Word: janitor
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...okay. The lightness of the punishments (if the actions can be called punishments at all) show that the administration condones such behavior, that boys will be boys, that you don't "rat" on one of your own, that people of a certain status are above punishment. If a janitor had passed the same notes to students, he would have been fired on the spot...
...Before we actually tried it, space travel was a whole lot easier. See Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953). So simple a janitor (Bud) and a half-wit (Lou) could stumble onto a big silver sausage of a rocketship, flip a few switches, and go all the way to . . . Mardi Gras. Then Venus, with all the usual misadventures and comic contortions along the way. The code term for this is "classic comedy." It's a warning, because it's dated. Soft spots, stiff acting by supporting players, and yet A & C fans (you know who you are) are watching...
Damon and Ben Affleck, who not only star in the film but wrote the script, grew up in Cambridge, and Damon attended Harvard before dropping out to pursue his Hollywood career. The plot involves a mathematical prodigy from Southie working as a janitor at MIT, that school two T stops from Harvard. I walked into the Kendall Square Theater prepared to criticize or applaud the movie's school and our cities. The audience was a tough crowd; the seat were filled with MIT professors and students and a smattering of Harvard folk, all anxious to see how their academic worlds...
...while, it's possible to hope that Good Will Hunting may partake of the same exuberant spirit. Damon's title character, Will Hunting (isn't that cute?), is a janitor at M.I.T., solving impossible equations a professor leaves on a blackboard. After hours, though, he joins his lowlife South Boston cronies for stupid boozing and brawling. Class issues, rarely raised in American movies, seem about to be interestingly engaged. But no, Will's inability to find love and embrace his upscale destiny is the product of childhood abuse, the memory of which he must recover. This brings on Robin Williams...
This just in! The media distorts the truth for its own nefarious purposes! Mad City focuses on Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman), a reporter who "crosses the line" between reporting the news and fabricating it when he turns a hostage crisis involving a fired janitor (John Travolta) into a media circus. Unfortunately, this preachy film also crosses a line--the one that separates commentary from polemic. Despite fine performances from Hoffman and Travolta, it suffers from a fatal heavy-handedness...