TEACHING MRS. TINGLE
So, who else was cheering for Tingle?

  Having heard so little about this movie that was good, I was surprised to find myself rather enjoying it...up to a point.  That point would be the arrival at my house of the two very last people on the planet I wanted to see.  So the rest of the movie was watched in a drastically fucked mood, WAY worse than that which I carried through Candyman 3.  But I've had a weekend to cool down, so I'm okay, I think.

That having been said, my enjoyment of Kevin Williamson's directorial debut would probably not have added up to enough to make a recommendation anyway; I suspect that Teaching Mrs. Tingle, chained for most of its length to one set as it is, would have worked better as a stage play.  Maybe a musical.  Okay, maybe not a musical.

Katie Holmes plays Leigh Ann, who's thiiiiiiis close to getting the marks necessary to be Valedictorian (is that supposed to be capitalized?), and would have it in a cinch if it weren't for the fact that her titular history teacher (Helen Mirren) has it in for her and gives her slaved-over project a C.  She and two friends (Marisa Coughlan, who looks astonishingly teenaged for being six months older than I am, and Barry Watson) go to Tingle's house to try to reason with her, but after threat and counter-threat, they accidentally knock her out with a crossbow (another student's project), and, not sure what to do, tie her up in her bedroom while trying to figure out how they're going to convince this hard-to-reason-with lady to not only not send them to jail, but to give Leigh Ann a decent grade so she can get her scholarships and go to the fancy college and the like.

The original title for this movie was Killing Mrs. Tingle, and the name change came right after that lil' Columbine thing, the studio backing off from the possible lucrative marketing tie-ins to that particular tragedy.  (hey, they could've held off a few months and waited for the emotions to calm down, and they would've made a - ahem - killing) (tacky, yes, but am I wrong?)  Killing... would've been a bit of a cheat anyway, since if they kill her in the end, the ending's given away in the title, and if they don't, then it's just lying to ya.  You can't win with a title like that.

Holmes is fine in the lead, though a little bland; Watson utterly perplexes me in that anybody would find a dunderhead like his role alluring enough to fight over him.  Coughlan gives this everything she has, though, and has so much fun with her goofy role that she's hard not to root for.

It should come as no surprise that Mirren is spellbinding from beginning til end.  Her methods are a little questionable - when a teacher flunks almost every one of her students, as this one appears to intend to do, the school board tends to notice.  But for all the venom and fiendishness that the script tries to infuse her with, Mirren makes this lady strangely sympathetic.  Maybe it's just because I've been out of high school for almost a decade now, but I LIKED watching her stick it to these kids, especially the dopey one played by Watson.  Sure, she's never convincing when she shows her moments of vulnerability and humanity; you just know she's just setting the kids up.  But it's fun to watch her try, and more fun to watch them fall for it.

Williamson's script has just a liiiiiittle too much movie-name-dropping with The Exorcist, though Coughlan has fun with it.  At least it's comparatively brief for a Williamson movie (by about twenty minutes), and the running joke about what does or does not constitute irony blessedly makes not a single reference to any songs by Alanis.  The expected pop/punk/ballad soundtrack sucks hard, as should be expected; c'mon, these soundtracks are corporate products, nothing more.  As a director, Williamson doesn't get too flashy and isn't as incompetent as he could've been, but a better script was needed.  Directorially speaking, screenwriter David "Stir Of Echoes" Koepp has a much brighter future ahead of him.

Teaching Mrs. Tingle doesn't really work overall, but it's worth a look for Mirren and a few funny minor players (particularly Molly Ringwald giving her two cents about Napoleon and Josephine).  With a smarter script which pays attention to its characters the way it does with Mirren's, this could've really added up to something.

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