bad education 2019

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Bad Education

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A layered, wonderfully-acted, and passionate drama.

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Summary Long Island school superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant superintendent for business, Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), are credited with bringing Roslyn School District unprecedented prestige. Frank, always immaculately groomed and tailored, is a master of positive messaging, whether before an audience of community l ... Read More

Directed By : Cory Finley

Written By : Mike Makowsky, Robert Kolker

Bad Education

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Hugh Jackman

Frank tassone, big bob spicer, welker white, allison janney, pam gluckin, annaleigh ashford, jenny aquila, stephanie kurtzuba, carol schweitzer, calvin coakley, chad schweitzer, geraldine viswanathan, rachel bhargava, sung yun cho, joyce - first agent, justin swain, shawn - second agent, laura patinkin, irene - third agent, kathrine narducci, sharon katz, brent langdon, todhunter - first teacher, tia deshazor, maya - second teacher, victor verhaeghe, doug bressler, john scurti, joseph scalvo, brian sgambati, conference speaker, rafael casal, kyle contreras, hari dhillon, david bhargava, nick fleishman, critic reviews.

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Bad Education (2019)

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Bad Education (2019 film)

2019 film directed by cory finley / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

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Bad Education is a 2019 American crime drama film directed by Cory Finley and written by Mike Makowsky . It is based on the 2004 New York magazine article "The Bad Superintendent" by Robert Kolker , [1] [2] about the true story of the largest public school embezzlement in American history . [3] It features an ensemble cast including Hugh Jackman , Allison Janney , Geraldine Viswanathan , Alex Wolff , Rafael Casal , Stephen Spinella , Annaleigh Ashford and Ray Romano .

Set in the Long Island village of Roslyn in the early 2000s, the film tells the story of school district superintendent Dr. Frank Tassone (Jackman) who, along with assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Janney) stole millions of dollars from their wealthy public school district, and together attempted to cover up the embezzlement. The screenwriter, Makowsky, briefly met Tassone as a child before the scandal broke and attended Roslyn High School in the late 2000s. [4] [3]

Bad Education made its world premiere on September 8, 2019, at the Toronto International Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO on April 25, 2020. It was well received by film critics, with particular praise for Makowsky's screenplay, Finley's direction, and Jackman's and Janney's performances. At the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards , the film won for Outstanding Television Movie and Jackman received a nomination for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie . [5]

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• "Engagingly devious (...) It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters"  Jordan Mintzer : The Hollywood Reporter
• "Jackman delivers an acting master class (...) 'Bad Education' can be a hard lesson to accept, but a necessary one in how the world works."  Peter Debruge : Variety
• "[It] bullseyes the sweet spot between realism and elevated drama, making it several cuts above the usual based-on-a-true-story fodder."  John Serba : Decider
• "It’s Jackman, whose smile appears increasingly wolfish as the film goes on, who ultimately owns 'Bad Education'."  Ben Kenigsberg : The New York Times
• "Although the themes don’t entirely coalesce by the end, Finley crafts a consistently compelling and often humorous tale anchored by Jackman’s impressively nuanced performance.  Adam Chitwood : Collider
• "Jackman and Janney shine in their roles (...) In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"  Peter Travers : Rolling Stone
• "A criminally entertaining film (...) The cast is exceptional here, with a deep bench, and for my money, Allison Janey gives the performance of her career (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"  M.N. Miller : Ready Steady Cut
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The perception of perfection, hugh jackman & allison janney: virtual conversation, rotten tomatoes® score.

Bad Education is a strong film overall, especially during a time in which we are bereft of theatrical releases and original ideas.

Frank Tassone isn’t a likeable character; in fact, he’s rather detestable. But that almost makes me love this film even more. It’s been a long journey towards real queer representation...

Bad Education is a criminally entertaining film.

This is one of those deadpan farces where we get to chortle as awful people are hoisted high on the petard of their own greed.

A deeply American tale about the drip-drop nature of morality in positions of power, and how easy it can be to excuse the wrong thing when it feels so right.

The film effectively sheds light on an ongoing problem in many school systems that quite frankly goes unnoticed. There is no denying that Bad Education is one of 2020s best films and a must-see for any cinephile.

This is a realistic, intelligent drama with a strong cast and a brilliantly flawed protagonist.

It's truly a small miracle to watch the way these two antisocial misfits con their way into people's trust, as Jackman and Janney make them all too human.

