Word: pupills
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...PUPIL Directed by Brian Singer Written by Brandon Boyce Starring Ian McKellen, Brad Renfro...
...scene midway through Apt Pupil, Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen) tosses a stray cat into an oven. The cat, of course, escapes, to wild cheers from the audience. This scene, while not profound or even endurable, epitomizes Apt Pupil. As in almost any drama, the villain is far more interesting than the "hero," who is likely asleep while our villain is drinking Old Crow, listening to opera and amusing himself by throwing cats into ovens or something. Of course, as in any Hollywood film, the one inviolable taboo is that no matter how many humans are gruesomly murdered, an adorable...
...such, Apt Pupil would seem to be a thriller that hovers somewhere between tolerable and entertaining. What's troubling, though, is that Dussander is a former S.S. officer, and this cat in an oven acts as an obvious metaphor for the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, the reference here being a blatant and almost nauseating one to Nazi gas chambers. If far more carefully done, a movie could perhaps have succeeded in making people understand the horrors of the Holocaust in visceral terms, for it is certainly a shockingly emotional event that is all too easily...
...Dave has a lot of trouble getting things down on paper," McKibben said of one pupil. "His main emphasis is doing things with his hands. His model of the boat was fantastic. It showed he really knew the information. If I asked him to write it down, it would have been very short." This is just the kind of application Gardner envisions: because McKibben knew that Dave understood the world in a kinesthetic way, she was better able to teach him and assess his knowledge. Dave must still learn to write well, McKibben said, but what counted here was that...
...dwells blissfully, for now, in Indieville. Singer, who was extravagantly courted by Hollywood (after 25 companies had rejected the $6.6 million-budgeted The Usual Suspects), is ready for Hollywood, on his terms. "My goal," he says, "is to bridge that gap between the independent and the mainstream film." Apt Pupil, a big subject compacted into a wee space and a tidy $15 million budget, may fall between the two. A bright high-schooler (Brad Renfro) learns that an old Nazi (Sir Ian McKellen) is living in his small town. The two strike up a symbiotic suspicion, each playing nastier games...