Lucy Punch – Mosher'sUnimaginativelyEntitledBlog

Due to illness, lack of sleep and a hectic weekend we only managed to catch the one movie on Saturday. So sadly (or perhaps not) we forewent Bridesmaids and opted for the following instead. There’s nothing else new out this week at all that I could spot. Pretty unusual these days.

Bad Teacher

“Hold my ball sack?”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Crap teacher passes time in class while saving for a boob job

See it if you like: slightly gross-out and marginally edgy humour. Not to be confused with Bad Santa which was way funnier and far less politically correct.

The reviews for this were generally OK, which surprised me after seeing the trailer. Call me disaffected, but I’ve seen so many trailers where every joke in the film has been crammed into 2 and a half minutes that I’ve given up on a lot of comedies before I’ve seen them.

It was better than I’d hoped for, but not as good as some of the reviews have made out. Part of this is due to the trailer effect and partly as some of the jokes just aren’t that good. It’s also rather predictable. Cameron Diaz is well cast as the uncaring, dope-smoking, swearing, money-grabbing teacher who’s just looking for a rich sugar daddy. However, she’s well matched by Lucy Punch as the opposition – Miss Amy Squirrel who’s so nice you wonder why the kids haven’t ripped her apart and beaten her to death with her own dismembered arms.

Justin Timberlake makes another movie appearance and the best thing about this is it means we’re less likely to get another of his shitty albums if he spends time on screen instead. Frankly, I wasn’t too impressed with his turn in Bad Teacher – he was much better in The Social Network.

Jason Segel as the unwanted PE teacher and Phyllis Smith as the naive older teacher who just wants to be liked are both very underused characters. The scenes with Segel produce a lotof the best dialogue, while Smith’s indecisive flustering makes for some amusing viewing.

On the whole, a decent film even if it does give away a lot of our teaching secrets. Like the fact that the real reasons for getting into the jobs are the long holidays…