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Last week, TNMN community members from all around the world submitted their favorite movie nerd essentials. Now you can see every submission, and decide whose is the best.
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What it is.
A petty middle school theater teacher seeks revenge on the school’s principal.
If you like these things, then you'll like the film.
→ Shockingly petty men. Played pitch-perfect by Tony-award-winning actor Will Brill is one of the most devious and petty characters, perhaps ever, to grace the silver screen.
→ Crossing lines that aren’t supposed to be crossed. If you often find yourself offended, wondering how such a tasteless joke can induce such uproarious laughter. Because people shouldn’t joke about that thing, whatever it is. Then this one probably isn’t for you. But, if you’re in the crowd laughing your ass off…
→ When kids steal the show. The kids are brilliant in this far-more twisted version of School of Rock and it’s their performances that make it work so beautifully.
What I think.
I’ve no doubt some critics will (wrongfully) see it as a big tasteless joke, though Giselle Bonilla’s The Musical is much more than that. It’s a shrewd, hysterical character study of a man so hopelessly self-serving and spiteful and damaged that he’d roll out the red carpet for every one of his worst impulses.
In your author’s view, comedy is at its finest when it is unpredictable and boundary-crossing and when it explores real feelings we have all encountered ourselves (in this case: envy, self pity, anger). Alexander Heller’s script is all of these things.
The real stroke of genius is Heller’s decision to orient his revenge tale around a washed-up playwright teaching at a middle school. The playwright’s plausible self-interest and proclivity for spectacle is a comedic goldmine.
Will Brill leads much of the film narrating with a sort of grave seriousness not unlike the famed fictional serial killer, Dexter Morgan. Indulgent and waxing poetic about the tragedy of being overlooked. Entirely giving the energy of someone who says “revenge is a dish best served cold” with sincerity and quite often.
It’s in this contrast, between the lead subject’s absurd seriousness, and the very low stakes of middle school theatre, that the film finds most of its humor. And folks, Heller and the film’s director, Giselle Bonilla are practically fishing with dynamite.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, the show is stolen by the lead subject’s crew of unwittingly complicit middle school students, who enable him to enact one of the most devilish and twisted revenge plots I’ve witnessed in modern film, one that left me breathless from laughter at the film’s conclusion.
| oh, neat. |
A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."
→ Rob Lowe, Gillian Jacobs, and Will Brill are certified theatre geeks. During the Sundance Q&A for The Musical, Jacobs mentioned that the principal cast members each came up in the theatre. “I loved musical theatre as a kid, and I auditioned for everything that I could do,” Jacobs said, revealing that she listened to Sweeney Todd and other cast albums “obsessively.”
