BAD EDUCATION : Official Reviews ( SPOILERS)

[jo]

[jo]

Brian Tallerico is Editor of the influential RogerEbert.com --

[hughmanity]

www.rogerebert.com/festivals-and-awards/tiff-2019-bad-education-a-beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood-hearts-and-bones

From his tweets, we knew he would review favorably

[hughmanity]

www.liveforfilm.com/2019/09/11/tiff-2019-review-bad-education/

(Thanks for reprinting these reviews, Jo, I need to figure it out!)

[jo]

Sept 11, 2019 18:58:24 GMT -5 hughmanity said:

www.liveforfilm.com/2019/09/11/tiff-2019-review-bad-education/

(Thanks for reprinting these reviews, Jo, I need to figure it out!)

TIFF 2019 Review: Bad Education
Posted by Hillary Butler on Sep 11, 2019 in All, drama, Film, Reviews | 0 comments


Image Courtesy of TIFF


Charm can get you a lot in this world, can manage to get people to overlook all sorts of things. It’s because of this that employees of a Long Island school district managed to defraud the taxpayers of millions of dollars. Inspired by a true story, Bad Education tells this tale of embezzlement with some A-list help.

Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) is the kind of school superintendent every district dreams about. He is improving standardized test scores, seeing more students into more prestigious schools. He has a memory for every child, and teacher, even getting quizzed on them by his colleague Pam Gluckin (Alison Janney). He leads the local book club where the parents adore him. Frank seems to have everything all in hand. So when a student from the high school paper (Geraldine Viswanathan) starts asking questions about a school construction project he does what he always does and encourages her to dig deeper to further her quest to become a real reporter. That encouragement ends up leading to his downfall.

Her investigation starts to uncover strange invoices to companies that have been billing the school board for years. Her father starts to help her chase up leads. What she eventually reveals is even more scandalous than anyone could have believed. And as everything starts to close in, Frank does what he does best and turns on the charm in order to try and hide an ambitious embezzlement scheme.


Hugh Jackman may not have been the first actor that comes to mind for casting as Frank Tassone but ultimately his charisma is exactly what the character needs in order to pull off his scheme. Jackman flashes his smile and pours on the chemistry making him instantly likeable. Even for all of his character’s treachery you still feel for him. It’s some of his finest work.


There is likely no better sparring partner for Jackman in this feature than Allison Janney who, after her Oscar winning performance in I, Tonya presents a more restrained, though no less effective role. Ray Romano also has a small supporting part, though is under-utilized here.

For all Frank’s vanity that is depicted director Cory Finley (Thoroughbreds) doesn’t exactly use the most flattering light on his stars making every wrinkle and blemish stand out as Frank tries desperately to hide them. Outward appearances are, after all, everything.

There’s a lot to like about Bad Education, though it never fully blossoms. However for only his second feature Finley continues to show promise and managing a cast like this only adds to his resumé. Bad Education will surprise you, and remembering that this is a true story only adds to the shock value.

[hughmanity]

Still not doing it right, lol,  but wanted to reprint this one as a follow up to Tallerico's tweets

insert quote here

TIFF 2019: BAD EDUCATION, A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, HEARTS AND BONES
by Brian Tallerico

September 11, 2019 | 2
Print Page

It could be an attempt to redeem a profession from charges of fake news or just an easy way to provide an audience surrogate into a story, but there were at least three films at TIFF this year that I saw that included a journalist’s POV. Now, they are very different journalists—an Esquire staffer, a teen at her school’s paper, and an internationally famous photojournalist—but they happen to have one important thing in common: they're all central in films I would recommend.

The best of the three is Cory Finley’s “Bad Education,” a refined dramedy that drew comparisons to “Election” after its premiere, but people shouldn’t seek out hoping for big laughs. This is more of a social commentary, about how easily corrupt people can convince themselves they are doing good. We like to delude ourselves into thinking that corruption only comes from truly morally bankrupt people. That's not always the case. Instead of just delivering a by-the-numbers accounting of a true story, Finley has delivered a nuanced film about how nothing is quite as black and white as it seems. Don’t get me wrong—it is in no way a redemption piece for criminals, but it does see them as complex human beings in a way that’s dramatically rewarding.

ADVERTISEMENT


“Bad Education” tells a story you may remember: the Nassau County Schools scandal, in which administrators in the Roslyn school district were accused and convicted of embezzling more money from their job than any educator before them. Finley’s film opens before the curtain was lifted as Superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and his Assistant Superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) are celebrating another successful year. The students at the school do very well, getting into major colleges, and the financial success of the school has allowed them to break ground on an exciting new construction project called Skywalk. When she’s assigned to do a puff piece on that for the school paper, Rachel Kellog (Geraldine Viswanathan) uncovers a few inconsistencies in the books, and it’s not long before this entire house of cards collapses.

