Something to watch tonight: Friday 13 December

Bad Education (Finley, 2019)

Subscribers to the New Zealand stream­ing ser­vice Neon will have noticed a new tab appear­ing in their nav­ig­a­tion recently – Max.

This means that Sky – Neon’s own­ers – have cemen­ted a deal with reg­u­lar sup­pli­er, Warner Bros. Discovery to get even more of the con­tent that fea­tures on their Max (formerly HBO Max) ser­vice out of the US.

There are a couple of implic­a­tions here for Aotearoa view­ers and media. One is that there are no plans to bring Max to New Zealand in the imme­di­ate future – a pro­spect some of us who are famil­i­ar with that ser­vice were hop­ing for – and, secondly, that Warner Bros. Discovery would rather take the ready cash from Sky for their product than use it to prop up their fail­ing New Zealand free-to-air chan­nel TV3.

As part of this new and improved deal, a few things that had pre­vi­ously played on Neon but had dis­ap­peared, have now returned and one of those is the comedy-drama Bad Education from 2019.

It first showed up in May 2020 and I reviewed it for RNZ At the Movies dur­ing that COVID lock­down peri­od when all we had to report on was home enter­tain­ment and streaming:

… the second film in a few weeks on this pro­gramme to be adap­ted from the work of New York journ­al­ist Robert Kolker – we reviewed the Netflix drama Lost Girls a couple of weeks ago.

Bad Education is based on Kolker’s art­icle for New York magazine, The Bad Superintendant, about Frank Tassone, the much-loved and respec­ted lead­er Long Island school super­in­tend­ent who took Roslyn High School to the top of the rat­ings but at the same time defrauded the board of over 11 mil­lion dollars.

Interestingly, the writer of the screen­play, Mike Makowsky, had been a stu­dent at Roslyn dur­ing the peri­od of the fraud and knew Tassone in those days. And, while the dir­ec­tion from young up and comer Cory Finley is effect­ive enough it is the bones of Markowsky’s screen­play that set the film on its way. That and a per­form­ance from Hugh Jackman that is nicely underplayed.

The film is set in the early 2000s. The aca­dem­ic and ath­let­ic suc­cess of Roslyn High School has meant a wind­fall for any­one who owns loc­al real estate. A suc­cess­ful school means good col­lege accept­ance rates and that makes Roslyn a desir­able place to live.

The school is run by Frank Tassone, played by Mr Jackman, with the help of his assist­ant Pam Gluckin, played with her usu­al pan­ache by Alison Janney.

A young report­er for the school news­pa­per, played by the Australian act­ress Geraldine Viswanathan, decides to invest­ig­ate the impend­ing “Skywalk” – argu­ably the least neces­sary and most expens­ive piece of prop­erty devel­op­ment that a high school could come up with – and then keeps digging.

Luckily for her, this was not the most soph­ist­ic­ated fraud ever devised. Its suc­cess relied almost totally on the pop­ular­ity and trust the com­munity had for the per­pet­rat­ors. It took a rel­at­ive out­sider – someone with noth­ing to lose – to slowly unravel it all.

You can listen to that seg­ment here, or the whole show (also includ­ing Alice Wu’s coming-of-age romantic com­edy The Half of It for Netflix and the crim­in­ally under­seen satire The Day Shall Come from the great Chris Morris (Four Lions).

That was a weird time. Only essen­tial staff were allowed in to RNZ offices and stu­di­os (and At the Movies very much did not count as essen­tial) and reg­u­lar host, Simon Morris, had no facil­ity to work from home. So I pro­duced, wrote, recor­ded and edited the show from my little pod­cast stu­dio in Silverstream for nearly three months.

I bring this up because I’m get­ting the one-man band back togeth­er soon to pro­duce a run of At the Movies shows over the hol­i­days. I’m call­ing it At the Summer Movies and I am des­per­ately try­ing to remem­ber how the audio edit­ing soft­ware works. It’s going to air in the reg­u­lar ATM time slots from Christmas Day until – we think – the last week of January, and it will also be avail­able for down­load at the ATM pod­cast page at RNZ. I hope you’ll join me for it – there are some big movies com­ing up.

Where to watch Bad Education

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on Binge

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland: Digital pur­chase from Sky

India: Streaming on JioCinema

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: Digital pur­chase from Sky or Amazon