Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

brent7767 Driving Lessons came out in 2006 Directed by Jeremy Brock. The movie is about a teenage boy who lives with his mother who is very forceful in his life. His mother is helping an old man named Mr.Finchem, who is in need after a tragedy of running over his wife. Ben's mother approaches Ben to get a job to help out with helping Mr.Finchem. Ben finds a job helping out a older woman named Dame Evie, a previous actor. The movie has its ups and downs but overall was a good film. The aspect of the movie I enjoyed was the actors Jeremy Brock chose for the characters in the film. The actors really found how to play the right emotion and fit in to the story. I'm sure they took hours of practicing lines but the way they feel their character you can tell no one else could of played the role better. Ruper grints role Ben was very emotional in different ways. He had his grumpy moments and his sad depressed moments, he showed an emotion in this movie you couldn't see in harry potter. The music selection in the film was also a strong point in the movie. Every scene seemed to have a new song to show the emotion and makes the plot all fall together. When Ben and Evie have depressing points Jeremy Brock chose good audio to play in the back ground to really make you feel as if you were a part of the conversation and mood. At the end of the clip Jeremy Brock chose the song "Auld Lang Syne" the song we all hear on New Year's Eve. The song represents a new beginning just like Ben had a new beginning at the end of the movie. The plot of the story was not that intriguing to me, I think this because I do not like the type of movie this one falls in. It came of as a depressing comedy but the comedy in the part was not funny to me one bit. I don't know the crowd Jeremy Brock was trying to get at with the genre of the story but it almost seemed to be aimed at an elderly crowd. The story line was also quite boring. The thing I was confused on most was why Jeremy named it driving lessons since there was only a few clips of driving lessons, maybe there was a hidden secret about the name that I did not follow. In conclusion the movie has its good and bad parts like every other movie. The way Jeremy took the to put all the little pieces together to make the film the way it is I like because he paid special attention to detail with the right actors and music selection. The bad of the movie was just the plot being somewhat boring and not appealing. To anyone who is questioning to watch the movie I advise to do so because it's not all that bad,

Parker Schings If I were sick, too tired to get out of bed and grab a DVD, and stumbled upon Driving Lessons on TV at three in the afternoon on a weekday, I would watch it. Other than that I would never watch that movie under any circumstances ever. The movie opened with various scenes of what seemed to be nonsense and did not seem to have a major plot at any time of the movie.It sort of had a Napoleon Dynamite feel to it (great movie). This could be appealing to someone that is willing to stare at a screen blankly for an hour and 40 minutes with an occasional laugh. The most entertaining scene of the movie comes late when Ben, the main character of the story, tells his big crush, Sarah, off. After an awkward rejection early in the movie he gains some confidence during some character development, and gains the courage to promptly tells her to, "f*** off." Which is interesting because she was trying to tell him to look to God to make him feel better, which is what his mom had been doing the entire movie in a more twisted way. There is also the slightly over-the-top, overbearing, and dominating mother, Laura, that controls everyone around her. She turned me off from the movie because she is just another stereotypical annoying Christian mother that tells everyone they are defying God whenever they would do something she did not want. The most extreme example is when Ben tries to run off with his friend and retired actress, Evie, and his mother tells him that if he continues to leave her ridiculous play, he would be turning his back on God. She also tries to get Ben to get a job so he can give his money to a homeless man, that lives in their home, who had run over his previous wife, which is total crap. That was the type of scene where you feel every teenager cringe at the sound of that request. There was also their supposedly great scene where it was Ben and Evie in a camping equipment store which showed various scenes of them goofing around together. The only though in my head was that this has been done many times before, and done much better at that. One thing I noticed was all of the random camera shots of Ben's mom shooting men around the church seductive looks throughout the movie, making me think that she may be having an affair. I was almost excited to see that encounter when the dad found out and confronted the mom about it. No such luck was found, it was just another random thing that the producer included to confuse me and tease me into thinking something interesting was going to happen. So all in all I give this movie a solid D+.

lando3095 Delando Johnson Mr. Faziani English 1 November 13, 2013Driving Lessons I honestly don't like the movie Driving Lessons. I feel that is was dry and confusing. I also feel that the movie was not well put together. In my opinion Jeremy Brock left the reader out on a limb too much. He left too much of the movie up to the viewer's interpretation and it gets confusing. The movie has a good moral value and it had a good plot it was just too much. I feel that he could have focused on one thing or explained other things more. For example, what is Mr. Finchem's condition and how he got that way. We see him gone crazy but as a viewer we can't help but wonder what his problem is and why he eventually hit Ben's mother. Even at the end we see Ben's growth but we are still left out in the dry with other characters and there are question left unanswered. For example, Ben's mother's relationship, where the characters go from there, Mr. Finchem's situation, etc.The actors did a god job in my opinion. You could tell what type of character we were supposed to get from the actors. For example, Bens' mother, you could tell she was bad from how she spoke and her actions. I feel that Eve was a very good character also because she brought the conflict to the story and the solution. She made Ben disobey his mother but also helped him find himself. This is Ben's story and he needed Eve to grow. Jeremy Brock did a good job of intertwining the title of the movie with how the movie plays out. He named it driving lessons and he showed us how Ben's driving lessons affected the whole movie. For example, he was driving his mother to cheat on his father which caused conflict with his family. Also, he was driving Eve around and working for her which caused conflict with his mother. But ultimately the thing he was having driving lessons on was his life. Ben was learning how to be a man and control his life the way he wanted. Eve helped him grow as a person. She helped him break out of the shell he was in and helped him make decisions that were best for him. I feel that that the mother was also another good character. I feel she provided the conflict in the story with her cheating, her strictness and her being a hypocrite. Jeremy Brock did a good job of showing how bad she was and how she affected Ben's life. Ben's mother was the reason he was like a scared boy. She manipulated him and used her power as his mother to make him do things she wanted without caring if that's what he wanted to do. She didn't allow him to have fun, or be himself because she was too over protective. She also manipulated the father and how the father acted with her reflected with Ben.

Filmophile I was persuaded to watch this film but approached it with reluctance, expecting a tedious 'rites of passage' cliché cache with obligatory feel-good ending. But it was a lot better than that.The cast looked promising, and without exception, delivered. I've long felt that Rupert Grint, somewhat squashed by pedestrian screenplays in the Harry Potter series, had a lot more to offer than we've seen so far. Anything with Laura Linney has to be worth watching and with Nicholas Farrell there too, not to mention the incomparably hyper Julie Walters, one knew there'd be some terrific acting.The Linney character is so unspeakably zealous, self-righteous and awful that even her husband (Farrell,) seems unable to cope with her, despite his being an Anglican priest. Ben (Rupert Grint) desperately needs friendly guidance and a more helpful introduction to adulthood than appears to be forthcoming from his nearest and dearest - but from where? From whom?His relationship with the foul-mouthed, neurotic, failing actress, (Walters) follows predictable lines but these are carried off by a terrific chemistry, between the two actors and the story turns enough, just, to hold one's attention to the conclusion.A hugely enjoyable film but one that with a lot more work on the script, a sharper, more deftly plotted screenplay and ruthless elimination of hackneyed ideas, could have been a truly great one.Grint underplayed his role, particularly in the first third of the film, but to great effect.