Half Nelson (2006)

Directed by: Ryan Fleck

Cast: Ryan Gosling,

Nomination: Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role – Academy Awards, Sundance Film Festival

I saw this a while ago. I forgot to write the review. I wanted to write then, but it slipped. Not only the movie but name of the movie as well. Later while searching for Ryan Reynolds, I found Ryan Gosling and the movie!!

See, over a period of time, you see how things/lives are interlinked. This whole networking stuff, sometimes is freaky and sometimes it is comforting as well. When it comes to movies, it’s exciting to see the interlinks. This could be the directors, actors, screenplay writers, anything. You remember a character from a movie. Much later you see another movie and you recollect, how you had seen this actor before. It creates a link. And then these links start growing. It creates huge mash-up. The bigger it grows, the exciting it gets.

Half Nelson. Questions conventional teaching and student-teacher relationship. Deals with personal indulgences, dependency, temptations, addictions, influences, fear, social stigma, failure, prison, hoodlum, bonding…

If you look these movies, which question the conventional education, the regular teachers are shown as quite ridiculous characters. So ridiculous, it’s very easy to take sides. In life it is not so. You have never such blacks and whites. More of greys. Half Nelson, School of Rock, Finding Forrester, Dead Poets Society, To Sir with Love, Taare Zameen Par, all fall into similar sketches.

Another thing, stories which appeal to the critics are stories of dysfunctional families, people. And if the storyline does touch-base on such areas, attention to that is bound to happen. So are the movies based on the Nazi-Jew themes.