The entire ensemble is incredibly strong, including great supporting work by Rafael Casal, but this film belongs to Jackman, as a man who believes his people are doing the right thing, even when presented with their crimes. And he may not be wrong. What’s the harm if administrators at a prestigious school pocket a little of the money earmarked for education in order to present an image of success? We don’t pay school officials enough money on any level, so if they have to take some donations that would fix a leaky roof in order to buy a new suit in order to woo donors, who loses? One of the most fascinating conversations in “Bad Education” occurs when the scandal first comes to light and before the authorities knew about it and the board has to decide how to handle it. If they make it public, kids who got into Dartmouth or Yale may have their acceptances revoked. Who would that help?

Jackman does some of the best work of his career here, finding fascinating gray areas in a man who is holding a few secrets of his own from his fellow administrators. The film overall can be a little too low energy—but there are interesting acting choices throughout, and some really fascinating discussion topics for when it’s over.

[jo]

That is why I have everything crossed that the film is picked up by " a deep-pocketed buyer" so it can give it the proper wide exposure and highlighting that Hugh Jackman deserves to be in the OSCAR conversation!


Jo

[jo]

I just realized nobody (outside the TIFF-goers) has even seen a trailer


Jo

[jo]

Brian Tallerico really likes BAD EDUCATION --

He posted this the day after he saw the screening --

[jo]

theplaylist.net/bad-education-tiff-review-20190912/

‘Bad Education’: Hugh Jackman Excels As A Superintendent At The Center Of A High School Conspiracy [TIFF Review]
Charles Bramesco September 12, 2019 10:08 am Features, Festivals, News, Reviews


In Cory Finley’s new film “Bad Education,” Hugh Jackman stars as the impossibly put-together school superintendent Dr. Frank Tassone. With hair so perfectly jet-black it has to be dyed, an impeccable physique maintained by a diet of activated-charcoal smoothies, and face-skin kept taut via nightly dabbings of undereye ointment, he presents the image of success at all times. He can back it up in the workplace, too — he’s practically the mayor of Long Island’s Roslyn High School, having built them up into the #4 public school district in the state. He knows all the kids by name and they genuinely like him, almost as much as the moms batting their eyelashes at him during their book group meetings for parents. He’d rather keep to himself, though, still pining for his long since deceased wife.


To many outside observers, this man — a consummate professional getting by on a tightly controlled charisma while keeping his private life private — fits the exact same description as Jackman himself. Which is what makes everything that comes next so thrilling, and perhaps the best work of Jackman’s career. Finley sets in motion a series of events that will precipitate a great personal reckoning and moral downfall for the good Dr. Tassone, revealing a weak and craven man hiding just beneath the surface. Accordingly, Jackman’s performance turns into a fearless work of auto-deconstruction, as he explodes his public persona and leaves someone even more engrossingly human in the resulting rubble.


Something’s amiss beneath the placid exteriors of Roslyn High, and yet with the school thriving, nobody would ever notice unless they’re looking for it. The student paper’s cub reporter Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan) gets a dry assignment to report on plans for a campus-spanning “skywalk” that would require a lot of money and bring more prestige than actual convenience. So she starts poking around, and quickly finds some rather unusual discrepancies in the school’s financial records. Someone’s got their hand in the kitty, and to really underscore the brash hubris of their greed, they haven’t even gone through the trouble of covering their tracks.



The first domino to fall would be Dr. Tassone’s assistant in charge of business, Pam (Allison Janney, leaning hardest on the Lon Guyland accent but still making it work). Her breakdown and rationalizations after the administration find out that the school’s been funding her home renovations plays like an amuse-bouche of the humiliations to come. Nobody ever came to harm, goes her defense for her actions. More importantly, outing her for these transgressions would cast a harsh negative light on the school, threatening their place in the all-important rankings. That particular distinction, we’re informed, determines the property values in the area, and that’s the entire ballgame as far as the town’s concerned.


As the pointed fingers shift in Frank’s general direction, the fissures in his facade of perfection widen to reveal a full-blown American pathology through which bad people can always explain away their guilt. Screenwriter Mike Makowsky (who lived through the real-life events that inspired this script back in the early ‘00s) burrows into the psychology of a man who’s channeled what should be shame into a form of denial so advanced that it convinces him his crimes are for the greater good. A few peeled-back layers later, at his pathetic and tenderly vulnerable core, he resents that the school board president (Ray Romano) has attained millionaire status while Frank takes a modest salary for the sake of optics. Finley makes his audience feel just enough sympathy for him to understand his mindset — to quote the great philosopher Johnny Rotten, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? — without so much as approaching the point of absolving him.



