Sam reviews…
Jul.04, 2008, filed under Miscellany
Let me get this straight, right from the start: I am a massive fan of the original Ealing comedies. MASSIVE. My adoration for the original films is right up there with my love of The Importance Of Being Earnest and the Miss Marple movies… Hell. Anything with Margaret Rutherford in it. It was because of those films I wasn’t entirely dischuffed with the idea of boarding school.
Now that I’ve made that clear, I’ll explain how DVD swapping works in my family. Mum and I buy DVDs and swap them after we’ve seen them. If we don’t like them we don’t want them back. Hence I have a number of movies in my collection that frankly I would prefer not to own. So when Mum handed me this DVD and explained she and Dad had only managed twenty minutes before having to turn it off because it was so awful, I didn’t hold out much hope that it was any better than I’d been led to believe.
With that in mind, we put it on 20 minutes before bedtime the other night, expecting to be ready to turn it off in disgust by the time we’d finished our mugs of tea.
We went to bed unreasonably late.
Watch this film expecting it to be like the originals and you’ll be disappointed, however I think that if the originals hadn’t been made, and this was the first adaptation, Ealing wouldn’t have made it any other way. It’s aimed at those who are familiar with internet subculture, and the sense of humour is such that I’m not surprised my parents hated it. But from the moment I saw Rupert Everett doing an utterly superb job as Camilla Fritton, I knew I was in for a surprise.
There is a scattering of familiar faces from the great and the good of British comedy, including Celia Imrie, Kathryn Drysdale (of Two Pints… fame), Russell Brand, Fenella Woolgar (recently seen playing Agatha Christie in Dr Who) and Stephen Fry; and they all seemed to be having a marvellously good time. Relative unknown Gemma Arterton puts in an accomplished, confident performance as headgirl Kelly, showing more capable than the rabble of teachers who spend their time drunk on matron’s frightening cocktail concoctions. The scene in which new girl Annabel is introduced to the various cliques — which I particularly enjoyed as a survivor of the hothouse environment that is boarding school (“We’re not Goths, we’re Emo!”) — shows that this school isn’t just about social groupings but specialist squads all keen to use their criminal initiative.
“Daddy, you can’t expect me to stay here. It’s like Hogwarts for Pikeys!”
As well as random shots doffing the proverbial cap to English popular culture past and present (“You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”) there are plenty of references to current political arguments about how to run the UK education system and the tendency of the press to go for headlines rather than actual news.
This film isn’t just puerile comedy: it’s genuine satire. It may not be intellectual satire, but it is satire nevertheless.
It’s not as good as the originals, and to be honest I don’t think they ever thought it would be. The bad-girl-comes-good was never going to be an option with this film, and I did find the stupid-girl-gets-clever equivalent deeply annoying for making the tired old mistake of conflating intelligence with general knowledge. It is, however, a fun way to spend 90 minutes or so and if you can forgive the makers revamping a time-honoured classic for the internet generation, you could do a lot worse.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
