Pretty funny:
Even Gyllenhaal’s 500-watt smile and Davis’ permanent air of wounded propriety can’t redeem a script that has that disconnected, amateurish quality distinctive to conservative-oriented entertainment and plays written by fourth-graders. It’s as if the right-wing disapproval of pop culture extends to rejecting the Aristotelian conventions of plot and character. Possibly this film is so avant-garde that I’m not getting it!
Here’s the principal narrative accomplishment of “Won’t Back Down”: It reverses the usual racial polarity in this kind of story, in that it’s Gyllenhaal’s character, Jamie, an endlessly earthy and upbeat bartender-receptionist who favors skin-tight jeans and midriff-baring tops (when she’s not wearing her combat-fatigue “Parentrooper” T-shirt), who brings some joie de freakin’ vivre back to Nona, Davis’ burned-out, beige-clad teacher, who describes herself as “the first black Stepford wife.” Jamie convinces Nona to put those middle-class problems up on the shelf and kick back with a virgin mojito, a Pittsburgh Penguins game and a little impromptu Texas line dancing. Because that’s the thing about white folks: We’re all about spontaneous fun, keeping it real, and convincing black people with decent middle-class incomes to give up 150 years worth of hard-fought progress and work harder for less money. She’s the magic redneck! (Source)
In Washington State we have a ballot initiative that if approved this November will permit the establishment of charter schools. The state has rejected the attempt to do so on several occasions, and it's a credit to Washingtonians that they have. I-1240 is a piece of trash and it has the Gates Foundation, Walton, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) hedge funders--the usual neoliberal types--supporting it, and everyone in the state who knows something about education against it. Nevertheless its approval is polling ahead of disapproval. I think in the end, we'll find a way to say No, but the timing of this movie celebrating the "parent trigger" has worried me.
I haven't been able to see the movie yet because it won't be released here in Seattle until the weekend, but reviews like this one are encouraging. Maybe no one will bother to see it. It's probably too optimistic to think that the stupidity of the movie movie will be a net negative, but at as propaganda goes, it looks as though it's not very skillful. As Parene points out, "Waiting for Superman" was far more effective in delivering a similar message.
The real problem in Washington State public education is its being terribly underfunded. Despite the relative affluence of our state and the high level of education of its citizens, we have somehow found a way to allow our funding levels to drop so that it ranks now 46th in the country. It's an embarrassment. It's so bad that the state's supreme court last year ruled in the McCleary decision that the government is not meeting its constitutional responsibility to adequately fund education, and it better get its act together.
And so the best argument that the NO on 1240 people are making is that first things first. We need solutions that benefit all kids, not just the handful that might get into a charter, and even if they get in there's a greater chance that the charter will underperform the typical public school than outperform it. And that means getting schools in this state funded. And that requires doing something about taxes.