It dialogues with topics about hypocrisy and corruption in the American educational sphere, but even with the decent performances from Jackman and Janney cannot rekindle a flat narrative that stumbles along. [Full review in Spanish]

Lightweight as a drama, but the performances - especially from Janney and Jackman - are first rate.

Additional Info

• Genre : Drama, Comedy
• Release Date : September 8, 2019
• Languages : English
• Captions : English
• Audio Format : 5.1

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Bad Education (2019)

Bad Education is a 2019 film directed by Cory Finley.

It is a based-on-a-true-story dramatization of the Roslyn, NY school district embezzlement scandal. Roslyn school superintendent Frank Tassone ( Hugh Jackman ) is the popular leader of the district. In particular, he has built Roslyn High School up into the #4 school in the nation, a reliable supplier of students to Ivy League universities. He's handsome, well-dressed, and widely admired. He's about to start a big construction project, namely, a raised pedestrian walkway to connect the various buildings of Roslyn High.

He's so admired that when the district's business manager Pam Gluckin ( Allison Janney ) is caught embezzling $250,000 from school funds, Tassone is able to talk the school board into keeping the matter quiet and not going to the cops, but instead allowing Pam to resign quietly and pay back the money. Unfortunately for Tassone, however, high school junior Rachel Bhargava ( Geraldine Viswanathan ) is not as easy to placate. Rachel, a reporter for the Roslyn High paper, starts digging into the bids for the walkway and starts finding a lot of very fishy items in the district's expense reports, for much more money than the original $250K estimate. Those fishy items eventually implicate Tassone himself.

Ray Romano plays Bob Spicer, a member of the school board. Screenwriter Mike Makowsky was a middle school student in the Roslyn district when the scandal broke.

Not to be confused with BBC comedy Bad Education or Bad Education (2004) .

• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing : The film does an excellent job in the first act of making it look as if only Pam is stealing...but then you find out the truth about Frank as Rachel continues digging.
• Book Ends : Begins and ends with scenes where Frank's being cheered and applauded at a public meeting. The second one's an Imagine Spot .
• Closet Gay : Frank is depicted as having two boyfriends (one younger living in Vegas, and one longterm partner who helps with his fraud), which Rachel is shocked to discover. Frank is also shown repeatedly referring to his long-dead wife, whose picture he keeps on his desk, as a means of rejecting the advances of enthusiastic mothers. (In real life, Frank did have a wife who died young, and two boyfriends, but he was not closeted and he and his longterm partner had an open relationship.)
• The Dandy : Frank. He spends district money on fancy suits. He puts on makeup. (He's still putting on makeup in jail!) He's revealed to have spent thirty grand on dry cleaning. He spends district money on a facelift.
• Dramatic Drop : Not the drop, but the aftermath. Frank walks into the office to see a coffee cup lying unattended on the floor in the middle of a puddle of coffee. Everyone in the office is shocked because the school paper has just broken the story.
• Education Mama : Mrs. Schweitzer, who keeps trying to get her poor dim son Chad into an advanced education program despite the fact that Chad can't read the word "accelerate". First she complains that the teacher wouldn't let Chad take enough bathroom breaks for the test, then after Chad fails a second time she says the teacher made the test harder out of spite. This pisses a stressed-out Frank off and triggers his Motive Rant .
• Facecam : A camera is trained on Frank's face as he enters the school, and steadily grows more and more unnerved at the sight of all the students gaping at him. Then he comes into the office and discovers that the school newspaper has published its story about the embezzlement.
• Fatal Flaw : Greed and pride, in Frank and Pam's cases. Pam became overconfident from getting away with it for so long and a family member gets her caught. Frank's greed and pride about his position is what pushes Rachel into deciding to run the story after she learns the truth.
• Flipping the Bird : The last time Bob appears onscreen, he goes out to get the paper only to find fresh dog poop on his porch, and the owner of the dog giving him the finger as she and her dog walk away.
• Hero Antagonist : Rachel Bhargava is the one investigating the budget on the skywalk and discovers the fraud as a result.
• Historical Villain Upgrade : Real Life Frank did have a younger boyfriend in Vegas, but he had an open relationship and his partner was aware of the Vegas boyfriend - who also was not a former student. The real life Frank was actually quite offended by the assertion that he would cheat on his partner or date a former student .
• Imagine Spot : The film ends with Frank, in jail, imagining himself at a district public meeting where he's being cheered and applauded by the crowd.
• Intrepid Reporter : Rachel, who treats the student newspaper like an actual paper instead of a club designed to make her college application look good, which is what the editor calls it. She starts digging into district records and eventually uncovers massive fraud.
• The Lost Lenore : Frank keeps a picture of a woman in a wedding dress on his desk. He claims that it's his wife, who died young; he cites his Lost Lenore when a divorced mother makes a pass at him. It's later revealed that not only is Frank gay, he's been in a relationship for 33 years , calling into question whether the wife even existed. (In Real Life it seems that Frank was in fact once married to a woman who did in fact die young, but Real Life Frank was not closeted.)
• Motive Rant : Frank slips into his office after the scandal has broken, practically shaking with fear, only to find that annoying Education Mama already in the office, still trying to get her dumb kid into the gifted program. His control finally cracks and he lets loose on her. Frank : My problem? My problem is you. It’s the people who trot their poor children out like race horses at Belmont; who derive some perverse joy out of treating us like low-level service reps. Do you remember the teachers who sat with you, who held you by the hand, who taught you to add and subtract, or showed you Gatsby and Salinger , for the first time— Mockingbird even? Do their names escape you? Are their faces a blur?...You might forget, but we don’t. We never forget. Ever.
• Plastic Bitch : Rare Male Example ; one of the most selfish ways Frank spends the money he stole from the school is by getting plastic surgery.
• Reassigned to Antarctica : When Pam gets fired, her cousin Debra gets a demotion and is reassigned to a windowless, closet-sized office in the basement.
• Refuge in Audacity : Frank never really comes completely clean throughout the film, but the audience starts to understand how he and Pam stole $11.2 million dollars total between them after Frank mentions that they both (separately) came to the realization that there wasn't a real system of checks and balances in their office, so "no one noticed." It's basically the justification for how both of them decided to yoink that much cash from the district.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil : The closest Frank ever comes to a confession is when he tells Bob that he once accidentally used a district credit card for lunch, and nobody cared, and then he used the card to get a drink, and nobody cared.
• Small Name, Big Ego : Frank, definitely. Not that getting the district to number four isn't impressive, but he seems to have developed a massive ego and narcissistic tendencies as a result of his success, even though no one outside of his office knows who he is until the scandal breaks.
• Stealing from the Till : Frank, Pam, and Pam's family relations stole $11.2 million from the school district.
• Stepford Smiler : Part of why Frank got away with everything for so long is that he has perfected his persona of the smiling, patient, devoted leader in his district.
• Suspicious Spending : Pam Gluckin and her family, who have three homes and live a high-flying lifestyle. Pam says it's because her husband's car dealership is doing very well. The scandal starts to unravel when a hardware store clerk catches Pam's son using a school credit card to pay for construction materials which are delivered to his home. Frank for his part is smarter, with a fancy apartment in New York City and a home in Vegas, both far away from folks in Roslyn.
• Tempting Fate : Rachel comes into Frank's office to write what she calls a "puff piece" about the overhead walkway. Frank, the educator, tells her that it doesn't have to be a puff piece and she can write a real story. So Rachel starts digging, and ruins Frank's life.
• Vanity Plate : Pam Gluckin, who has used the money she's stolen from the district to buy a fancy house on upscale Dune Street, has a vanity plate that says "DUNENUTN".
• Villain Protagonist : Frank Tassone, who masterminded a long-term conspiracy wherein $11.2 million was stolen from the school district.
• Visible Boom Mic : In the first hotel scene between Frank and Kyle in Las Vegas, the boom mic is subtly visible in the top of the bedroom mirror.
• What Happened to the Mouse? : Andrew Miller, the auditor, is first shown being deeply apologetic, saying that he took Pam at her word about a lot of things. Later he lets Frank browbeat him into not digging further. Still later he digs up the time when Frank bought first-class tickets to London for himself and his boyfriend, but again he backs down when Frank intimidates him. Near the end of the movie he's shown being led away in handcuffs, despite never doing anything criminal. In Real Life Miller altered records at Frank's behest in an effort to cover up the crime.
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Bad Education is 13498 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 8211 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Firesign Theatre Presents 'Hot Shorts' but less popular than Cheers for Miss Bishop.

A superintendent of a school district works for the betterment of the student’s education when an embezzlement scheme is discovered, threatening to destroy everything.

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Pushy parents basking in the reflected glory of driving their kids toward extreme excellence is not exactly a new phenomenon. Long before the college admissions scandal that brought down corporate executives and Hollywood stars alike, the pursuit of academic superiority—real or imagined—has inspired perfectly sensible people to go to insane lengths. The right neighborhood with the right schools, a packed schedule of the right kinds of activities and athletics—it’s all to achieve the greater goal of sending their children to the right Ivy League university which will prepare them for the right lucrative career.

