Poor Man's "Dead Poets Society"

Rating: 3/10 (24 January 2005)

A middle-aged teacher reaches fulfillment in helping young students reach their full potential. Blah blah blah. There is nothing here that Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society and Finding Forrester didn't do better. Much better. The premise of this film is a bunch of loosely-connected vignettes that involve a frustrated composer becoming a teacher, and reluctantly growing to love his students. These students return at the end of the story to perform a tearful rendition of Mr Holland's 5 minute masterpiece. 5 minutes! This composition has apparently taken him most of his adult life to write. Again, 5 minutes!This is the greatest contrivance of this underwhelming and ultimately infuriating piece of heartstring-tugging tripe. My advice? Watch "Dead Poets Society" again. You'll find more that is new in the hundredth viewing of that masterpiece than you will in one viewing of this shower of offal.