tek's rating: ½

School Ties (PG-13)
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This is something I've vaguely wanted to see ever since it came out in 1992, but I didn't get around to it until 2014. Several of the stars are familiar from things they did later, including Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Chris O'Donnell, and Zeljko Ivanek. Amy Locane is vaguely familiar from something she did a couple years earlier. Oh, and Ben Affleck was in this... I guess it's the movie on which he met Matt Damon, which is sort of significant. Although I thought it was neat when I saw both names in the opening credits, I kept looking for Affleck, and it was a long time before I ever noticed him. So he really didn't seem important to the story. But then, most of the other actors are unfamiliar to me, and I didn't manage to learn names of many characters, let alone recognize them from scene to scene. Because I suck like that. But anyway, it was a decent movie, and I'm glad I finally saw it.

Fraser plays a high school quarterback named David Greene, who gets recruited to attend a prep school in his senior year, which could help him get into Harvard. He makes new friends at his new school, but this being the 1950s, he feels compelled to hide from them the fact that he's Jewish. Which is understandable, considering they all crack jokes about Jews around him, having no idea he is one. Anyway, Damon plays a guy named Charlie Dillon, who comes from a wealthy family, and he's very anxious about failing to live up to their standards. O'Donnell plays David's roommate, Chris Reece. Ivanek plays a strict teacher named Mr. Cleary, whom everyone hates. Locane plays Sally Wheeler, whom Dillon thinks of as his girlfriend, though she doesn't. David and Sally are immediately attracted to each other, which eventually complicates things between David and Dillon. And... well, there are a bunch of other characters and plot points I don't feel like mentioning. It's actually quite awhile before David's friends find out he's Jewish, and then everything changes, very dramatically. And eventually, another teacher learns that someone in his class cheated on a test, but he doesn't know who. So he leaves it up to the students to decide who it was, and the movie basically turns into "12 Angry Men." And I'm not really sure what else to say.


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