Finley has a devil of a good time dragging us down along with Frank, tracing the ironies between the school’s positive messaging (it’s Frank who encourages young Rachel to cultivate the journalistic instincts that will ultimately be his undoing) and the negativity behind the scenes. As in his superb debut “Thoroughbreds,” the director takes aim at a repressed subset of the wealthy class convinced that their money insulates them from ethical consideration, as if everything they do is right because they’re rich and not the other way around.


What this film has that Finley’s debut didn’t is Hugh Jackman, one of our last remaining bona fide movie stars and still willing to throw his industry weight behind a risk such as this. Finley did exactly what a director’s supposed to do when he has a buzzy first film; he leveled up, both in terms of his production’s scale and the maturity of his critiques. This is precisely the sort of grown-up mid-budget entertainment that moviegoers spend the summer months clamoring for.

The Finley-Makowsky team has woven a knotty intelligence into each step of Frank’s descent into disrepute, and in their cleverest stroke of all, they cast a man known as a charming illusion to cut through the compartmentalization and lies.

Jackman shines, teasing us with suggestions of just how deep his performance runs.

[B+]
.

[jo]

[jo]

A "B" rating review -- but a review which also focuses on the stark realities and issues of today.


thefilmstage.com/reviews/tiff-review-bad-education-is-a-roller-coaster-ride-exploring-a-real-life-crime-with-complexity/

[hughmanity]

birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/09/12/tiff-2019-review-bad-education-is-a-good-lesson-on-everyday-greed

TIFF 2019 Review: BAD EDUCATION Is A Good Lesson On Everyday Greed
Corey Finley’s follow-up to THOROUGHBREDS makes an unbelievable true story hit scarily close to home.
By ABBY OLCESE Sep. 12, 2019 4 Comments

82
Shares

A couple of years ago, my high school paper made national news when its student reporters discovered their newly hired district superintendent had falsified her credentials. It was stunning at the time not only because it was impressive that a group of teenagers had broken the story, but because they were easily able to find red flags that the adults on the school board had overlooked. As an alumna, and a former newspaper kid, I was proud of them, but also kind of baffled. I knew several of the people on that board. They weren’t dumb. How had this woman duped them into passing her through the interview process without a second glance?

I thought about that story a lot while watching Thoroughbreds director Cory Finley’s new film Bad Education, based on a real-life scandal that rocked Long Island’s Roslyn school district in the early 2000s. Like my hometown, the scandal involved the superintendent—in this case Frank Tassone, a long-established leader of the school district who admitted to stealing millions of dollars from the schools over about a decade. Like my hometown, the story was also broken by a high school newspaper. Finley’s movie also asks and attempts to answer the same questions I’d had: how did this happen? And how did intelligent adults let it go so far?

It would be very easy to sensationalize this story, to make Hugh Jackman’s Tassone a mustache-twirling villain, or his colleagues a bunch of image-obsessed goofballs. But Bad Education, which was also written by a former Roslyn student, Mike Makowsky, doesn’t do that. Instead, it’s a very human movie that avoids making outright villains of anyone, Tassone included. Finley and Makowsky tell a story that twists and turns in some pretty odd ways, but always grounds its characters’ decisions in real emotions and desires.

Finley shows this story through several perspectives, but Tassone is its main one. He’s the respected superintendent of the Roslyn school district, having brought it national ranking and high numbers of Ivy League college-bound seniors. The high school is constructing a fancy new skyway that Tassone hopes will bring them a number one ranking. But there’s a problem. Just weeks before a scheduled vote to approve the district budget, it’s discovered that assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) has been embezzling from the schools’ coffers for years, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in misspent funds.

Tassone and his colleagues manage to cover Pam’s crimes up. But even after she resigns, the problem doesn’t go away. Rachel (Geraldine Vishwanathan), a high school reporter assigned to cover the new skyway project, notices that while there’s apparently money for new construction, there are still major issues with her school’s existing facilities. Listed contractors for the district turn out never to have worked with Tassone, or to be totally invented. And considering he lives on a teacher’s salary, Tassone is always conspicuously well-dressed, and drives a nicer car than anyone else in the district. As the truth comes out, parents and colleagues alike are shocked at the extent of the district’s rot.

At the surface level, these would appear to be the actions of evil people. But they’re not. Bad Education goes out of its way to show how much Tassone and Gluckin care about the district, the teachers and the students. Tassone is involved. He goes to conferences, knows current and former students by name, and makes an effort to know personal details about educators. Gluckin is flagrant in her greed and opulent lifestyle, but she’s not necessarily selfish. She lets her niece, a single mother, in on her spending, and pays her numbskull son to do the contract work on her house, because the poor kid needs a job. When Rachel writes up her story for the paper, she debates the ethics of publishing it, knowing that the results would ruin the lives of people who worked hard to make hers better.

