Word: film
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...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...
...Anyone who's seen a fight film will be able to predict the rest of The Wrestler. Randy gets one more chance: a 20-year rematch in Wilmington of his Ayatollah fight. Will he pass it up to save his life? (Not if there's gonna be an Act Three.) He also has a stab at mending the hearts of the women in his life. Will Randy manage to connect with his estranged daughter (Wood), who hasn't forgiven him for abandoning her? (That's Act Two, where the only innovation is that the girl's mother is never mentioned...
...Wrestler is that it's visually inert. Aronofsky's main camera habit is to follow Randy, just his imposing back, as he trudges through corridors toward another fight. (Martin Scorsese virtually patented that shot in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.) The trope does pay off later in the film, when the camera trails the briefly retired Randy down the stairs to his new job, behind a deli counter. But Aronofsky's main contribution was to lion-tame a jolting performance out of a forgotten hero...
...Motorcycle Boy), The Pope of Greenwich Village, Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon, the S&M erotic drama 9 1/2 Weeks, the satanic thriller Angel Heart (De Niro was the Devil), as a gangster in Elephant Man makeup in Johnny Handsome and a lowlife genius in a film of Charles Bukowski's Barfly. The guy was sexy, dangerous, adventurous in his choice of roles. The actor's cliché "totally committed to the process" could have been coined for Rourke...
Between rigorous concentration requirements and highly demanding classes, balancing the general demands placed onto a Harvard student can prove to be a daunting task. Add morning lift, afternoon practice, film review and weekly games to the mix, and one starts to wonder whether there is enough time to eat three meals a day and still get more than four hours of sleep...