Bea Swanson
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Ava-Grace Willis
Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
dysfnctional101
I saw this movie for the first time in 8th grade and thought it was great. Funny and entertaining, with a bit of a moral thrown in. Once I went to highschool my view changed somewhat, considering I went to (and am at) Whitney Young. It's been said here before, but the characterization is all wrong. Whitney has a majority of black students and is neither private nor in the suburbs. At the time the movie was made, Whitney was simply the best public school in the city (new rivals have cropped up in recent years), and so it developed a nucleus of extremely intelligent kids. For the most part they are not the privileged suburbanites portrayed in the movie, although there have been some families that would move into the city just to send their kids there. Anyways, it killed the moral for me, but it showed me a different fault in the Chicago Public schools, that good schools get help while smaller ones get forgotten. This was the story of a forgotten school fighting to get their name back into the light. They went about it the wrong way, but there is something to be learned from it. Or maybe not, considering the funding gap just seems to get worse.But if I forget all of this, ignore the realities, this is still a great movie.
LFChachere
I attended Whitney Young H.S. and was a member of the 1st Whitney Young Academic Decathlon team in 1982; the first year this competition was nationalized. I was very interested to see this movie as I did not even realize Whitney Young had continued to win the Illinois competition.Had it not been for the misrepresentations in this movie, I probably would have given it a much better rating.For those outside of the Chicago area, basically Whitney Young AND Steinmetz are BOTH Chicago Public high schools. The difference is that Whitney Young is a magnet school, where you apply and get accepted on the basis of merit of your grades in elementary school, whereas Steinmetz is a district school which accepts anybody who lives in the neighborhood. Whitney Young is NOT a privileged school filled with rich kids (some of the people making comments, after seeing this movie, even had the impression that it might be private and/or suburban.) The overwhelming majority of my classmates were minorities, with nearly 70% black. As a matter of fact, there were probably more minorities at Whitney Young than Steinmetz, which is located in a white neighborhood on the north side of the city. I was disgusted by the Jeff Daniels' rant implying that rich suburbans were sending their kids into the city to attend a public high school; some line about this school being a "fortress in the city" -- The majority of kids who attend Whitney Young are from middle class and poor families. I just could not believe that Hollywood could stoop so low, to portray high achieving public inner city public school city kids as privileged snobs, for the apparent purpose of getting the audience to sympathize more with the Steinmetz kids .. to make us feel that the kids being cheated deserved to be cheated.And Whitney Young having cheerleaders at this event .. PLEASE .. that's just insulting the intelligence of the viewers.The reason that Whitney Young would consistently beat out other Chicago schools year after year is very simple: There is a system in place in Chicago with centralized magnet schools such as Young, Lane Tech, where all of the A students from grade schools across the city can attend and be in classes with each other ... for the purpose of having enough kids in the same place to provide advanced courses.The professor at Steinmetz who helped his students cheat, basically tried to cheat kids at another school who worked VERY hard to earn their spot, and that stinks. This film did a very good job at desensitizing the audience about the injustice done to the kids who actually EARNED the win, in order to help add sympathy to the Steinmetz students who were NOT underprivileged, but simply chose either NOT to apply to Whitney Young, or simply did not work for the grades to get into Whitney Young in the first place.The movie tries to make you feel sympathy for the cheaters, rather than the victims of the cheating. What a wonderful message for America.
insomniac_dreamer
What I absolutely loved about this movie is the fact that it displays a genuine moral dilemma without necessarily preaching anything. It doesn't provide viewers a standpoint for moral ascendancy, instead, the viewers get the pleasure of interpreting the situation, thus gaining that threshold for ascendancy.I'd say the film did play out a bias, and the bias was in favor of the students from Steimetz High. I'd say that it is rather a fair bias, because it is rare to see the cheaters as the protagonist. Amidst this, they weren't portrayed as the over-glamorized heroes that will promote a cheating society. What John Stockwell did was to give us a dose of reality, an arena for sympathize with cheaters, at the same time, displaying the consequences of the human act.I love the mixture of documentary footages. Opening Credits was awesome, wherein there were raw footage in grainy stock of actual American high school. It played greatly on the emotional framework that the film worked on and I'm so glad my parents were able to find a copy of the film on DVD.
Roxburyfunny1
It's scary and it's shocking what one school had to go through just to be the best. Did i agree with what they did? no. but look at they had everything short of mini bar's and a juice room they had all the latest stuff and this one school is struggling just to keep running. These students, these kids were determined to be the best no matter what i took. It is a great movie and a good yet sad story of how these kids were driven to cheat and how they just wanted to feel and to know what it was like at the top. Recommended for those who want to watch something new a fresh! ~!