Jackman gives a possible career-best performance as Tassone, projecting a genuine air of geniality and caring, while keeping the actual details of his life under wraps. What he does outside of the office doesn’t matter. The schools are the only thing that matters. His selfless effort and kind attention make him hugely sympathetic. Even after it’s revealed that he stole millions from the schools, you still want him to be happy. As a former teacher and an administrator, Tassone felt he was owed for putting up with helicopter parents and a community that took him for granted. Given the power to treat himself the way he felt he deserved, he took it.

From its relatable characters to its muted cinematography and intentionally bland set design, Bad Education is crafted to show us that the “unbelievable” story at its center isn’t over-the-top at all. It’s the tale of a banal crime committed by flawed human beings taken in by traditional ideas of material success, and given the tools to take that success for themselves. It feels like a decidedly American story, one that highlights our current capitalist impulses, and our willingness to overlook blatant warning signs in the leaders who promise us success.

[jo]

Many reviews resonate about current society's mores and morality and how the movie brings them out without overly dramatizing the facts and behavioral patterns. True to life, sad as it may sound.

Btw, I wish the moviegoing public supports movies of this kind...rather than being giddy about tentpoles. The young people growing up should also see how the non-superheroes live their ordinary lives.

Jo

[jo]

In Film/TV
TIFF Review: Hugh Jackman breaks bad in Cory Finley’s ‘Bad Education’
By Nick Johnstonon September 13, 2019

TIFF


Editor’s Note: Vanyaland’s Nick Johnston is north of the border all week long for the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival; click here for our continued coverage from the fest and also check out our full TIFF archives of past coverage.


It’s been a TIFF defined by non-traditional crime films at TIFF this year — diamond dealers in NYC in Uncut Gems, Tourette’s-suffering gumshoes in Motherless Brooklyn, murderous clowns taking a fake NYC to task in Joker — but only one is about the kind of ridiculous fraud that happens in public institutions like school systems, in which taxpayer money is repurposed for any number of grifts by unscrupulous “servants.” That film is Cory Finley’s Bad Education, which based on a true story as documented in a New York Magazine piece by Robert Kolker from a decade ago, and it might be one of the weirdest crime films you’ve seen in some time. It boasts what may be a career-defining performance by Hugh Jackman, who, in a career full of magnetic and fascinating roles, has found a part that requires practically every one of his talents as an actor to run at full-steam, and he pulls it off with style and grace.


It’s the fall of 2002 in Long Island, and in the midst of one of the best years of his professional life, Roslyn superintendent Frank Tassone ( Jackman) has been alerted to a potentially gigantic problem on the horizon. Thanks to her dipshit son (Jimmy Tatro) and his reckless purchases with the company card, it’s been revealed that Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), a key member of his school system’s staff, has been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of her 10+ year career with Roslyn. The school board, led by real estate magnate Bob Spicer (Ray Romano), has convened an emergency meeting in order to decide what to do. It was so simply a just a few hours earlier: they were celebrating being ranked fourth-best high school in the country, making plans for a “skywalk” to make the lives of the students easier, and Tassone was being hailed as one of the best administrators in the country. Now he’s faced with the end of a close friend’s career, and potentially, even worse, his own, now that Rachel Kellog (Geraldine Viswanathan), a junior reporter at the school newspaper, is pursuing the case with a dogged intensity.


Finley, who burst on to the scene a few years back with the astonishingly-assured Thoroughbreds (which we still believe all emo revivalists need to see), feels like an odd choice for the material, but in practice you can understand why he took the project. His removed yet operatic approach works most of the time, but it occasionally doesn’t gel with his subject as well as it should — the scenes of Kellog investigating the school’s misdeeds aren’t nearly as interesting as they could be, though her fights with her editor (Alex Wolff) and his concern about how this whole affair will impact the recommendation letter that Tassone has promised to write him are funny enough — but when he hones in on Jackman and his double life, or Janney’s fracturing relationship with her upper-crust family, or the community’s reactions to the malfeasance occurring within their school system, Bad Education really sings. His screenwriter, Mike Makowsky (who attended the high school while these events were occurring) does a fantastic job of illustrating just how deep the rot goes, showing and implying just how much fruit is spoiling on the vine: property values will decline if the school system starts to drop, which means tax revenue will go down, which will impact the city’s budget and then residents will begin to leave.


