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GRITZ Movie Reviews: Billy Bob is Back, Jodie Foster Shines


MR. WOODCOCK

Billy Bob Thornton is back, in what he himself told me was “Bad Santa without the alcohol.” That’s a pretty apt description.

Woodcock is a career middle-school gym teacher with unorthodox teaching methods and a really bad attitude. And if you think he is hard on the kids, wait until you see him coaching the elderly swim class at the YMCA.

Still, Susan Sarandon has fallen in love with the P.E. teacher, and plans to marry him, not realizing just how much her son, played by Seann William Scott, hates Woodcock. After all, Woodcock did everything in his power to humiliate and embarrass Scott’s character, John Farley back in the day. Now, Farley is a best selling self-help author who finds himself breaking every rule in hips own book to stop the unholy union of his mom and his own personal Satan.

It seems Billy Bob is making his way through every sports movie possible, with football (Friday Night Lights), baseball (Bad News Bears) and even paint ball ( School for Scoundrels). With Woodcock, Thornton is the epitome of every kids worst teacher nightmare. 

Great acting all around, from Oscar winners Thornton and Sarandon as well as from Scott.

Four and One Half Stars

If you see Woodcock in this position, by all means, protect the family jewels!

 

 



THE BRAVE ONE

Jodie Foster stars as a radio talk show personality in New York City named Erica Bain, who somehow manages to see the beauty amidst the sky scrapers and subways of her home town. That is until the love of her life is savagely beaten to death, putting her in a hospital and inches away from death’s door herself.

Bain decides to buy a gun for protection, and in a series of unexpected events, she becomes a vigilante killer, taking the law into her own hands.

Along the way, she befriends Police Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), a man who feels her pain in a big way.

It is a very well written film, and Foster and Howard both deliver excellent performances. At first I thought I would be sitting through a female version of Death  Sentence, but I was wrong. This one was just a little more thought out, and cerebral, and I like that

Five Stars

 

-Reviews by Michael Buffalo Smith

 

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