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The students are understandably skeptical, excruciatingly contemptuous. Turned out in a cherry-red suit and black pumps, her strand of pearls gleaming as bright as her teeth, Erin cuts an unavoidably awkward, borderline goofy figure.
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She plays Erin Gruwell, who in 1994 was a 23-year-old student teacher assigned to teach freshman English at Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif.īy the time Erin steps into her classroom, a scant two years after the riots, the climate inside is at once frosty and scorching. Swank uses that neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation. In her finest roles - a transgender man in “Boys Don’t Cry,” a boxer in “Million Dollar Baby” - she plays women whose hard-angled limbs and squared jaws never fully obscure a desperate, at times almost embarrassingly naked neediness. Swank is an appealing actress of, at least to date, fairly restricted range. One worrisome sign is Hilary Swank, the two-time Academy Award winner with the avid smile who recently vamped across screens as a femme fatale in Brian De Palma’s period thriller “The Black Dahlia.” Ms.
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“Freedom Writers,” a true story about a white teacher trying to make a difference in a room crammed with black, Latino and Asian high school freshmen, has the makings of another groaner. Jackson makes like Charles Bronson with some bad students, it’s an argument for universal home schooling. Sometimes, as with the egregiously offensive “187” (1997), wherein Samuel L. Sometimes, as with “Dangerous Minds,” the 1995 film in which Michelle Pfeiffer uses her cheekbones to disarm high school toughs, the results are risible. As a cinematic subspecies, films about teachers working with throwaway kids tend to follow a predictable arc involving conflict and resolution, smooth beats and bitter tears.