I was surprised to find on looking this movie up on the IMDb, with this cast (Jeff Daniels, Jena Malone, Paul Sorvino), that it was actually a TV movie. It’s one of those rare exceptions to the format that turns out actually a lot better than a lot of theatrical releases.

Jena Malone delivers great voiceover narrations – in Goldie Hawn’s Hope (another great TV movie, btw), in the recent Saved!, for example – and does another great one here, in addition to her onscreen performance. The editing and score are suitably frenetically MTV-styled, making a high school academic decathlon seem as fast-paced and physical as the more typically movie-portrayed sports.

The film presents quite a beautiful quandary and, like the test paper they come into possession of, really offers no hard answers in the end. Ultimately you can’t deny the outright badness of the world, and the cheaters out there – it’s up to you if you want to stoop to their level and succeed or waste your life trying to do it “right” (oops I made that into a biased statement lol). The movie’s based on a true story which makes it all the more scary, and the mandatory post-script text blocks detail some quite humourous follow-up stuff that re-enforce the message even more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 at 11:18 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.