Election 1999
This one has been out for a while but I’ve been wanting to see it and it is still at the cheap theaters. This was a neat offbeat dark comedy about a high school election, but it is more for adults than kids (esp. in its blunt sexual depictions). It centers around an over-achieving student and a good teacher who thinks she needs to be stopped. The teacher is a good role for Matthew Broderick who is always likable even though he’s a bit of a loser here. Reese Witherspoon overplays her part, but for an over-achiever maybe that’s what you want. There are some funny moments and occasionally brilliant dialog. In the end, however, the movie loses any type of message it may have been trying to get across and shows loathing for all characters involved. This might be okay in some movies, but this film is not a character study, it is more of a morality (ethics?) play, so we need to have good guys and bad guys, triumph and defeat. I feel like this could have been a better movie. It has many elements of a better movie but somehow can’t tie it all together. Perhaps the movie suffers from a paradox of its own conception: how can you say anything that matters in a story about something that doesn’t matter, i.e. a high school election.
I give it a B.