Won't Back Down (2012)

Dissatisfied parents and teachers take over a school, literally.

The gimmick: This movie teaches you how to take over a school. It doesn't focus on what happens afterwards. That's because it's a film backed by the school privatisation lobby, and the lobby either doesn't care about what happens after, or doesn't want you to know that none of such recently privatised schools succeeded.

Watch for: bunch of Hollywood liberals suckered into a right-wing project; an 'inspirational' movie going through the motions; very good but very dishonest scriptwriting.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 26 December 2012.

Pitch Perfect (2012)

This is an adaptation of the delicious non-fiction book GQ magazine editor Mickey Rapkin wrote after spending a year covering the US college competitive a cappella scene and reporting its shenanigans.

Expect: an even less politically correct take on Glee, with less cheesy storylines, and better, less autotuned singing.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 7 November 2012.

The Secrets (Ha-Sodot) (2007)

A god-fearing girl in a religious boarding school for the Ultra-Orthodox meets her universe's version of Winona Ryder. Things get really from there in their boarding school/coming of age story.

The concept is quite standard but the director has other ideas. Namely casting 3 very dramatic actresses in a film that's secretly an existential comedy. And they're not in on the joke.

It's a great introduction to the ultra-orthodox, as well as a divinely written comedy.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 5 September 2012.

The Moth Diaries (2011)

Moody, atmospheric, and menacing, The Moth Diaries goes back to the basics of vampire fiction.

Really far back to the triple threats of lesbian sex, blood, death in Camilla.

So it's fitting that our protagonist and heroine is a student in a boarding school whose place as queen bee is slowly taken over by a sexy, charismatic, maybe lesbian, maybe vampire...

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 20 June 2013.

Runway Beat (ランウェイ☆ビート) (2011)

The key rule of the Japanese high school genre: it's a coming-of-age drama where everyone in the class finds something inspiring to do as their senior year class project.

The gimmick here is our skirt-wearing, scissor-wielding hero wants his class to put on a fashion show.

Watch for: a slightly quirky take on a predictable genre, Koji Seto in skirts and boots all the time.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 22 February 2012.

The first grader (2010)

Inspirational. Based on a true story. A story of how one man overcame the odds.

Emotional manipulation, a predictable storyline, and a highly contrived plot manage to come together in The First Grader, thanks to its great script.

That and its nationalist telling of the Kenyan independence movement and critical assessment of post-colonial Kenya.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 31 August 2011.

Take me home tonight (2011)

The John Hughes/Cameron Crowe high school comedy gets a modern update, with young adults instead of schoolkids.

As per genre conventions, expect our protagonist to learn to thumb his nose at authority, be his own man, and get the girl of his dreams - i.e. come of age all in the space of one night.

Nothing unexpected happens, though you might want to watch this for its 1980s soundtrack.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 17 August 2011.

Box! (ボックス) (2010)

Box! is Rocky in a Japanese high school.

It's a sports film for people whose only introduction to boxing is Rocky, apparently made by a director whose only introduction to boxy is also Rocky.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 8 December 2010.

Stomp the Yard (2007)

Don't they do this every Saturday night at Zouk?

It's unfortunate that I didn't grow up in the hood, get my BA in an all-black high school, or join one of their Greek letter fraternities - which makes it hard to understand this hiphop meets black campus meets dance movie. While this movie is about dancing (a very predictable and formulaic genre), it's set in a world where every move you dance may set off a riot and get you killed because you just insulted someone with that hand-flapping action. In the ghettoes of Los Angeles, dancing is urban warfare by other means, almost as lethal as a combat sport and taken by its participants with just about the same amount of seriousness, as you will discover at the film's opening, where 2 rival dance groups wage battle over money, pride, and bragging rights in what appears to be an underground boxing arena. It's like watching a Balinese cock fight or an Aztec sport without any commentary track by the ringside anouncers. Yes, the crowd reacts with hisses, cheers and stunned silence as each team insults the other (but what did that flapping action with the hands really mean?) through their hiphop dance moves, but the point is you can't read or make sense out of what is undeniably a beautifully choreographed sports/dance/fighting scene that's bursting with energy.

But things are not meant to be and the victorious team is waylaid by the sore losers who want their money back. The gangfight that occurs claims the life of one young man, and his talented younger dancer brother gets a short jail record, a rude awakening, and a chance to reform himself, via a relation's connections in an all-black college, where our young hero will learn the value of hard work, solidarity in brotherhood (without joining a gang), woo a girl who happens to be the dean's daughter and the girlfriend of a fraternity leader (stock villains alert!). Since this is a dance movie and the hero does end up in college, this means all the fraternity clubs are actually competitive dance (or "stepping") societies, and the boy who grew up on the wrong side of town will teach these middle-class steppers something about real dancing from the hood. Which will lead to a dramatic finale involving a dance competition!

