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SCHOOL
OF ROCK
7/10
USA
2003 : Richard LINKLATER : 95 mins
Way down deep,
School of Rock isn’t colossally different from, say, Mr Holland’s
Opus or Music of the Heart: great inspirational teacher introduces
kids to the power of music, thus unlocking their potential, etc etc etc.
Except now, instead of the halo-polishing, po-faced likes of Richard Dreyfuss
and Meryl Streep, we have the farting, belching, sweaty Jack Black in
inimitable full-tilt ‘Tenacious D’ form: “Mr Holland’s Anus”, perhaps…
or (for British audiences) “Music of the Arse.”
All bar-band
guitarist Dewey Finn (Black) wants to do is rock. Or rather, raaawwwwwkkkkk!!!
But as rawwking tends not to pay many bills, he opportunistically passes
himself off as nerdy teacher-flatmate Ned (Mike White) to land a well-paid
temp-job at a snooty private school. Before you can say Bachman Turner
Overdrive (or, indeed, Kathleen Turner Overdrive) Dewey is introducing
his class of posh ten-year-olds to the delights of Led Zep, Motorhead
and Nirvana – while prim-and-proper principal Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack)
isn’t looking, of course. Dewey’s ulterior motive: a lucrative battle-of-the-bands
contest, and musical revenge over the ex-bandmates who gave him the push
after tiring of his endless solos
Some
could argue – with justification – that School of Rock could itself
do from a little of the ‘Dewey Finn’ treatment. Linklater is certainly
a long way from the avant-garde dabblings of his recent experimental work
(Waking Life, Tape)
and there’s nothing in his square, conventional style of film-making that
would strike even Rosalie Mullins as remotely in-your-face. His main contribution
seems to be ‘let Jack get on with it’ – not a bad ethos, as it turns out.
Black, like Linklater, benefits from returning to the scene of an earlier
success – the first glimpse many audiences got of him was way back in
1994's The Neverending Story III, when he (hammily) played a
school bully of implausibly advanced years.
A decade on,
Black goes all-out to ensure nobody steals his show. Several of
the kids make an impact (Kevin Clark’s punk-as-f*ck drummer, Miranda Cosgrove’s
over-achieving manager) but the other adults barely get a look-in: Cusack
is rather disappointingly shunted to the sidelines (the film seems to
be moving towards Finn and Mullins ‘getting it on’, only to disappointingly
‘wuss out’), while Sarah Silverman, as Ned’s shrewish girlfriend Patti,
is stuck in a one-dimensional cardboard-villainess role. It’s often corny,
usually predictable - but while School of Rock is bounding across
the screen, you don’t have the time or inclination to pick holes in White’s
script. Propelled along by Black in irrepressible form, this is just a
great night-out-at-the-pictures crowdpleaser.
Neil Young
3rd February,
2004 (seen 17th January : Fokus Cinema, Tromsø – Tromsø
International Film Festival “closing” film)
click here
for a full list of reviewed films from the Tromsø International Film Festival
2004
by Neil
Young
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