And now to discuss another movie I have not seen and likely will never see — this one destined to edge on into basic cable rotation with other sitcomy movies of vaguely “edgy” contours.

It shouldn’t be a movie I think twice about, but I am oddly fascinated by some things I have read on this movie.  It seems that from the component parts of Bad Teacher, I can construct something moderately interesting — though probably not anything that could pull through more than half an hour or so.

In the movie, Cameron Diaz plays a disinterested teacher behaving badly, who decides her out of the job she hates is by seducing a virginal substitute teacher — played by Justin Timberlake — rich off inheritance money and highly idealistic in his profession — and to that end, she schemes to purchase breast implants from money raised by taking over a fund raising car wash where she writhes around in short shorts, the better to increase the funds from which she would pilfer money out of — and by shaping up her curriculum in order to increase her class’s test scores so as to win bonus money awarded to whatever teacher shows the greatest increase in test scores.

It looks like  a movie with strained plot contrivances at every turn.  I take it to be a sign of just how convoluted this plot comes across that the reviewer for Reason, who would be inclined to take an anti-teachers’ Union “What does a public servant have to do to get fired” stance — can’t accept her remaining as teacher as exaggerated political commentary.

I do see something in this pile that sparks my interest, and stops me from immediately discarding it into a “Hollywood Machine Rolls Out mildly profitable Brain Dead Filler” slot.  It is a sign that just maybe, layers down in the production, some creator affiliated with this movie had something inspiring in mind to add to this thing.  Apparently the Cameron Diaz character fills up her curriculum by showing her collection a wide collection of “Inspiring Super Teacher Movies”.  These have a troubled contradictory lineage — teachers love and hate them in equal measure.

A case study of the uneasy Hollywood Production process in fictionalizing actual teacher experiences is the teacher whose book inspired Dangerous Minds.  I heard her book on a book on tape on a car trip with my (teacher) sister — it was a series of vignettes of individual student cases in that “little miracles, and no magic bullet” category of the challenges of teaching in an economically deprived inner city high school.  I did not recognize it as attached to Dangerous Lives, until This American Life did a story on her disillusioning experiences with Hollywood.   The first step the movie took, in emphasizing her “drill sergeant” background and the environ of a her school, was to take her high school of — like 60 percent black students and 30 percent white students and make it 100 percent black.

The teacher was a mixed bag for her, though she saw positive and redeemable qualities in the character ever-so-loosely based on her.  These qualities were then chopped off when the movie was spun off into a tv series — where the show faced its ratings and sweeps needs by, for instances, an episode where the students organize a fund-raiser at a strip club, to the teacher’s guarded and reluctant acceptance, to which the original teacher commented — “I would not have condoned or accepted that.”

But that’s an extreme example of the “Unusual” “Outside the Box thinking” that the teachers of the bulk of “Super Teacher” movies are tending to try.  I’m thinking if we throw out the bulk of “Bad Teacher”, getting to the thrust of what this person sees in it, we may have a situation where a teacher — inspired for selfish reasons — wants to bring a turn-around in her teaching, and the only thing she knows is to imitate the gimmicks that abound in the genre.  And after a bunch of stunts and having the kids stand on the desk, and with an inspiring montage of the kids readying themselves for their big moment —
— Nothing changes.

In the movie, apparently this happens.  And she gets by by stealing the test-scores by seducing whatever official is in charge of keeping the scores — because it’s just that kind of stupid movie.  It’d be a fatalistic message, or one that there are no quick fixes to the problems of student achievement — but I am guilty here of constructing my own narrative of the droppings of a largely forgettable stupid movie.

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