Something to watch tonight: Friday 13 December
Bad Education (Finley, 2019)
Subscribers to the New Zealand streaming service Neon will have noticed a new tab appearing in their navigation recently – Max.
This means that Sky – Neon’s owners – have cemented a deal with regular supplier, Warner Bros. Discovery to get even more of the content that features on their Max (formerly HBO Max) service out of the US.
There are a couple of implications here for Aotearoa viewers and media. One is that there are no plans to bring Max to New Zealand in the immediate future – a prospect some of us who are familiar with that service were hoping for – and, secondly, that Warner Bros. Discovery would rather take the ready cash from Sky for their product than use it to prop up their failing New Zealand free-to-air channel TV3.
As part of this new and improved deal, a few things that had previously played on Neon but had disappeared, have now returned and one of those is the comedy-drama Bad Education from 2019.
It first showed up in May 2020 and I reviewed it for RNZ At the Movies during that COVID lockdown period when all we had to report on was home entertainment and streaming:
… the second film in a few weeks on this programme to be adapted from the work of New York journalist Robert Kolker – we reviewed the Netflix drama Lost Girls a couple of weeks ago.
Bad Education is based on Kolker’s article for New York magazine, The Bad Superintendant, about Frank Tassone, the much-loved and respected leader Long Island school superintendent who took Roslyn High School to the top of the ratings but at the same time defrauded the board of over 11 million dollars.
Interestingly, the writer of the screenplay, Mike Makowsky, had been a student at Roslyn during the period of the fraud and knew Tassone in those days. And, while the direction from young up and comer Cory Finley is effective enough it is the bones of Markowsky’s screenplay that set the film on its way. That and a performance from Hugh Jackman that is nicely underplayed.
The film is set in the early 2000s. The academic and athletic success of Roslyn High School has meant a windfall for anyone who owns local real estate. A successful school means good college acceptance rates and that makes Roslyn a desirable place to live.
The school is run by Frank Tassone, played by Mr Jackman, with the help of his assistant Pam Gluckin, played with her usual panache by Alison Janney.
A young reporter for the school newspaper, played by the Australian actress Geraldine Viswanathan, decides to investigate the impending “Skywalk” – arguably the least necessary and most expensive piece of property development that a high school could come up with – and then keeps digging.
Luckily for her, this was not the most sophisticated fraud ever devised. Its success relied almost totally on the popularity and trust the community had for the perpetrators. It took a relative outsider – someone with nothing to lose – to slowly unravel it all.
You can listen to that segment here, or the whole show (also including Alice Wu’s coming-of-age romantic comedy The Half of It for Netflix and the criminally underseen satire The Day Shall Come from the great Chris Morris (Four Lions).
That was a weird time. Only essential staff were allowed in to RNZ offices and studios (and At the Movies very much did not count as essential) and regular host, Simon Morris, had no facility to work from home. So I produced, wrote, recorded and edited the show from my little podcast studio in Silverstream for nearly three months.
I bring this up because I’m getting the one-man band back together soon to produce a run of At the Movies shows over the holidays. I’m calling it At the Summer Movies and I am desperately trying to remember how the audio editing software works. It’s going to air in the regular ATM time slots from Christmas Day until – we think – the last week of January, and it will also be available for download at the ATM podcast page at RNZ. I hope you’ll join me for it – there are some big movies coming up.
Where to watch Bad Education
Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon
Australia: Streaming on Binge
Canada: Streaming on Crave
Ireland: Digital purchase from Sky
India: Streaming on JioCinema
USA: Streaming on Max
UK: Digital purchase from Sky or Amazon