187
[DVD Info]

Trevor Garfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is a science teacher at an inner city high school in New York. One day, he opens his text book to see “187 Garfield” scrawled on every page. The book belonged to a known gang member. He takes it to the principal who laughs it off (and insults his teaching methods); a few minutes later he’s stabbed several times in the side and back with a nail. Fifteen months later we see Garfield, now a substitute teacher living in L.A. He gets called in for a four day job at John Quincy Adams High School and on his first day he’s already starting to make enemies with the local Hispanic gangs. Garfield genuinely wants to help his students and accepts the job when he’s asked to stay for the rest of the year. However, the longer he stays, the more bad things start happening to the students who threaten him. Is it just a coincidence or has a good teacher just snapped?

People who are dirt poor are taken seriously when they threaten to sue the school over being accused of stealing.
In L.A. women can get raped on the school grounds (during school) and nothing happens to the rapists.

"Stupid Indians..." ~Cesar Sanchez after being shot with an arrow.

Errrr. It's so typical of people from L.A. to be spouting "I'll Sue You" everytime they do something wrong and are able to get out of it because the system sucks.

Brutal. That’s the only way to describe this flick. It’s a very dismal look at how teachers and students interact in heavy gang/poor areas. Now, I’m not sure what the point they were trying to get across was. Was it that, someday these conditions will push teachers over the edge? Or that, teachers aren’t getting paid enough for what they put up with? Who knows…but it can’t be that out of control can it? I have no idea. All I know is, this movie made me afraid of California and I lived there for almost all my life! This was a really awesome movie though. The climatic scene was totally brutal and really put its point across without being too over dramatic. The movie really would have been better if they had ended it there and not gone on to the graduation…it seemed almost redundant making the message a little wishy-washy. Oh well…it’s still an awesome movie. Because of this, the jury gives this flick:

(Shocked!)

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