The Bad Teacher trailer is glorious. Fantastic. If you’re in the mood for a good rant about how bad movies have become lately, how low the respect filmmakers have for the audience, and just how far in general the whole industry has sunk, this is the place for you. You could probably, if you take life too seriously, even manage to muster up some offense at how teachers are portrayed, but really, the people who should probably be most offended are director Jake Kasden’s fellow filmmakers.
I have really, really lowbrow taste in movies; I like a lot of explosions, I’m more than willing to suspend disbelief and accept either alien invaders or world domination plots and I can totally appreciate both a good fart joke and Cameron Diaz winking at her own exploitability (think Charlie’s Angels ). But it would be far, far easier to accept the premise of fellow new release Hall Pass , in which Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate give their husbands permission to be unfaithful for a week-because yeah, why not-than to buy Cameron Diaz as a teacher who writes “are you fucking kidding me” on student papers, smokes pot in the parking lot, and, in an effort to pay for a boob job, is dramatically sexy in a way we’ve seen a thousand times before at a student fundraising car wash.
This is the trailer for a movie that promises to lose any humor by taking the whole thing just that much too far, and then even further, in an effort to make sure we all see just how edgy that joke really is, before lapsing into predictability. (Who thinks Cameron will learn that it’s great to be a good teacher? Raise your hands.) But as a trailer, Bad Teacher is exceptional in piling the bad on the worse. Play it and enjoy it. (It’s got a red stripe and a NSFW designation for language, but unless you’re working in a school yourself, it’s all about as truly risky as an episode of Two and a Half Men .)
