Freedom Writers (Full Screen Edition)
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Features
• Color
• Full Screen
• NTSC
In Theaters : 05 January, 2007
DVD Release : 17 April, 2007 |
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Freedom Writers (Full Screen Edition) description
Though the "inspirational teacher" theme may feel done to death, Freedom Writers succeeds because it emphasizes the students as much as the teacher. Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby, Boys Don't Cry) comes to a southern California high school bubbling over with naive optimism, but quickly discovers that her unruly classroom isn't easily won over by her good intentions. After a few floundering attempts to connect with her students, Gruwell gives them the assignment of keeping journals about their own lives--an assignment that the class bites into with relish, which eventually bonds them together and pushes racial rivalries aside. This plotline has been made before, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; Freedom Writers, by drawing heavily from the published journals of the students--and thanks to a (mostly) unheroic script, direction that emphasizes individual characters over stereotypes, and rigorous performances from the whole cast--makes the story seem fresh and genuine. Swank does solid work, but the standouts are April L. Hernandez as a girl whose gang wants her to lie and send an innocent boy to jail and Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake) as a teacher who resents Gruwell's offbeat success. Also featuring Patrick Dempsey (Grey's Anatomy), Scott Glenn (The Right Stuff), and a plethora of strong young actors. --Bret Fetzer Beyond Freedom Writers 
More Inspirational Teacher Films on DVD | 
The Freedom Writers Diary
by Erin Gruwell | 
More DVDs Starring Hilary Swank | Stills from Freedom Writers (click for larger image) |
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Freedom Writers (Full Screen Edition) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
An incensed, insulted teacher speaks out
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I'm a high school teacher and I found this to be just about the most insultingly inane movie I have ever seen. I'd rather have a root canal than sit through this again--ugh!
For starters, the people behind this movie have an annoying agenda: They believe in that asinine old long ago disproven Rousseauian philosophy of the "noble savage" which taught the ridiculous notion that children and savages are 100% free from corruption and vice, and if only corrupt adults and advanced society would just leave savages and savage children alone, they would stay innocent and pure. I say "Bull" to that, and I say "Bull" to this movie. If you let a child run amok without discipline, then that's how the child BECOMES a vicious savage. I could understand this movie portraying the high school student/criminals as victims--yet this movie seeks to portray them as pure, innocent victims, as if, if only society would leave them alone, then these poor shoot-em-up teenage gangbangers and philanders would be virtuous angels. Oh my, I'm going to be sick just thinking about this message this movie excretes to the viewer.
Then let's get to the dialogue: As I said, I am a high school teacher, and I can tell you firsthand that NONE of the idiotic, cartoony, bonzo-racist and hyperbolically scornful dialogue that ALL other teachers in this movie spout (except for the angelic idealist heroine)--I say NONE of that kind of poorly scripted talk EVER comes out of the mouth of ANY teacher. NEVER. Period. We never view students with such cartoony disdain. It just was horribly written, utterly unrealistic dialogue.
Then there's the idealist heroine's husband in this movie: He's a eunuch; an utter metrosexual wimp. His wife shows utter disdain for his wishes; his wife doesn't listen to a word he has to say; his wife slaughters herself for her idiotic job of chasing-after-the-wind futility (which it would be in real life); and then, when the husband FINALLY stands up for himself, remembers he's a man, packs his bags, and rightfully pursues a divorce from this woman who doesn't respect him, then HE'S considered the jerk by this sexist, out-of-touch film-maker. Yikes!
And then let's talk about some of the situations that occur in this movie between the idealistic heroine teacher and her cartoonily-propagandized student characters: Let's just bring up but one example among many: #1) There is one scene where the idealist heroine teacher talks to a male student after having closed the door behind her, leaving her and the male student alone in a small room. Well folks, let me tell you: This doesn't happen, unless a teacher is screaming to be fired from her job. Everybody's scared to DEATH of sexual harrassment lawsuits these days, ESPECIALLY in gov't schools, and lawyers are petty chieftains who LOVE to have students come report such a thing to them that a teacher closed the door behind them and had them alone in a room. Ha! Only a writer who knew NOTHING about the REALITY of the working conditions in a gov't school system could have included this in his screenplay; yet again, in this SAME scene, there is MORE to scream NO! NO! NO! about: AFTER this idealist female teacher closes the door and gets all alone and cozy with this male student, she attempts to movitate said student to perform better by making a vulgar slang statement about his GENITALS!!! Arggggghhh!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you IMAGINE what the critics and the public would do to this movie if the sex roles were reversed, and it was a male teacher, and a female student, and the male teacher had just attempted to motivate the female student to perform better by referring to her female genitalia!!!!!!?????? Ahhhhh!!!!! This movie would be pulled from distribution immediately, such is the BLATANT sexual discrimination in our society, and in this ugly, sexist, awful, stinker of an agenda-laden rotten movie.
One last thing: the idealist heroine teacher keeps trying to make a connection between the plight of her young gang-banger students with the Holocaust of WWII. Indeed, this is a major theme to the movie. Trouble is, the comparison is grossly overstretched and just a bit hackneyed by now, don't you think?
And that's just it: Don't Americans THINK anymore? At all? Or are we so dumbed down as a society in America that this lousy stinking rotter of a sexist poorly written movie can pass for quality realism??!! Think I'm going to vomit. This was really that bad. Just utterly lousy stinking awful and insulting.
I say all this as a teacher, and a very idealistic one at that.
This is another one of a long line of misguided movies about idealistic teachers slaughtering themselves trying to buck the system at the harmlessly low level of the classroom, rather than do a little research into just why the system is so corrupt at the highest levels, and then try to fight the system at the highest levels, where the spider really has its lair and is fattening itself on idiot idealist teachers who slaughter themselves needlessly over their jobs. Read Charlotte Iserbyt's "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" if you want to know what's really wrong with the gov't school system.
One final complaint (I can't resist): Where are all the other students? Why does it only show this teacher with 20 students all day everyday? What about all her other classes? Did she really work 2 extra jobs to pay for her first job like a fool while reading 150 journals a night like a real-life teacher would? Hollywood has NO clue what the job of a public school teacher is like. None. And this film-maker is pure Hollywood, nothing else. |
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Freedom Writers (Full Screen Edition) dvd movie.