The top administrators at the Roslyn, New York, school district seemed not only to understand this instinct but also to exploit it for their own personal gain. “ Bad Education ” explores their real-life embezzlement scheme, which came crashing down when the high-school newspaper broke the story in 2004. Spending nearly $8 million on a sky bridge to beautify a campus seems reasonable when you’re trying to exude an aura of success—when you’re the fourth-ranked district in the country, gunning for that No. 1 spot. With that much money flying around, skimming a little here and there for a bagel or jewelry or renovations on your beach house in the Hamptons is no biggie.

Director Cory Finley finds the dark humor within this scandal, which he depicts with wit, style and a terrific cast. Hugh Jackman does some of the best work of his long and varied career as the superintendent, Dr. Frank Tassone, whose charisma and polished image disguised a multitude of secrets. Jackman plays on his usual charm and looks to great effect. But there’s something sinister within the slickness that’s unsettling from the first time we see him, spritzing cologne and trimming nose hairs in the mirror of the boys’ bathroom in extreme close-up. Frank clearly cares deeply and works hard to recall names and personal details of students and parents alike throughout the district; we can still see glimmers of the calling that drew him to this challenging profession in the first place. Fundamentally, he’s a pleaser and he wants to be liked—yet increasingly, he savors the fame and power that come with being in a position of authority in an affluent community. And as Frank and his second-in-command (played brilliantly by a brash Allison Janney ) find themselves squirming to survive when their $11.2 million scheme comes to light, their flaws and follies become even more glaringly evident.

Finley’s follow-up to “ Thoroughbreds ,” one of my favorite films of 2018, doesn’t seek to dazzle with sleek, showy camerawork like that film did. But it’s similarly interested in mining the depths of out darkest impulses, and doing so with sharp satire. ( Mike Makowsky , who was a middle school student in Roslyn when the embezzlement scandal broke, wrote the script.) “Bad Education” also calls to mind the great Alexander Payne film “ Election ,” with its students who are smarter and savvier than you’d expect and teachers who aren’t as mature and responsible as you’d hope. Finley actually could have used a bit more of Payne’s sharp bite in tackling this material. Geraldine Viswanathan radiates a quiet but increasingly assertive confidence as the high school reporter whose tough questions and thorough document searches reveal the district’s financial irregularities. Just as compelling as what she finds is her internal debate over how to handle that information. She knows what’s the right thing to do—but what if that’s the wrong move for her future?

That’s the dilemma that also plagues the school board members—led by a vividly haggard Ray Romano —when they first learn of the administrators’ indiscretions. Going public would not only jeopardize the standing of the school district nationwide, it also would damage its reputation locally, which would make it harder for high-school seniors to gain acceptance at top universities, which would cause property values to plummet.

For a long time, Jackman keeps us guessing as to the amount of Frank’s knowledge and the depth of his involvement. Janney’s Pam Gluckin chats casually about flagrant misuse of her district credit card over the buzz of the blender as she mixes margaritas. (And the film’s costume and production design find just the right amount of Long Island tacky and flashy without diving over the top into parody.) Frank, on the other hand, contains myriad, fascinating multitudes. As Jackman gets older, he seems less interested in getting us to like him and more inclined to play complicated characters who make questionable decisions. Wildly violent as his Wolverine may be in the “ X-Men ” universe—particularly in the excellent, standalone “ Logan ”—he’s still essentially a hero. “Bad Education” gives him the chance to play someone who may be doing some truly bad things, and you can tell he’s really sinking his claws into the role this time.

Premieres on HBO on Saturday, 4/25.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Bad Education (2020)

103 minutes

Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone

Allison Janney as Pam Gluckin

Ray Romano as Bob Spicer

Alex Wolff as Nick Fleischman

Geraldine Viswanathan as Rachel Kellog

• Cory Finley
• Mike Makowsky

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• Louise Ford
• Michael Abels

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Bad Education

  TV-MA | biographical dramas | 1 HR 49 MIN | 2019

A respected Long Island school superintendent (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant (Allison Janney) turn up in a massive embezzlement scheme.

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A respected Long Island school superintendent (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant (Allison Janney) turn up in a massive embezzlement scheme.

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Starring: Hugh Jackman , Allison Janney , Ray Romano , Geraldine Viswanathan

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Bad Education (2019)

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