Larry Cahn
Assigned the thankless task of teaching freshman English at a gang-infested Long Beach, CA high school, a 23-year-old teacher resorts to unconventional means of breaking through to her hardened students in director Richard LaGravenese's adaptation of Erin Gruwell's best-seller The Freedom Writer's Diaries: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. Her students had been written off, and her chances of succeeding scoffed at, but Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) wasn't about to go down without a fight. Long Beach is a place where a new war is waged with each passing day, and when the hardened students who walk those dangerous hallways sense an outsider attempting to understand their plight, their cynical resentment threatens to keep a deadly cycle in motion. Despite the initially hostile reaction she receives in the classroom, Gruwell uses the writings of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo to teach her students not only the basis of the English language, but compassion and tolerance as well. Later, when the time comes to tell their own tales in a project specially designed to explore the daily violence that the majority of students have grown numb to, the barriers that had once stood so strong gradually begin to crumble. When the only chance for survival is to befriend the person who was once your mortal enemy, the world is opened to a whole new realm of possibilities. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hilary Swank, Scott Glenn, (more)
- 2005
It's a toss-up as to who is more disgusted by the news that Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) has slept with Derek (Patrick Dempsey): Meredith's roomies Izzie (Katherine Heigl) and George (T.R. Knight), or the interns' granite-faced supervisor Bailey (Chandra Wilson). Back at Seattle Grace, Derek picks George to assist him during an extremely delicate brain operation, but George may lose the opportunity if he speaks up about the drinking problem of veteran anestheseologist Dr. Taylor. Elsewhere, Izzie performs emergency surgery on a disgruntled gent who has swallowed his girlfriend's car keys; Alex (Justin Chambers) meets a fellow former wrestler named Owens (Russell Hornsby), who has developed a morbid fascination with self-mutilation; and several of the interns become involved in the plight of a teenager who is suffering the aftereffects of a botched gastric bypass operation. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 2003
A bookie with several high-profile clients is found murdered. When the dead man's partner is brought up on charges, his defense attorney is Randolph J. Dwarkin (Peter Jacobson), who seems more concerned with flamboyant showmanship than with the letter of the law. Just when it appears that his grandstanding may cost him the case, Dwarkin cannily pulls the old "race card" out of his sleeve, insisting that his client is the victim of rampant and deeply ingrained anti-semitism. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
