Review of Bad Teacher (2011) by Shiira — 16 Jul 2011

Bad actress(person). Is she? In a spoofing worse than Heath Ledger impersonating Val Kilmer in "Lords of Dogtown", Anna Faris sends up Cameron Diaz in "Lost in Translation", playing the megastar as the ultimate ditz, because filmmaker Sofia Coppola apparently was angered by how Diaz would flirt with then-husband Spike Jonze on the set of "Being John Malkovich".

In a pointed scene, Scarlett Johansson(standing in for Coppola) and Giovanni Ribisi(likewise, for Jonze) walk through the lobby of the five-star Tokyo hotel they're staying at, and run into Faris, who channels Diaz's trademark gregariousness that we're accustomed to seeing on her late-night talk shows.

With John's wife standing only inches away, Kelly comes on to the photographer with the sort of entitlement that comes with being famous. "I'm staying as Evelyn Waugh," the actress tells John, her favorite shutterbug, confirming in Charlotte's mind as to the vacuousness of this horribly proprietary woman.

Waugh is a man, Charlotte, a Yale graduate, points out, much to the annoyance of her husband, who thinks he married a snob and ends up defending the intellectually impaired actress. Bad singer. In "My Best Friend's Wedding", Diaz hits all the wrong notes on the Burt Bacharach/Hal David-penned "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself", a karaoke scene that Coppola references with a karaoke scene of her own(not the good one in which Bill Murray makes like a lobotomized Bryan Ferry on "More Than This"), where Kelly gives Kimmy a run for her money by slogging her way through "Nobody Does it Better", the theme song for the James Bond flick "The Spy Who Loved Me".

The guy who loved Diaz at the time, Justin Timberlake, in a less-reported item, probably takes the form of Kelly's equally vacuous musician boyfriend, an inarticulate hip-hop artist whose superficiality inspires Charlotte to seek better company at another table.

Coppola, as evidenced by this wholesale character assassination, makes Diaz out to be a home-wrecker, a promiscuous tramp who can't keep her hands off other women's husbands. In particular, hers. The look of trepidation that washes across Ribisi's visage says it all when he realizes that Kelly doesn't know the first thing about poker faces.

Seven years has passed since "Lost in Translation" hit theaters. Finally, at long last, Evelyn(Cameron is also a unisex name) strikes back. In "Bad Teacher", Diaz does little to tone down the sex-kitten persona that Coppola helped cultivate.

Playing a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking, perpetually hung-over middle-school educator named Elizabeth, "Bad Teacher" makes good on Coppola's paranoia, in which Diaz's character makes no qualms about stealing Scott(Timberlake, with an axe to grind of his own), the school's latest hire, away from the conspicuously-named Amy Squirrel, who could very well be the surrogate for Coppola, a Francophile(Aimee is a French name) of Italian descent.

It can't be a coincidence that Scott is a musician just like the filmmaker's second husband(Thomas Mars of the French indie-rockers Phoenix), and as the Period 5 lead singer, the vaguely effeminate substitute performs a self-penned song that he dedicates to Amy called "Simpatico", an English word of Italian origin, which also acknowledges both the filmmaker's ethnicity, and the wedding in Bernalda(a southern Italian town).

Made livid by Scott's growing interest in Lucy, the bad teacher rubs poison ivy on her rival's apple, giving the good teacher a bad case of the hives. No longer able to chaperon a field trip, Elizabeth fills in for the stricken woman, then sets her sights on seducing the stricken woman's beau, culminating in an odd set-piece that recalls the hardcore puppet sex scenes in "Team America: World Police".

Technically, in the strictest sense of the word, no betrayal takes place, since Scott insists on the relatively chaste act of dry humping. Nothing happened. In the crudest way possible, that's what Diaz communicates to Coppola when Elizabeth sends Lucy the lurid, but harmless images via camera phone.

While Diaz is made out to be a tramp, Coppola self-congratulatingly paints herself as a woman of virtue. At the lounge bar, Charlotte tells Bob, "I wish I could sleep," leaving out the "with you," because unlike her philandering husband, marriage means something to her, as it does for the American actor, who says, "Me, too.

" This time, it's Coppola who plays the fool, in which her proxy is sent to Malcolm X High School, a dig, perhaps, at the filmmaker's preference to work in a mostly white milieu. It's not the most satisfying of endings because the moviegoer doesn't get what it paid for, a really bad teacher.

With all the sex scandals involving educators and their charges, Elizabeth's homage to Tawny Kitaen during the benefit car wash scene just doesn't cut it. David Straitham in Karen Moncrieff's "Blue Car".

Now that's a bad teacher.