Yet all of this is really Jackman’s show (who has previously played flem-flam men, though not as compellingly as he does here), as Tassone requires every ounce of his charisma in order to perpetuate the con, and the actor is, most assuredly, up to the task. He weaponizes his charm in the early moments, and endows his character with a sense of earnest care about his pupils and the community that he works in: indeed, his downfall comes because he just so happens to tell a student that she shouldn’t just make “puff” pieces and investigate things as far as she could. Even better, His hesitant romance with a former pupil (Blindspotting’s Rafael Casal) and the subsequent revelations about his closeted sexuality are portrayed with sensitivity and great care by Finley, and it helps to layer an already-complex performance with an interesting added power. When you finally see the inner snake within Jackson take over — dodging and weaving out of the way until he finds himself completely cornered — his downfall has a wonderfully tragic dimension to it. Here was a man who cared and cared, and convinced himself that because his intentions were good, it would tip the scales in his favor.


Bad EducationFilm ReviewHugh JackmanTIFF 2019

[hughmanity]

  www.avclub.com/why-make-the-astronaut-in-a-diaper-movie-if-you-dont-wa-1838107070

Maybe this didn’t need to be a movie at all. I had my doubts, too, about the cinematic potential of the Roslyn academic scandal, in which it was discovered that a couple of high-ranking administrators of a public school district in New York embezzled millions of taxpayer dollars. But Cory Finley’s Bad Education (Grade: B+) gets some real dramatic juice out of what became a national story, largely by building itself around a compelling personality: district superintendent Frank Tassone, who Hugh Jackman—in one of his most intelligent and complicated performances—portrays as a pathological compartmentalizer, somehow capable of squaring his genuine, inspiring commitment as an educator with his vanity and secretly pursued self-interests. (The movie treats the financial crimes like an extension of the double personal life he was living under the community’s nose.)

I did some squaring of my own watching the film. As a follow-up to Thoroughbreds, Finley’s electrifying first feature, Bad Education is a little disappointing–it’s not nearly as unconventional, at least formally speaking, as his debut. But I’m also fascinated by the elaborate schemes of con artists, and the investigations that expose them. Though its muckraking reporter is just a high-school kid (Geraldine Viswanathan from Blockers), Bad Education boasts an uncovering-the-truth narrative nearly as queasily gripping as that of Shattered Glass. The script, by Mike Makowsky, takes great care to lay out the interpersonal dynamics of the school system, then begins to tear back the veil to reveal what few within that system knew or allowed themselves to see. The strength of Jackman’s performance is that he hoodwinks us with his decency, showing us how Tassone (transgressing in concert with another high-ranking administrator, played here by Allison Janney) hid under the prosperity and prestige he brought to the district, allowing everyone to consciously or unconsciously look the other way, because doing so benefitted them.

Like Lucy In The Sky, Bad Education takes liberties. The difference is that it does so to underline themes and strengthen characterizations. It’s proof that you can find a human story even in a subject as dry as an investigation into financial fraud. 

[jo]

variety.com/2019/film/festivals/best-movies-toronto-venice-joker-adam-driver-1203335606/?fbclid=IwAR147qUY5w1DQG5cvfah_wL9iA7n2EhvEAz714OjIPW-Dz-TM7twI7-7aIM

The 15 Best Movies of the Fall Film Festivals

By Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman

HOME Film Events
September 13, 2019 4:48PM PT
The 15 Best Movies of the Fall Film Festivals
By Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman


CREDIT: Toronto Film Festival
Over the span of just a couple weeks, more than 300 new movies are launched into the world via the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals — a trio of events that collectively kick off award season and tease what moviegoers can expect to discover in theaters over the year ahead. To help make sense of all those new offerings, Variety sends a dozen critics to the three events, sifting through the overwhelming lineups, looking for the proverbial wheat among so much chaff. Here, chief critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge identify the 15 films that impressed them most.



Menu


HOME Film Events
September 13, 2019 4:48PM PT
The 15 Best Movies of the Fall Film Festivals
By Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman


CREDIT: Toronto Film Festival
Over the span of just a couple weeks, more than 300 new movies are launched into the world via the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals — a trio of events that collectively kick off award season and tease what moviegoers can expect to discover in theaters over the year ahead. To help make sense of all those new offerings, Variety sends a dozen critics to the three events, sifting through the overwhelming lineups, looking for the proverbial wheat among so much chaff. Here, chief critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge identify the 15 films that impressed them most.

