A high school teacher's personal life becomes complicated as he works with students during the school elections, particularly with an obsessive overachiever determined to become student body president.
Two men reaching middle age with not much to show but disappointment embark on a week-long road trip through California's wine country, just as one is about to take a trip down the aisle.
Director:
Alexander Payne
Stars:
Paul Giamatti,
Thomas Haden Church,
Virginia Madsen
An irresponsible, drug-addicted, recently impregnated woman finds herself in the middle of an abortion debate when both parties attempt to sway her to their respective sides.
An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million-dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize.
Tracy Flick is running unopposed for this year's high school student election. But school civics teacher Jim McAllister has a different plan. Partly to establish a more democratic election, and partly to satisfy some deep personal anger toward Tracy, Jim talks popular varsity football player Paul Metzler to run for president as well. Chaos ensues. Written by
R. P. Falvey <falvey@scf.usc.edu>
In the gym scenes, since the extras were real high school students, the director faced the problem of not having enough of them because of the SAT season, and many of them having already found out the sometimes tedious process of working as an extra. As a solution for the shots requiring a full gym to be seen, the director asked the extras to move two or three times from their seats to look as if there were more people with the help of editing. The wide shot showing both sides of the gym was done in less than 20 minutes when the teachers of Papillion La Vista Highschool asked more students to join the film shooting. See more »
Goofs
The newspaper articles near the end contain spelling mistakes such as "deceipt" (ie "deceit" with an extra "p"), and "shoe-in" (which should be "shoo-in" as the expression refers to driving an animal, not footwear). See more »
Quotes
Jim McAllister:
Dave, I'm just saying this as your friend, what you're doing is really, really wrong and you've gotta stop. The line you've crossed is... it's immoral, and it's illegal.
Dave Novotny:
Jim, come on, I don't need a lecture on ethics.
Jim McAllister:
I'm not talking about ethics, I'm talking about morals.
Dave Novotny:
What's the difference?
See more »
Crazy Credits
The end titles include four "The producers wish to thank the following:" cards, one "Very Special Thanks to:" card, and one "Extra Very Special Thanks to:" card. See more »
I'm not generally a fan of excessive voice-over and quirky, stylised direction but here it's all done so well. It seems to suffer from that classic "this film didn't make sense" style of review, but it clearly does. A wonderful script with a great mix of slapstick and intelligent comedy and winning performances from Broderick, a brilliant Reese Witherspoon and the normally hapless Chris Klein.
And, yes, it has sex in it. It's hardly titillating and is always completely relevant to the plot. But if you simply hate seeing sex (not nudity, of which there is very little) in films then you won't like it.
It beats Rushmore to the 'best film set in a high school' award.
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Ethics and Morals
I'm not generally a fan of excessive voice-over and quirky, stylised direction but here it's all done so well. It seems to suffer from that classic "this film didn't make sense" style of review, but it clearly does. A wonderful script with a great mix of slapstick and intelligent comedy and winning performances from Broderick, a brilliant Reese Witherspoon and the normally hapless Chris Klein.
And, yes, it has sex in it. It's hardly titillating and is always completely relevant to the plot. But if you simply hate seeing sex (not nudity, of which there is very little) in films then you won't like it.
It beats Rushmore to the 'best film set in a high school' award.