There are few movies that make teaching look more quietly unappealing than Won't Back Down, which is quite an achievement, given its naked aims to inspire. The film, directed by Daniel Barnz (Beastly), who also co-wrote the screenplay with Brin Hill, doesn't by any means hate teachers — it merely holds them to impossible, wild-eyed standards. Inside every classroom instructor, it posits, is a Stand and Deliver-worthy saint who's merely being kept down by those pesky teachers union regulations that are crushing spirits and encouraging them not to try. It's the system that's preventing them from handing out their home numbers so students can call for help. It's the system that's holding them back from staying after school to work with anyone who needs it, and from loving their students even more than the kids' parents do. The film is all for teaching as a calling. What it doesn't do is offer it the dignity of also being a job.
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Also in Thursday afternoon's news round up, Peter Bogdanovich will direct John Ledger, Locarno Film Festival will fete Johnnie To and Harvey Weinstein and Donald Sutherland take honors at a Paris festival.
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Anyone who’s ever seen or used a rabbit vibrator can attest to the device’s utter adorableness as a totem. Whoever designed this miraculous pink rubbery thing, with its Peter Cottontail-worthy quivering ears, probably thought, Why does a vibrator have to be ugly? Why not make it cute? Tanya Wexler may have had the same idea when she was making Hysteria, a romantic comedy and highly fictionalized history of the vibrator. The picture is, in places, too adorable for words, and when it’s not adorable, it suffers from an excess of neo-suffragette preachiness. But the picture is at least spirited, a jaunty trifle that’s low on eroticism but high on cartoony coquettishness. Like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, it does have its charms.
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Scan the latest from a busy Monday news day in Movieline's newly minted Biz Break. Following this morning's edition of the new column is a slew of casting news from Iron Man 3 to Woody Allen's next project, while the folks at CAA caught a surprise break from the office today thanks to a power outage.
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