good. There were a few moments of well written material, but the rest was fairly trite. I remember laughing at a few things and thinking, “now THAT was a good joke,” but I can’t remember what it was that made me think that. So it wasn’t particularly memorable.
I’ll score this movie on the scale the SATs used to have (before they added the essay and screwed it all up, no longer letting it be used to qualify test takers for MENSA). From a low of 400 (for signing your name) to 1600 (a perfect score), I’d give this movie about a 950. By my research, that’s enough to get it into Catawba College, which sounds like a somewhat boring place to go to school. Rather appropriate for this movie.
