CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

secondtake Blue Car (2002)The story of a teacher (male) having a tryst with a student (female) has been done so many times it's hard to know how this can make it fresh. And as it begins, with the really first rate David Strathairn as the teacher, you begin to believe it will be special. The girl, a talented high school student (Agnes Bruckner), has a troubled home and finds comfort in the teacher's kindness (and his encouragement for her poetry). And so it goes.The few complications to this plot are forced—a troubled sister and her sweetness that goes very bad, and a wife whose own mental issues are thinly portrayed—and so we are left mostly with the simple basics. Girl, man, crossed signals, and then…well, you have to watch to see.Director and writer Karen Moncrieff does a creditable job here. Not sure I've used that word before, and it doesn't speak well of the big picture. Bottom line? There are many better movies about this kind of thing. And yet, it's an enjoyable telling of the story, with Strathairn really solid and likable in a somewhat limited kind of character. Oh, and the poetry? Not bad!

Robert J. Maxwell Agnes Bruckner is a high-school senior from what is now commonly called a dysfunctional family. Her father has left the family. Her mother, Margaret Colin, is holding down a twelve-hour job and going to school at night. And Agnes must care for her little sister, Regan Arnold, who seems to have childhood schizophrenia. Her friends all have unethical quirks and Bruckner herself is given to shoplifting.Her only outlet seems to be poetry and she comes up with an impressive one she calls "Blue Car." This gets the attention of her teacher in the Advanced Placement class, David Strathairn, and he encourages her to enter a poetry contest to be held in Tampa. She's accepted as a contestant.Her home life being as rotten as it is, Bruckner invests a good deal of herself in the relationship with her teacher. He's reserved, friendly but cool at the same time, a perfect gentleman who may go places some day because, as he tells her, he's writing a novel. He keeps the manuscript in a briefcase and won't allow anyone to read it.Bruckner must sneak away to the contest in Tampa because her mother, preoccupied with her own problems and trying to keep the family on a tight budget, has put the kibosh on the trip.In Tampa, Bruckner runs into Strathairn and his family -- a wife and two kids. When the two are alone, Strathairn gives her a kiss and asks if it's alright. Bruckner assents, the two wind up in bed, and Strathairn deflowers her, somewhat to her discomfort.SPOILER.Afterward, Bruckner begins poking through Strathairn's briefcase, flips through the manuscript of the novel, and finds all the pages blank, except for a few which have stick-man drawings in the margins. A poem that Strathairn has claimed as his own turns out to have been written by Rilke.When her turn comes to read her poem before a vast audience, including Strathairn and his family, she lets him have it. She's discarded "Blue Car" and substituted another that is a raw, bleeding attack on the phony Strathairn.I didn't really care for the film that much, though I applaud its quiet intensity. It's familiar territory, the youth disillusioned by a mentor. We've seen it in, oh, "The Flamingo Kid," "Hearts of the West," and others. But at least this is from the point of view of a young girl who finds respite from real life in poetry. If I have to watch another movie about teen-aged boys trying to make money and get laid, I think I'll vomit.Strathairn is fine as the distant teacher trying to keep his hormones in check, and Margaret Colin, as always, is good in the role of the distraught mother. Even the little sister gives a believable performance, though she's only about six. Bruckner, on the other hand, is bulkily pretty but wears a hangdog expression throughout, as if playing an instrument on which there was only one note.I don't know if the writer/director, Karen Moncrieff, intended it or whether it stems from some brutalization of my own emotional apparatus but I felt considerable sympathy for both Margaret Colin's super-tense Mom and David Strathairn's shamed, phony novelist. Imagine the teacher's character. So lacking in self esteem that he must invent an alter identity for himself -- the promising novelist -- but feeling so low about the trick that he doesn't brag about it, just let's it fall casually and infrequently into conversations. What a tightrope the guy is walking, like a gay guy not out of the closet. The merest HINT in Bruckner's final poem, the slightest pin prick letting him know that she's uncovered his secret, would have brought him down. Instead, she hits him over the head with a crowbar.Strathairn has learned something, namely that you can only carry on a pretense for so long and that eventually your fraud, however modest, is uncovered -- especially by some nosy young girl who goes poking around in your personal effects. But what has Bruckner learned? That you can't trust anyone but yourself? I don't know if that moral calculus all works out.

loredenizen "Blue Car" is an initiatory tale. Auster tells Meg that she is going to be a poet, and lo and behold, by the films conclusion, a poet she has become. Observe how repressed and suppressed she was at the beginning of the piece; notice how fully self-expressed she is by the film's conclusion. We see her and her mother having authentic, heartfelt dialog, something there had been no room for or possibility of before. Reunited with her father, sitting in the "blue car", she recalls a past event so beautifully, so eloquently, so full of wonder it's clear that she will never go back to being the person she had been. When Meg asks Auster about the way his novel ends, he replies "They make love, and he is transformed." In actuality, it was she who was transformed. Her awakening came through suffering, but often this is what it takes for a person to really grow.Life is is often complicated. People do good things for bad reasons, and/or bad things for good reasons. Nearly every character in the piece has a turn displaying grandiose errors in judgment. These characters were all ( save perhaps Auster) unconscious. Meg herself was just pulled along, compelled to make it down to Florida and her rendezvous with whatever it was that awaited her. The shattering of her illusions, rather than destroying her, created a clearing for a greater understanding of herself and her relationship to the world. Meg's new awake and aware self created opportunities for new and healthier relationships, especially with her parents.Such is the untidiness of life that even though Auster was wholly inappropriate with Meg, he did deliver what he promised, in an unexpected and roundabout way. She lost her innocence, but gained insight and the ability to express it. The vulnerability, the loneliness, the pain he exploited in her were the very attributes that gave her the depth to be a great poet. With his own novel nothing but blank pages, he fed off of her raw talent, and couldn't resist the opportunity to take advantage. A relationship like this, when it occurs in real life (and they do all the time) is karmic. Someone comes along to serve as a catalyst for change. "Blue Car" is an initiatory tale, and Auster was Meg's initiator. It wasn't what she wanted or expected, but in a way, it was just what she needed. This was the only way her life was going to change. For all the ordeals she she underwent, she ended up in far better place than before.

jotix100 It's always gratifying to see an independent film that tackles a thorny subject, knowing well that any of the major studios won't dare to sponsor any director who is original and has a different way to present the story. Such is the case with Karen Moncrieff, a courageous new voice who is a first time director working with her own material.The idea that school is a safe haven for the innocent, is the subject to this film. Meghan who comes from a recently broken home can't accept the idea of her parents living apart. When in school, she looks up to a male role model, perhaps trying to fill that void in her life. At the beginning of the film Ms. Moncrieff steers us into thinking one way, when in reality she wants to tell us there is another side to the apparently kind man who takes Meghan under his wing.As we have witnessed by the recent wave of revelations of sexual impropriety in the Catholic Church, there are people that tend to go to jobs where they can prey on unsuspecting young minds, only to satisfy their own sick desires. The film is an eye opener for any impressionable young person into believing these people that befriend them don't have ulterior motives.Agnes Bruckner, as young Meghan makes an excellent appearance in the movie. Equally effective is David Strathairn, as the teacher. This actor is always a welcome addition to any film. Margaret Colin, as the mother, gives a painful characterization as Diane, who must make ends meet and has her feet on the ground. Frances Fisher, is the jaded teacher's wife who has seen her husband get involved with other young girls before.Ms. Moncrieff is a talent to watch.