CREDIT: Courtesy of CBS Films

Bad Education (Toronto)

Hugh Jackman has become an audacious actor, and he brings an enticing real-world sneakiness to this fact-based drama built around the figure of Frank Tassone — the superintendent of the Roslyn, Long Island, school district, who gets ensnared in a singular scandal. The year is 2002, and Tassone’s assistant, played with uncaricatured moxie by Allison Janney, is revealed to have embedded a ton of personal expenses — including massive home-renovation costs — in the school-system payroll. A crime, to be sure, but is there a movie in that? As demonstrated by director Cory Finley, working from a script by Mike Makowsky (who went to high school in Roslyn), there’s a sensational movie in it: a kind of grubby Lawn Guyland white-collar-crime noir, in which the audience is placed in the position of watching a whirlpool of immorality churn deeper and wider. “Bad Education” tweaks how the obsession with quality schools, in an era of squeezed opportunity, has become both desperate and corrupting. Jackman plays Tassone as an idealistic public servant who’s also an impeccable walking mystery — a fallen missionary living a mirage of a life. This is an enthralling drama by a wizardly young filmmaker, featuring one of the most bracing actors we have going. — OG

Btw, DeBruge wrote the Variety review for BAD EDUCATION while Gleiberman went against the tide and showered high praises for THE GREATEST SHOWMAN!

[jo]

BAD EDUCATION is making many lists of outstanding new films... but this one highlights the social relevance of the film and its subject.


www.msn.com/en-ph/entertainment/celebrity/greed-torture-immigration-and-the-death-penalty-how-6-new-movies-explain-america/ar-AAHjKIK?li=BBr8zL6

msn entertainment

Greed, torture, immigration, and the death penalty: how 6 new movies explain America

Alissa Wilkinson 19 hrs ago


Editor's note: The opinions in this article are the author's, as published by our content partner, and do not represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.


The Toronto International Film Festival obviously isn’t an American film festival. But with so many Hollywood movies and American indies playing in its venues, it can be easy to forget it’s in Canada.

And you can tell a lot about what’s going on in the world by looking at what the movies that surface at TIFF are interested in. In 2019, the unofficial theme of the festival (as it was at Cannes in May) seemed to sit at the intersection of privilege and the mistrust of the powerful. Movies about the CIA’s torture program, embezzlement on local and global scales, the death penalty, and anti-immigrant sentiment were among the festival’s most buzzed-about titles, alongside one particularly prominent entry that, in the end, exposed the emptiest of worldviews.


Here are six movies that played at this year’s TIFF that explain a lot about America in 2019.

The Report

The Laundromat

Knives Out

Just Mercy




© Courtesy of TIFF Hugh Jackman in Bad Education.
Hugh Jackman in Bad Education.


Bad Education was one of the surprise delights of TIFF — a real-life tale of intrigue and larceny in the most drab of locations: a Long Island public school district. Based on a true story from the early aughts and directed by Cory Finley (Thoroughbreds), the film stars Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone, superintendent of the fourth-best school district in the state of New York. Tassone is beloved by parents, students, faculty, and administrators alike. He’s undeniably devoted to his work and to the many families who depend on the Roslyn school district to provide their children with an excellent education.

One day, however, thanks in part to reporting by a student journalist (Geraldine Viswanathan), the district discovers that the assistant superintendent for business, Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), has been embezzling millions of taxpayer dollars for years. Soon the noose starts to tighten around Frank’s neck, too — and there’s a lot he wants to keep hidden.
That kind of fraud is bad no matter what, but Bad Education expertly traces the effects of pressure placed on administrators and faculty. That college admissions matter so much that parents are willing to commit fraud to get their kids into good schools is no secret in 2019. But it’s not just parents who care; after all, as Frank is reminded repeatedly, good school districts mean higher property values, which in turn leads to a more affluent community. A complex set of factors (along with some good old-fashioned theft) lead to scandals like the one in Bad Education, and it’s unlikely to be the last.

How to watch it: Bad Education is currently awaiting distribution and a release date.



Joker

[jo]

www.hammertonail.com/reviews/bad-education-review/

Reviews

BAD EDUCATION
For Kids
by Matt Delman
September 15, 2019
0


(The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, or “TIFF” runs September 5-15. Hammer to Nail has boots on the ground with Matt Delman and Chris Reed covering so keep your browser pointed here! Like what you see here on Hammer to Nail? Why not pay just $1.00 per month via Patreon to help keep us going?)


Director Cory Finley (Thoroughbreds) graduates from students to faculty with his latest takedown of academic privilege, Bad Education. This true story of public school administration embezzlement is told with aplomb — and without assigning a letter grade, it’s safe to say the film hits its marks. Finley’s well-paced, taut drama may not carry the same significance of Spotlight or All The President’s Men, but from the characters’ points of view the world is on fire and so the tension is palpable in almost every scene. The notable cast does a swell job with Finley’s script, especially Hugh Jackman (The Greatest Showman) in the lead role of Frank Tassone, the Superintendent, and Allison Janney (I, Tonya), as Pam Gluckin the budget director. The story’s hero is a green high school newspaper writer named Rachel, played by Geraldine Viswanathan (Blockers), and although journalism is a key plot point, the main takeaway here is ignorance. Ignorance of the staff to let such a scandal go unchecked, ignorance of the nephew (a clueless Jimmy Tatro) who blew the cover, and ignorance of everyone to see behind the perfectly manicured veneer of the man in charge.


