Passing Grade
Mockumentary about teachers amuses but lacks a
climactic resolution “Chalk,” which played in
the Gen Art film festival April 17, is a mockumentary about high school
teachers over the course of a school year, that brings out
unintentionally funny things about the personalities of its teacher
characters.
The screenwriters -- Mike Akel and Chris Mass -- and actors put forth
original personality quirks presented with a distanced documentarian’s
eye. Especially notable are the duo of Janelle Schremmer and Troy
Schremmer -- Janelle as Coach Webb, the gym teacher who gets perceived
as lesbian even as she unwittingly teaches yoga in suggestive poses, and
Troy as Mr. Lowrey, the in-over-his-head first-year teacher who
struggles with classroom control and the time demands of the new job.
Co-screenwriter Mass also makes an impression as Mr. Stroope, a teacher
campaigning as hard for teacher of the year as if it were a political
race.
The film is so tightly presented that it’s hard to tell if its lightly
funny sensibility is a product of the screenplay or what the actors did
with it -- if some improvisation occurred that helped sell the scenes.
Chalk, however, in the end takes the route of tying itself up with more
concern about where its characters’ heads are at, rather than a more
energetic or surprising conclusion in the manner of other classic
comedies that presented themselves as a “study” of a subculture -- such
as Best In Show and Animal House.
That’s the reason why, if one were to use a four-star rating scale, this
would hover somewhere between a 3 and 3 ˝, but nothing more, because it
doesn’t have that extra “oomph.” |