School Of Rock! School Of Rock! School Of Rock!
Last weekend on MuchMusic they showed the Jack Black virtuoso vehicle “‘The School of Rock” couple of times.
I first remember noticing Jack Black in the “X-Files” episode where Giovanni Ribisi played a character who could call lightning strikes. Jack Black was his best friend, so he got fried. I’ve seen him in other things like ‘Shallow Hal’ in which he was quite good and “Mars Attacks” where I hardly noticed him.
I usually don’t like watching theatrical movies on TV, especially on TBS or Spike, because the commercial breaks literally (figuratively speaking, of course) break up the rhythm of the movie. Most such stations also heavily edit the movie, and, of course, silently bleep the profanity (or even just the off-colour language), or overdub it with innocuous phrasing. Leslie told me about seeing ‘Sideways’ and hearing Thomas Hayden Church’s character refer to someone, through innocuo-dubbing, as an ‘ashcroft’.
There have been exceptions where the editing or commercials didn’t harm it too much; “Legally Blonde”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Knight’s Tale”, but (okay, sit down, this one is bad) when TBS showed ‘The Matrix”, they cut the scene with the all children potentials in the Oracle’s apartment, so that when Neo and Trinity are zooming up the elevator shaft on the way to rescue Morpheus, and Neo says ‘There is no spoon’, it just doesn’t make any goddam sense.
But I digress. Hoo boy.
Back to “The School of Rock”; it was hilarious. So much so that, despite the commercials (short breaks, oddly for a demographically driven station like MuchMusic - maybe it’s the attention span thing…), I watched it the second time they showed it that day. The awesome Joan Cusack is nearly perfect as the principal of the prep school where Jack Black’s character Dewey underhandedly gets a supply teacher job meant for his friend and roommate.
You may recall that the movie is about a bunch of uniformed (totally apropos in more ways than one) students who Dewey turns into a metal rock band. Well, the kids are great, the plot is delightfully daffy and the denoument is not what you’d expect, although it’s also nearly perfect.