Word: hiller
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LIFE AT THE fictional JFK High almost matches my real high school. We had shootings, locker searches, and teachers flipping out--but not all on the same morning. Such is the unbelievable pace, however, that colors much of Teachers, the thoroughly confused new release from Arthur Hiller...
Teachers seems to be the victim of directorial schizophrenia. Arthur Hiller has made films before, and he knows that MGM wants to make loads of money. Therefore his film possesses all the advertising and proper packaging of Porky's or Meatballs. The heavily promoted soundtrack, a good sign of a bad movie, is from well-established dead armadilloes like Bob Seeger, 38 Special...
...soon as Nolte arrives at school, a huge dose of parental gravity gets overlayed on the cellophane. Hiller and screenwriter W. R. McKinney (an alias if there ever were one) possess Social Consciousness. They want to make a statement about an Important Issue, like those movies about bedwetting and wifebeating that TV does so well. What else but misguided do-gooderism could be behind dialogue like this...
...John Hiller...
...women whose unlisted phone numbers they have lost; the air around the Manhattan Bridge filled with the falling bodies of suicidal lovers; a service that rents cardboard cutouts of celebrities to fill up the room when a hopeless bachelor tries to give a party. A pity Director Arthur Hiller could not sustain such a high level of lunacy throughout this adaptation of Bruce Jay Friedman's pop-classic meditation on how urban realities undermine our urbane fantasies. If he had, unlikely adjectives like Felliniesque might now be accreting to The Lonely Guy. But half the film is merely joky...