Hamlet 2

Hamlet 2
Starring: Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, Joseph Julian Soria, Melonie Diaz, David Arquette, Elisabeth Shue, Phoebe Strole, Skylar Astin, Amy Poehler
Directed By: Andrew Fleming
Written By: Andrew Fleming, Pam Brady
Release: 2008
Grade: B-

From a young age Dana Marchz (Coogan) wanted nothing more than to be an actor. He was in a few commercials, but never made it upon realizing that he wasn’t very good. Well you know what they say: those who can’t do teach. So Dana follows this and becomes a high school drama teacher. At the school he teaches at the drama program isn’t very large. There are really only two students that enroll in his class, Rand (Astin) and Epiphany (Strole). They are in every production, which is always a remake of a Hollywood movie. These productions are hated by everyone, especially the school’s critic, an extremely short freshman, who seems more intelligent than anyone else in this film.

The school has a lot of funding problems and nearly all of the extra programs have been cut. So all of the Latin students who live in the less well of areas get stuck in the theater program. There is total chaos in Dana’s classroom from this point on, which is stuck in the cafeteria with the lunch ladies making noise. He isn’t getting any respect from anyone except for his two loyal students. Everyone else is just taking advantage of him. Not to mention after this year, drama will be canceled. Dana decides that the best way to get funding and save his program is to bring attention to it. He sets out to make the play this year be the best he has ever directed. Rather than doing another movie turned play, he is advised to do something else. Dana takes this as a recommendation to create a creative piece of work. He spends a couple days struggling with it and ends up with Hamlet 2, a sequel to William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy that includes and boys having a sexual attraction to Jesus as he resurrects, fights with the devil, and features a bi-curious male character.  read more »

I’ll admit, I might have laughed at Hamlet 2 a little more than the average viewer because I have a particular loathing for the Teacher-That-Changed-My-Life classroom drama. Now that I’ve started writing this review I’ve realized that I hate it more than I hate any particular genre because there really isn’t any decent variation to the common them with its inspiration-by-numbers bullshit and Very Important Life Lessons you can see a mile ahead…

You know them because you’ve been forced to watch them in school at one time or another while your teacher grades papers: Dead Poet’s Society (if I got a paper cut every moment there was an obvious cliché, I would have bled to death before minute 25. At least Robert Sean Leonard got to die before this movie ended leaving the rest of us to finish this dreck ), Lean on Me (…while I doze off from tedium), Dangerous Minds (…would stay far, far away from this formula flick as in real life a teacher that looked like Michelle Pfieffer would have had a train run on her before the second bell rang), and most recently, the Oprah Winfrey-produced The Great Debaters (debate and racism!!! Integrate them together and get a…really dull movie. It might have been better if Robert Downey Jr. played Denzel Washington)…  read more »