| heaven85 |
10-14-2006 12:28 PM |
No problem Bianca. No new ones to share? I'm so shocked.
Once again I'm not sure if its already posted but I like this review :
Quote:
Half Nelson offers an opportunity to marvel, once again, at the dazzling talent of Ryan Gosling for playing young men as believable as they are psychologically trip-wired. In a performance spectacular and ''invisible'' at the same time, the Canadian-born former child actor, who blew the roof off five years ago as a neo-Nazi in The Believer (and then went on to make The Notebook halfway palatable), stars as Dan Dunne, a charismatic, dedicated inner-city Brooklyn junior high school teacher by day. By night, though, he's something else — just another white, middle-class crackhead.
Dan, in other words, is a disaster waiting to happen, and a heartbreaker, too: He cares about his kids (most of them African-American) with the fervor of a valiant inner-city educator — but with none of the cliché heroics we've seen throughout Stand and Deliver history. Instead, when he wastes himself at night, he's a wreck the next day, too (both in the classroom and in the gym where he coaches basketball). And that vulnerability doesn't go unnoticed by Drey (newcomer Shareeka Epps, a poised, powerful match for Gosling's intensity), a prematurely wise 13-year-old who has seen drug dealing up close in her own family.
There's no easy way out of Dan's self-imposed headlock of self-destruction and disillusionment. Half Nelson conspicuously offers no tidy resolution or concluding uplift, which only makes the movie that much more trustworthy, and the unflashy, documentary-style filmmaking more artful. Working from a script he co-wrote with Anna Boden (shot three years ago as a short called Gowanus, Brooklyn), first-time feature director Ryan Fleck keeps the story low to the ground, organic, honest. In response, every choice the star makes is fresh, from the way his Dan rubs his bloodshot eyes to how he attempts to straighten up his crummy apartment. Without ever appearing to act, Gosling is the most exciting actor of his generation.
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EW
Quote:
By Arthur Salm
ARTS WRITER
September 7, 2006
Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is the history teacher you always wanted in middle school: funny, intense, committed, not only willing but also downright eager to spin lessons off into long, involved, fascinating but ultimately related tangents.
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That's not how we first see him, however, in Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's moving, jangly film “Half Nelson.” He's in his underwear and in a daze, sitting on the floor of his semi-crummy apartment, bathed in the soft light of either dusk or dawn. An alarm clock goes off: dawn.
Dan's had a hard night, but then, most of them are. He's a druggie, although not a particularly discriminating one; cocaine, alcohol, even crack will do. It's crack, as it turns out, that gets him small-time busted – by Drey (Shareeka Epps), his most promising student, who catches him with pipe in hand.
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MOVIE REVIEW
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“Half Nelson”
Rated R; Opens tomorrow
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But “Half Nelson” is too smart a film to plod along the rutted trail of the standard drug flick. Dan, of course, claims to have his problem under control, and the truth is, he almost does; somehow he manages to get to class every day and summon enough verve to do his job and do it well. (“The kids keep me focused,” he explains.) Fellow teacher and occasional girlfriend Isabel (Monique Gabriela Curnen) tolerates Dan's mercurial attentions, but only up to a certain point, after which it's so long, pal. The dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie), friend to Drey's family, isn't a heavy but a lighthearted, basically centered fellow pursuing his version of an inner-city capitalist dream. An idealist to his shaky core, Dan is consumed with the notion of dialectic – the struggle between and ultimate reconciliation of opposites, or, at least, opposing forces. It is the touchstone of the history lessons he imparts to his (at least partially understanding) students, and of his life as well. A committed if mostly bystanding leftie, he perceives himself as ineffectual and not especially worthy of happiness; hence the broken love affairs, the solitary existence ... the drugs.
It's to the filmmakers' credit that none of this – not even the students' brief oral reports on significant contemporary events on the world stage, from the CIA-engineered assassination of Salvador Allende to the Twinkie-engineered assassination of Harvey Milk – comes across as either overly strident or lazily half-baked. If sometimes it doesn't quite gel, it doesn't have to: Everything within the movie turns on the budding friendship of the slowly sinking Dan and the remarkable Drey, coolly appraising onrushing adulthood and, from the look of her, ready for it.
Their scenes together have a soft electric hum; nothing sexual, to be sure, yet at the same time something deep and telling and true. In his car together – he gives her a lot of lifts home after basketball practice – they settle into their seats and seem almost to exhale in unison. It's nothing a whole lot more complicated than that they feel comfortable in each others' presence. They're friends at a time when each of them needs one.
Not that the film makes this out to be a universal panacea, or even the answer to anyone's overarching problems. But it's student and teacher, adult and child, man and very young woman coming together in a touching reconciliation that would do any dialectician proud.
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San Diego Union-Tribune |
