Bad Teacher

71/100 (92 min, 1011)
Plot: A comedy centered around a foul-mouthed, junior high teacher who, after being dumped by her sugar daddy, begins to woo a colleague -- a move that pits her against a well-loved teacher.
Director: Jake Kasdan
Writers: Gene Stupnitsky, Lee Eisenberg
Stars: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake

Teacher from Hell

"Bad Teacher" is Cameron Diaz's comeback to good form. She has been appearing in truly awful movies for the last few years and now she finally found a good material to work with. Although from what I'm seeing the movie is quite underrated, I consider it to be one of the funniest films of the year - granted, it was not a very good year for comedy, but still, I laughed during "Bad teacher". The movie is a comedy about Elizabeth, quite awful human being, who cares only about finding rich boyfriend and thinks she will achieve that by getting a boob job. How to get the money for it? Using her position as a teacher.

That's awful isn't it? Stealing from kids, their parents, manipulating gullible principal...but strangely Diaz makes her Elizabeth likable. She is extremely smart, clever and gets away with everything. And by the end of the movie, she will drop the most horrifyingly superficial aspects of her, but still remaining largely a free spirit, unbounded by anyone. Diaz haven't been that good on screen since "Vanilla Sky". She is genuinely funny and I'm quite shocked at the scathing comments about her looks in the movie, claiming that she looks old. I think she looked smoking hot. If I'm even alive when I'm 40 I'll be grateful, but if I look like that, I'd be one lucky lady. There is a car wash scene in the movie, where Elizabeth wears slutty clothes and provokes everyone around her in order to get more cash - it's the hottest scene involving a wet woman and a car, since redheaded Liv Tyler was playing around in the bubbles on the hood of the car in "One night at McCool's".

The main source of humour in the movie lies in how unbelievably cavalier Elizabeth is about anything around her - she doesn't even try to teach, she plays movies during class, she spends most of her interactions with others texting, she has a draw filled with drugs and booze in her school desk, she openly blows guys off because they aren't rich enough and she even gets high on school property. I especially loved the scene where Elizabeth is grading essays her classmates wrote: "are you fucking kidding me?".

Unfortunately, the movie has a disease that started to spread in modern cinema. The dreaded disease by the name of Justin Timberlake. I actually wanted to see "In time" until I saw he was in it. Dude, you can't act. Go away. He plays douchy, pathetic hipster - again - actually, maybe he isn't even playing? Watching Timberlake trying to be funny is physical painful. The rest of the supporting cast rescues the scenes which feature him - Lucy Punch, who was absolutely unwatchable in Woody Allen's "You will meet a tall, dark stranger" is very good as a teacher who is trying to expose Elizabeth and Jason Segel is perhaps the most charming in the cast as gym teacher who keeps hitting on Liz. He is the perfect boyfriend material - sweet, kind, supportive and at the same time he is not a sissy. He doesn't have money, though, having which is the only requirement Elizabeth has for a possible boyfriend.

The film is very entertaining and funny, it is not overly vulgar and crude like Judd Appatow's films. The only moments that it is getting close to the line of good taste reminded me of Kevin Smith's terrific "Zack and Miri make a porno". "Bad Teacher" also has quite an ironic conclusion - it's a happy end, but it's a happy end for the bad one, not the angelic type character. Huh.