Frank Tissone is the type of Superintendent who makes an effort to learn every student’s name. He’s wonderful with kids, parents, teachers, and even the real estate agents whose house values depend on the scores of the school district. We discover he’s still in the closet when he, by chance, reunites with an old student (Rafael Casal) in Las Vegas and they hookup. Turns out he has many secrets. Finley knows how to show instead of tell, and a scene where Jackman covers up his plastic surgery incisions with foundation is a savvy metaphor for his entire career. Rachel is hot on his trail, and after Frank initially encourages her to turn her puff-piece into something more substantial, he comes to regret that advice when her investigation turns up some ‘dubious expenses.’ He threatens her in a restrained showdown seething with desperation.
Finley’s story has a great sense of place. The Long Island-ness of the whole thing gives the film flavor. The cinematography is adequate, for a film shot mainly in the doldrums of a high school, though recent projects like HBO’s Euphoria prove that an academic setting can indeed be made to look interesting. What the film lacks in stylistic panache, it makes up for with terrific dialogue. A scene where Frank delivers a sermon to a 6th grader and his neurotic mother about how to spell the word ‘accelerate’ is a highlight.


Bad Education boils down to a detective story of who knew what, when. Stealing millions of dollars from public schools is an immoral thing to do, even if nobody dies from it, and so perhaps the story should be given the same weight as Watergate. But it’s unclear who the victim is in all of this. The school is one of the best in the nation, the students seem happy and everyone in the film is extremely likable. Frank is a fascinating anti-hero, and Jackman’s performance may be one of this year’s best.
– Matthew Delman (@itstherealdel)

[jo]

Another inclusion of BAD EDUCATION in another 2019 TIFF BEST FILMS list, from Indiewire --


www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-movies-tiff-2019/cave-4/

Excerpts --

The 12 Best Movies of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival

This year's TIFF had a lot of exciting fall movies, but the highlights of the festival were more than just the buzziest titles.

By Eric Kohn, Kate Erbland, Chris O'Falt, Anne Thompson, David Ehrlich
Sep 14, 2019 12:26 pm


With more than 333 features from over 80 countries, the Toronto International Film Festival was a whole lot bigger than the buzz. Yes, TIFF launched some of the most anticipated titles of the fall, and elevated others that premiered earlier in the year, many of which will dominate the awards conversation in the weeks ahead. Fortunately, some of them are very much worth the hype. However, the program encompassed a range of first-rate narratives and documentaries from around the world as well, and any list of the best movies at TIFF must acknowledge these, too. Here are the IndieWire team’s 12 favorite movies from this year’s festival, with major Oscar contenders and under-the-radar gems alike.

As the highlights of the fall festival circuit were bigger than TIFF, we’ve also included a few gems from Telluride and Venice.

“Bad Education”

The incredible magic trick of Cory Finley’s “Bad Education,” a diabolically smart true-life crime drama that stars Hugh Jackman as a Long Island superintendent in his best performance since “The Prestige,” is how it manages to invite sympathy for the devil even after it convinces you why he should go to hell. Heavy with poisoned humor and as panoramic as Finley’s “Thoroughbreds” was laser-focused, “Bad Education” is in no hurry to reveal the full picture; watching the first hour of the movie, it’s hard to imagine how this seemingly benign tale of suburban malfeasance could possibly explode into the biggest embezzlement scandal in the history of the American school system. But it sure does.

Working from an incisive script by Mike Makowsky (who was actually a student at Roslyn High School when the action went down in 2002), Finley takes a kaleidoscopic approach to the story, craftily revealing what Dr. Frank Tassone (Jackman) and his assistant Pam (Allison Janney) knew and when they knew it. The back office of a school district may not sound like the most exciting place to set a movie, but “Bad Education” resists the temptation to sex things up for the sake of the drama. Finley’s rigid compositions and Lyle Vincent’s gliding camera moves galvanize Frank’s administrative fiefdom with a sense of absolute purpose. This is a film in which even the most innocent scenes crackle with nervous energy and — especially once Frank reconnects with a former student played by Rafael Casal — frustrated erotic tension. Most of all, it’s a film that’s galvanized by a sense of profound empathy that’s alternately deepened and challenged with every scene. Thanks to the most grounded performance Jackman has ever given, it all builds to a remarkable third-act scene that defies every rule about conventional filmmaking; a wordless and shockingly moving dance number so human and desperate that it makes you take all your own judgments with a grain of salt. —DE

More...

