Its bad person is neither bad enough or likable enough. Comparing the film to the 2003 comedy Bad Santa, he writes: Like Lane, Roger Ebert objects to Elizabeth’s character in his review of Bad Teacher.

“Just nothing in the face,” Diaz instructs them carelessly, tossing her blond mane to one side.) (To be fair, she also lets them throw dodgeballs at her when they get an answer right. She writes “Stupid” and “Stupider” in red pen on her students’ essays, and teaches her class about To Kill A Mockingbird by throwing dodgeballs at them when they answer incorrectly. She embezzles money from a car wash fundraiser. She keeps drugs and alcohol in the false bottom of her desk drawer. Elizabeth has her seventh-graders watch almost all of them- Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Lean On Me-while she sleeps off the parties of the night before.Įlizabeth, as played with rock-star attitude by Diaz, is the raging id of any teacher who’s ever felt a twinge of frustration with students and co-workers (i.e., every teacher). Anyway, as Bad Teacher notes, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of movies about good teachers. Teachers in movies, however, operate under no such obligations, which is why Elizabeth gets to feel blasé about kids slinging coleslaw at each other. It’s true that teachers in actual schools have serious responsibilities to their students they have to ensure that kids learn and grow and survive field trips. Granted, Lane’s trademark snark is still intact here. However, he seems to be making a semi-serious condemnation of the very lazy, very hungover, very bad teaching methods of Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz), the protagonist of Bad Teacher. The correct one is: What have you done, children, to deserve Miss Halsey? In a line that will freeze the soul of Arne Duncan, Elizabeth is asked, “What went so wrong that you ended up educating children?” But that’s the wrong question.

So the concluding lines of his Bad Teacher review took me by surprise: With his irreverent wit, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane doesn’t usually seem bound up in concerns about whether movies preserve a certain moral order.

Tad friend new yorker anna farris