BEFORE: I was home sick on Monday, my cold wasn't that terrible, but when you wake up exhausted, like more tired than when you went to sleep, that's a sign, right? Also, our refrigerator stopped making things cold again (2nd time in a month) so I volunteered to stay home and wait for a repairman, assuming that we could get one to arrive on short notice. The earliest we could get one was around 4 pm, so I spent the better part of the day on the recliner, fading in and out while watching a double feature of "Kingpin" and "The Big Lebowski" on cable. On Tuesday I slept a little later than usual, but after a hot shower I felt good enough to go back to work, so I guess it was just one of those 24-hour type colds.
Next problem, our downstairs air conditioner also isn't working, just as the summer is getting ready to start. But after calling for an appointment for an A/C tech (one's not available over the holiday weekend coming up, so the earliest someone can be here is next Tuesday) I thought, what if it's not the air conditioner that's broken? After all, it could be the outlet that's not working, or even the circuit breaker. So when I got home today we connected the unit to a power strip with a longer cord that could run into the kitchen, and the air conditioner worked, so I'm glad I thought to test that. I'd rather pay an electrician $200 to fix an outlet than buy a new air conditioner for $500 or more. Now I'll have to call back and cancel that appointment tomorrow, and try to find an electrician available before Memorial Day.
Cate Blanchett carries over again from "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle". There's a joke to be made about going from the jungle to the "blackboard jungle", but it's too easy. Not gonna do it. But perhaps there's some plot convergences to be seen in similarly hostile environments.
THE PLOT: A veteran high-school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.
AFTER: When you're a teenager, it might be tough to think of your teachers as normal people, with regular sexual desires, and also very human faults. Or I don't know, maybe you did think of them as sexual beings, I think I had like one or two female teachers that it was easy to fantasize about, but for the most part they were older women and when you're 14 or 15 years old, someone who's in their 40's seems positively ancient. Of course, once you reach 40 or 50 yourself, you try not to think of that as being old, just to get through the damn day, and you REALLY don't want to think about what you might look like to someone who's 14 or 15.
Then we have this odd double standard in society, where an adult male teacher coming on to teenage female students is total perv/creep behavior, but an adult female teacher coming on to her teenage male students - it's kind of hot, right? But no, they should be treated equally, both are very wrong and should lead to the same punishments and consequences. It's statutory rape, regardless of the genders involved. I guess if you're on the younger side of that equation you might have a fantasy about an older woman or man, but if you're past the age of 40, you're much more likely to fantasize about teenage boys or girls, right? It seems only natural.
Crazy as it sounds, though, it wasn't that long ago when gay people couldn't get married, and also not long before THAT when the "general knowledge" was that gay people couldn't form lifelong partnership bonds, that a gay relationship was automatically a casual one, just by its very nature. I'd say this falsehood probably persisted in some circles through the mid-1990's, and then combined with the lack of legal status for gay marriage, the two things sort of perpetuated each other into a never-ending circle of unfairness - gay people couldn't get married because their relationship was "unnatural" and if you needed proof of the relationship being "unnatural", well, it's not like they're married or anything, right? If nothing else, I'm glad that society finally found its way out of this little logic loop.
But I think there's a little bit of the old attitude left in this film - the older, more "conservative" history teacher is secretly gay, though it takes a while for the film to reveal this, with vague allusions to what happened with "Jennifer", the teacher she had her eye on years ago. So it just so happens that there was something twisted and unnatural about this relationship (there's that old logic trap again) even if we don't know all the details yet. So when Barbara (the history teacher) learns that Sheba (the new, younger art teacher) is involved in a romance with one of her students, she starts looking for ways that she can turn this to her advantage. This involves befriending her, and offering to keep her secret, but also using this to subtly blackmail Sheba into spending more time with her, so that eventually she'll turn to her for emotional support.
I'm not sure that the logic makes sense here - even if Barbara uses the information she has to discredit Sheba and ruin her marriage, that isn't going to turn her into a lesbian. Just because she's sexually open with a teen boy, that doesn't mean she's down for anything. Unless she's willing to outright blackmail her in exchange for sexual favors, it's a bit hard to see how taking away her career and marriage is going to produce the exact result that Barbara wants. Did she not think this through correctly, or is she supposed to be mentally imbalanced somehow? This could explain what went wrong with Jennifer in years past, but then she really can't be both things - a clever, plotting genius and also someone who's not mentally all there. Those two things would seem to be a bit contradictory, unless I missed something.
Also starring Judi Dench (last seen in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"), Bill Nighy (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Andrew Simpson, Juno Temple (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Tom Georgeson, Michael Maloney (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Joanna Scanlan (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Shaun Parkes, Emma Kennedy, Phil Davis (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Max Lewis, Anne-Marie Duff (last seen in "Before I Go To Sleep"), Julia McKenzie, Adrian Scarborough (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Jill Baker, Benedict Taylor, Miranda Pleasence, Stephen Kennedy, Derbhle Crotty.
RATING: 5 out of 10 gold stars
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