Freedom Writer

其实给我们的也是一种启示，每个人都是自己的英雄,我们要相信自己,只要按自己的想法去做了,即使失败了,依旧不会后悔,依旧感到快乐,很欣赏那句话,每个人都给自己营造一个小黑屋,我们每个人都可以在里面放进一束光,其实我们都很坚强

英文影评: 自由作家 Freedom Writers review by Desson Thomson

自由作家,Freedom Writers

It doesn't matter if we're watching a scratchy old videotape of "To Sir, With Love," the 1967 Sidney Poitier movie, or "Freedom Writers," the latest back-to-school drama; the question on the chalkboard is always the same: When will the students ditch their attitude and love the teacher -- the one trying so hard to reach them?

Why do we keep falling for movies as cut and dried as these? How do we explain our perennial support for school-based films such as "Lean on Me," "Finding Forrester," "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "Dangerous Minds"? Perhaps it's because the perennial audiences for these films have all-too-recent memories of lunchboxes and lockers. And because these films reinforce our need to see teachers as sensitive heroes, rather than the dweebs, control freaks or buffoons we remember handing us back those flunked papers. We're suckers for meaningful mentor relationships.

So, is it a good thing or bad that "Freedom Writers," which stars Hilary Swank, adheres so closely to the cliched syllabus? Do we call this an invigorating reaffirmation of the things that work so well in these films or the unimaginative reiteration of same? At any given moment, both are true. By the simple force of her acting, Swank (as real-life English teacher Erin Gruwell) is compelling as she faces the apparently insurmountable hostility of her Long Beach, Calif., high school students -- most of them blacks, Latinos and Asians -- who have been deemed unteachable because of their housing project backgrounds, low scores and gang affiliations.

But Erin's strategic little victories at Wilson High follow excruciatingly familiar patterns, ringing of the trite business we associate with "Fame" and other hokey classroom fables. At first, her teaching methods are eager and cheesy -- she tries to explain the internal rhyme structure in a Tupac Shakur song, and it leaves the pupils cold, even laughing. But her determination to get their respect comes through. She works extra jobs to buy them books and take them on school trips. She makes them open up by encouraging them to write about their harrowing experiences at home, where death, drugs and depression are staples in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And she teaches them to look beyond their immediate worlds -- introducing them to the Holocaust and to a young girl named Anne Frank, who, like them, wrote about the terrifying oppression around her.

All of these moments may be based on true events; they are retold in "The Freedom Writers Diary," a book by Gruwell and her students. But even the movie's darkest and most affecting subjects -- interracial hostility in the classroom and schoolyard; the churlish resistance to Erin's innovative teaching approach from a dour principal (a thankless role for super British actress Imelda Staunton); a deteriorating relationship between Erin and her husband (Patrick Dempsey) -- don't feel informed by history so much as heavy-handedly manufactured from it.www.130q.com

This is not to say that -- for the audience looking for those reliable highs, lows and eventual successes -- "Freedom Writers" won't be satisfying. But to these classroom-movie-fatigued eyes, the satisfactions amount to feel-good pornography, in which some base instinct is serviced without heft, grace or subtlety. The performances by the younger actors, including recording star Mario and April Lee Hernandez, are full of verve and conviction. And the underlying messages about respecting students and expecting great things of them will surely warm the heart of any moviegoer. But the ultimate effect of "Freedom Writers" is only theatrical, merely Pavlovian: We respond to the performances as audience members but not as true believers. No sooner have we walked away from this movie than all those take-home pearls of wisdom, rallyings of the spirit and courageous gestures by students who didn't know they had it in them to excel, fade away. We have experienced a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic. Maybe that's why we keep coming back.

Poor Hilary Swank. She’s had a terrible year, and it’s only April. The biblical dog The Reaping is currently hounding her like Cerebus, but her awful 2007 started with Freedom Writers, dumped into the postholiday, pre-Oscar black hole of January and landing on DVD this week. And actually, it’s a film that works best in a particular kind of black hole, that kind that sucks away all your knowledge of every other film you’ve ever seen. (If only such black holes existed -- it would make enjoying so many movies so much easier.) If you’ve never been exposed to Stand and Deliver or Dangerous Minds or Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dead Poets Society or Lean on Me or Music of the Heart or Finding Forrester or Pay It Forward or Take the Lead, then have at it: you’ll probably love it. I’d rather watch Dead Poets Society again, but that’s just me.

The game Swank is Erin Gruwell, a Southern California newbie teacher who rocked the limited worlds of her inner-city gangbanger students by introducing them to the power of the written word. Word up! Book ’em! Or something. Gruwell is a real person and her kids, who’d been abandoned by The System, did actually triumph in real life, but movies like this only denigrate their achievement by making it look like a snap to overcome the wheels of oppression and ignorance. And they sugarcoat the reality that people like Gruwell are merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- it’s wonderful, of course, that she saved a handful of kids, but what about the rest of them? The System still sucks, still needs a major overhaul or maybe to be trashed entirely and rebuilt from the ground up, but those hard realities can’t crush the fantasy of this flick, which actually gives what should be the voice of reason to the villain, a school administrator played by Imelda Staunton: she’s the meanie trying to keep Gruwell from helping the poor kids who only need someone to show them a little understanding.

If only things were that simple. Or, wait: In these movies, they are.

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