One Eight Seven
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Clifton Collins Jr., John Heard, Kelly Rowan, Samuel L. Jackson, Tony PlanaBrand: JACKSON,SAMUEL L.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 119 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-02-15
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of One Eight Seven
Movie Review: One of my favorite movies....
Summary: 5 Stars
"187" is a masterpiece for so many reasons, but they can be summed up in three words: plot, cinematography and soundtrack. First, the plot is dark and bleak, rendering this by no means a teacher-done-good, uplifting movie, but in fact, just the opposite, akin to "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," or "No Country for Old Men." The movie begins with a Brooklyn school teacher named Garfield, played brilliantly by Samuel L. Jackson, who faces escalating drug-dealing-thug-posing-as-student threats and violence, but manages to triumph (which is to say, get a student to actually learn this or that) as a teacher with his largely uninterested, disrespectful, grill-toothed, inner-city kids, in spite of being surrounded by uncaring jaded administrators who couldn't care less. This portion of the movie is shot in warm blue hues. And yes, this is the sweet part.
Without giving up too much of the plot, serious events happen which cause Garfield to be fired -- but that is not the half of it. These events largely undermine his deep passion for teaching for reasons that are obvious. Several months later, however, he struggles back to teaching, but now in Los Angeles in tough neighborhood. The movie changes from blue to gold hues which give it a dry clay-dusty heat. With naivete vanished, he again confronts his dilemma of trying to get through to wife-beater-T-shirt-wearing, gang-banging school kids who would rather see their defiled textbooks outside in the dirt rather than inside reading them, while battling fears borne from his Brooklyn trauma that are difficult to assuage in the current equally hostile, barrio-like, tennis-shoes-dangling-from-the-power-lines environment. His principle student adversary, Caesar Sanchez, played brilliantly by Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, is an ignorant doped-up, macho student-foe who plagues Garfield at every turn, but provides one of the funniest drug-induced falsely logical lines in the movie, the humor of which you have to see in visual context to understand, but I'll give you as a tease: "Stupid Indians...." I laughed out loud and you will too.
This paradox of how to impart near-sacred knowledge before such murderous undeserving miscreants causes, shall we say, some radical and unorthodox solutions from Garfield, that gives this movie its great dark and disturbed richness. Garfield's light romantic interest, Ellen Henry, played perfectly by Kelly Rowan, cannot believe what she is forced to conclude about Garfield and her own future as they face this impossible, desperate and soul-killing situation.
Garfield has to resort ultimately to extreme measures to get some of his criminal-students to finally understand not only his commitment to his own profession, but also to force them to almost confront and understand (yes, almost) their own self-and-otherwise-destructive and imbecilic modus operandi. But you may conclude that his is a Pyrrhic victory.
The musical pieces are all "needle drops" as they are known in the business, but set the mood in this deeply disturbed story so well, that I consider them to be master strokes of this film. For me, the film is almost moved up to the status of opera seria for the effort. With "Slack Hands" by Galiano opening the movie, I felt I was immediately swimming in the slimy, uneducated, untrustworthy, multicultural soup which gives you a great hook while driving you straight away from accomplishment, erudition and responsibility. And when Garfield moves West, cue "Spying Glass" by Massive Attack, the lyrics of which hint that no one is going to leave you alone - in the bad kind of way -- while nestling you down in pseudo-soothing anesthetic beats which foretell that you, quite soon, will not be in your usual control if things continue. Madredeus' "Pregao" is precisely the hip-hop Gregorian chant you want to be murdered to (not saying that anyone is, mind you), and "The Wilderness" by V-Love haunts you with the idea that you might not survive this unstoppable stinking tide.
This is a beautiful, awful, wonderful movie that I have watched dozens of times and, of which, I can't seem to get enough.
Summary of One Eight Seven
A vicious high school student is dead. A gang hit? An act of sudden rage? Or did a once-idealistic teacher finally snap? The issues and the tension hit home when Samuel L. Jackson stars in a gritty urban-school thriller that's "gripping, high-octane entertainment" (Newhouse News Service).Similar DVD Movies
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