No prizes for guessing that the college dance competition will be just as energetic, involving just about the same amount of energy, aggressiveness, and coded insults in dance movies as the opening scene. Bookmarked by such mysterious yet well-filmmed sequences where you don't quite know for sure what is actually happening but it sure looks impressive, the rest of the film is too easily predictable and mundane, going from necessary plot point to necessary plot point. When there are no dance sequences, the movie goes into autopilot. Yet when there are dance sequences, only the opening and closing scenes stand out - because hip hop kungfu dance is far more visually arresting and interesting than college stepping, which unfortunately looks like any run-of-the-mill school orientation mass dances Singaporean students have to endure in their lives. If the director had wanted to make a film that promoted stepping, audiences might be led to think that he has achieved the exact opposite, showing instead that the street dance is far more superior and less silly than the sanitised college version.

Stomp the Yard has one good idea but doesn't go far enough to pursue it - for me, the movie would have been far better if the director completely ditched the fictional narrative and just went to the streets and underground arenas of LA and Chicago to film punks and gangsters waging war through hiphop dance. That, I'm sure, would be a great dance and music documentary. And perhaps Stomp the Yard is meant to suggest that to us...

First published at incinemas on 15 March 2007

Accepted (DVD) (2006)

Ah, the weird initiation rites of college

The campus comedy genre has by now just completed one full cycle of creativity, stagnation, and rejuvenation - the last phase famously ushered in by movies like Road Trip and Old School, while the entire Revenge of the Nerds saga chronicled the earlier rise and fall of the same genre from 1984 to 1994. The genre is quite straightforward: pre-rejuvenation of the genre, the losers, slackers, and other assorted underachievers enter college and proceed to gain self-worth while fending off humiliation and rejection from the jocks and the conservative members of the faculty (Revenge of the Nerds). Post-rejuvenation, the losers, slackers and other assorted underachievers recreate their experiences of humililation and tribulation from the distance of time - either retelling and embellishing the tale (Road Trip), or through reliving it in a reenactment (Old School).

It is a strange thing that coming at what we would consider the rejuvenation phase of the genre, Accepted basically takes the familiar elements of both periods of the campus comedy and meshes them together, producing an even more familiar cinematic offering that one would imagine possible if its writers had stuck to just filling in the template of either period. It is stranger still that Accepted does have a somewhat original (albeit Old School-ish) premise that you'd never expect to descend softly and gently into familiar ground after a mere half hour in the film.

But for your cerebral entertainment, here's the most original thing about Accepted: smart aleck goof-off Bartleby (Justin Long, the guy who plays the Mac in Apple's Get a Mac commercials) and his 2 buddies discover after graduating from high school that no college (or "university", for us folks in the UK and the Commonwealth) would accept them. Hence, the need to set up a fake university (or college), complete with website, application forms with authentic-looking mastheads, and an entire campus to fool their parents into thinking they has been accepted. Presumably the amount of work that goes into the deception far outweighs the social shame of not attending college. Of course, when you set up a deception on such a comprehensive scale, it's impossible to keep it secret, and pretty soon 300 fellow rejectees from other colleges turn up at the front door of the South Hampton Institute of Technology (I kid you not about the name or the initials of the college!) demanding entrance. And because this is a college comedy, the prospect of empowering rejects and losers (as well as heading his own college) prompts Bartleby to operate the college as if it is the real deal.

It's suprising then that the scriptwriters fail to make an iconic film out of this intriguing mixture of overfamiliar tropes and occasional creative ideas. Perhaps the talent of comedian Lewis Black (from the Daily Show fame) is squandered in his thin role as the candid (i.e. frothing at the mouth) and radical former academic who Bartleby and friends rope in as the Dean of the school. The scriptwriters also miss the boat at a chance for a stronger and pungent satire of the education system. Instead, much of the comedy derives from the over-familiar tropes of teenagers slacking off in style in their own college, an obligatory love interest with a barely-formed subplot, the students' rivalry with the uptight frat boys from the legitimate and prestigious college across the road that culminates in what else but a phoney court battle. The lack of research that would have gone into making Accepted a great film shows easily: apparently Adam Cooper and Bill Collage are unaware of the Nordic folk high schools that basically operate like Bartleby's radical and hippy "make your own course, teach your own peers" educational programme.

As a comedy, Accepted is entertaining but not great. One would've wanted more of Lewis Black than Justin Long, who one wishes had better luck choosing his first leading comic role. On the whole, though, Accepted is certainly worth the rental and the easy laughs it generates.

First published at incinemas on 1 February 2007