6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
An English teacher's life is disrupted when a former student returns to her small town after failing as a playwright in New York.
Starring: Julianne Moore, Michael Angarano, Greg Kinnear, Nathan Lane, Lily CollinsDrama | 100% |
Comedy | 35% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Common wisdom states that typically the most important adult in any kid's life other than his parents is quite often a beloved teacher. Most of us have had at least one teacher in our lives whom we still remember with fondness and who affected our lives in perhaps unexpectedly profound ways. It probably goes without saying that the teachers we most admire and remember the best tend to be those who tutored us in subjects we loved anyway and therefore it shouldn't come as any great surprise that one of my own personal favorites was my high school junior year Honors English teacher, a nattily dressed, smallish man who encouraged my writing, eventually nominating me for a supposedly prestigious national award, which I ended up winning, something that allowed me to start writing professionally for newspapers (remember those?) while I was still in high school, forging the way for what eventually became my career. This dryly acerbic individual took no intellectual prisoners and continually challenged all of his students to really think about what they were writing and/or reading. Julianne Moore’s character of Linda Sinclair in The English Teacher is exactly the same type of mentor to her students that my long ago professor was, with one notable exception. Our teacher proudly announced his engagement to us one fine day, obviously expecting a lot of curious questions about his fiancée and the upcoming nuptials; unfortunately, that very same day some student had somehow found out that our teacher was a cousin of a major music star who was then Top 10 material, and instead of peppering the teacher with questions about his marriage, everyone wanted all the “dish” on the cousin—such are the vagaries of high school life. In Ms. Sinclair's case, there is no engagement announcement of any kind due to the fact that there are no—and probably never will be—any impending nuptials. Ms. Sinclair is, as the weirdly British accented opening narration informs us, a “spinster”, one who has forsaken the comfort of romantic relationships for a lifetime of interaction with literature. Ms. Sinclair follows in the grand tradition of cinematic teachers who inspire and nurture their students, supposedly helping them to come to a better understanding of not only the world around them, but of themselves as well. That all begins to crumble rather dramatically when one of Sinclair’s most promising students, a would be playwright named Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano), returns from Manhattan to the tiny village of Kingston, Pennsylvania to lick his wounds after not having been able to successfully market a play he’s written. Sinclair offers to read the piece, falls in love with it and goes into overdrive in an attempt to have the high school where she teaches and where Jason was once a student stage it. This is supposedly where, in that time honored adage, “hilarity ensues”, except that The English Teacher can’t make up its mind whether or not it wants to play to people’s funny bones or their more sincere emotions.
The English Teacher is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cinedigm with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Despite being a film of recent vintage, The English Teacher has a curiously kind of blah looking high definition transfer. Things are certainly okay looking by any reasonable standard, with decent color and fine detail, but nothing ever really pops with any true immediacy or overwhelming impact, and offering a somewhat soft ambience quite a bit of the time. Contrast remains strong, allowing the transitions from outdoors to inside of the school or other interiors to flow seamlessly, and there were certainly no compression artifacts that jumped out to my eyes, this being a rather short film roomily housed on a BD-50. But while occasionally lovely moments—like some of the nicely autumnal exteriors—do in fact crop up, the bulk of this film, while acceptable on every objective level, never approaches a significant wow factor.
The English Teacher features a perfectly serviceable DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track that delivers the dialogue and occasional musical moments (including Lane singing a little snippet of Stephen Sondheim's "Putting it Together") very well. Dynamic range is minimal in this film, but fidelity remains strong, with no damage of any kind to report.
When you're confronted by a cast list which includes Julianne Moore, Greg Kinnear and Nathan Lane, you probably go into a film expecting something breezy and at least amusing, if not flat out hilarious. Somewhere along the line The English Teacher lost whatever comedic spark it might have had. It still shows up in dribs and drabs, as in the early montage of Linda's dating "grade system", but the bulk of this film is tired, predictable and often too unseemly and melodramatic for its own good. Adding insult to injury is a kind of uninspiring visual style that never really is able to amount to much on Blu-ray.
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