Word: mariners
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...They gracefully destroy the laws of physics, combining in artful permutations that no one should try at home unless bending backward and touching your butt with your head is as easy as rolling over in bed. The evening's most incredible image: Natasha Patterson, a 13-year-old from Marin County, rests her chest on the stage, her elbows under her chin, as her legs - it's painful for me even to type this - Walk in a Circle Around Her. The audience gasps in a mixture of wonder and horror; it's not that the body can't do this...
...pyramid. Anthony Gatto, a showman with a plethora of panache, tosses and catches seven balls, seven hoops, an alley's worth of bowling pins; he's simply the best juggler ever. And in an act already used to sensational effect in Ka, Jimmy Ibarra and Carlos Marin Loaiza run inside and on top of the Wheel of Death, a pair of gigantic hamster wheels held by an outside steel belt. It must be tremendous fun to perform, if you don't mind risking both your lives and all your limbs...
...this as simply as the film does: A man named François Marin (François Bégaudeau) teaches - or tries to teach - French to 14- and 15-year-old students in a coldly modern school in Paris. His classroom is not quite a blackboard jungle, but it does contain a marginally middle-class, ethnically mixed, psychologically fractious group of kids, who constantly challenge him with their lolling indifference, their angry outbursts, their perpetual edge-of-insolence attitudes. To be honest, we do not witness very many heartwarming pedagogical triumphs in director Laurent Cantet's The Class, which...
...think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents. For its first few minutes The Class threatens to be just as boring as you probably remember high school to have been. But then one girl, previously one of Marin's better students, refuses to read aloud from a book and then angrily refuses to make a genuine apology to him in an after-class confrontation. From that point onward, things pretty much run downhill for M. Marin. (See the top 10 movies...
...Marin, this becomes a moral crisis, and it must be said that neither here nor elsewhere in the movie does Bégaudeau or Cantet take it easy on the teacher. Like all the other caring and humane faculty members - maybe the film could use one or two cynics - he's obviously committed to his work and supple in his attempts to engage his students. But there is a certain self-righteousness in him, bordering on arrogance, that can be tough to take. He is not exactly Mr. Chips. On the other hand, the film makes it obvious that eccentric...