DE ( David Ehrlich) also wrote the impressive review of the film for Indiewire.

[hughmanity]

And while we wait....and wait....here is yet another very positive blog review

thefilmexperience.net/blog/2019/9/15/tiff-a-good-time-with-bad-education.html

TIFF: A Good Time with "Bad Education"
DateSunday, September 15, 2019 at 8:00PM
by Chris Feil

Long Island public school administration corruption comes to light in Cory Finley’s Bad Education, a sharp examination of early 2000s secrets hidden in plain sight. A young school paper reporter Rachel (Blockers’ Geraldine Viswanathan) first goes looking for a quote on her high school’s flashy new building project. What she ultimately stumbles upon are records that reveal an embezzlement scheme funneling millions of taxpayer dollars into the interests of those at the top, including Hugh Jackman’s chief administrator Frank Tessone.

Based on an actual case of massive fraud, Bad Education is less salacious than you might expect and much more humanely interested. Mike Makowsky’s script starts with the big picture and focuses towards the personal, detailing not only the slippery slope of petty to major financial theft, but also the landmine of Tessone’s closeted sexuality in a culture that forces him into interiority. The film has a strong, smoothly told grasp on the finer points of the story, such as economic inequity, gender imbalance, and personal relationships allowing people to look the other way.



The film is stacked with an intelligent cast bringing humanity and wit to the surrounding characters, including Annaleigh Ashford, Ray Romano, and Alex Wolff. Allison Janney delights as Pam Gluckin, the first administrator caught committing credit card fraud, deepening the film’s complex emotional core and sharing unexpected chemistry with Jackman. Some of the ensemble (especially the great Viswanathan) aren’t given quite enough to work with as others in terms of a balanced narrative, but that’s because it surprising shifts its focus to key criminal Tassone.

As the film progresses, the ensemble piece fades to more of a showcase for Hugh Jackman, rewarding the actor with one of his most complex characters and paying off in his greatest performance. There’s something tragic in Tassone’s downfall as Jackman portrays it: a life of shame and vanity competing for space in his motivations, his public nice guy persona being a methodical, but ultimately easily torched veil to hide behind. Jackman turns this all in on itself, smoothly shifting from confusion and coldness with raw nerve composure. The actor isn’t often noticed for such subtle work as this, but it reveals a smartly observed sensibility that we should hope to see more of.

Where Bad Education succeeds most richly is with its tone. Empathic but not forgiving, the film thrives on its nuances of character and upper middle class economics to prevent it from becoming a reductive take on institutional evils. Never quite a wholehearted comedy or outright satire, instead the film first deceives the audience with lightness before rolling us into a clearer context. Finley makes something that is journalistic but not dry, immensely pleasing but not aggressive. It’s more low-key and confident in the audience’s brains than his debut Thoroughbreds; watching it is witnessing a filmmaker grow up and chill out in real time. B+

[mamaleh]

I'm hopeful that HJ will be recognized come awards season even if the film itself doesn't get A+ reviews. Not so long ago Rami Malek won his Best Actor Oscar for BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, which received only mixed-to-good reviews. So there's hope--assuming it finds a responsible buyer/distributor and becomes eligible.

Ellen

[hughmanity]

Nice to know ROLLING STONE magazine includes it in its 12 best of the festival list 

www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/10-best-movies-toronto-film-festival-2019-884040/

Director Cory Finley (Thoroughbreds) beats the sophomore slump with this deconstruction of a real-life scandal in the Roslyn, NY, school system, in which Teflon superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman, channeling the perfect-life facade to perfection) watches as a tiny thread regarding personal expenses is pulled and slowly turns him into the face of a wide-ranging embezzlement scheme. Most folks would have gone the full-blown satirical route; instead, Finley and writer Mike Makowsky juggle a dark comedy about corruption, a drama about shoeleather student journalism and a character study about a nice guy slowly seeing his mask peeled back. Also: Allison Janney is God.

[jo]

The reviews can only strengthen the selling point of this movie -- hope it gets the full attention it deserves, via a more welcome distribution channel and more awards attention!


Interesting how the ratings at IMDB have now risen to 7.9 of 10 from 105 voters ( which dovetails with the current Metacritic rating of 79 ( based on Metacritic's selected reviewers). Metacritic is more rigid compared to Rotten Tomatoes, whose current rating is also 79% based on 19 reviews. The IMDB vote distribution is now quite even among all the demos ( age/gender/nationality)

www.imdb.com/title/tt8206668/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt

Jo

[hughmanity]

A couple of new reviews up at RT; the film now stands at 85%. It still stands at 100% for top critics, albeit there are not too many of those. (And we will probably have to wait for release time for many more!)