The Chances of Half Nelson Showing In Theatres Are...

Have you heard of the movie Half Nelson? No? Then here you go:



From Pajiba:
On the one hand, you have a freebasing inner-city junior-high-school teacher, Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) (he’s a base-head because he can’t afford cocaine on a teacher’s salary), who spends his evenings getting high and doing the tango with street walkers. On the other hand, he’s a fucking helluva educator and exactly the kind of guy you want teaching your kids. He eschews government-defined lesson plans, opting instead to teach a Hegelian dialectical view of historical change to a group of ninth graders who — under the tutelage of anyone else — would have absolutely no interest in the subject.
But they’re fascinated with their teacher, and the audience is equally transfixed with Gosling, who turns in one of those rare performances that makes you feel giddy just watching him onscreen — honest to God, it’s a head-shaking, awe-inducing accomplishment, the rare drug-addled, self-destructive character that you find yourself completely invested in (like Lohan, only likable). I suspect that anyone who has only seen Gosling in The Notebook might be as skeptical as I was walking in, expecting a smirky, self-referential Breckin Meyer-type performance. You have to see it to believe it, but somehow Gosling manages to be both subtle and dominating, commanding a Pacino-like screen presence with the flash of a simple smile of vulnerability.
But what’s almost equally amazing is the performance of Shareeka Epps, who plays Drey, one of Mr. Dunne’s students. She walks into a locker room after a girls’ basketball game and finds Dunne, who is also her coach, huddled in a bathroom stall hitting the crack pipe. She has every reason to turn on him, but — as the latchkey daughter of a single mom who works double shifts as an EMT and the little sister of a man who is in prison for drug-related crimes — she seems to find something fascinatingly real about a superstar teacher with a drug addiction. In a very unassuming way, she makes Dunne her salvation project, while at the same time quietly using him to help escape her lot. The IMDb has absolutely no autobiographical information about Epps, but the old soul within her outdates the likes of Dakota Fanning by a few decades, I’d imagine. She’s mostly dour and seemingly detached in the film, but every few scenes or so, she’ll reveal a bit of 12-year-old humanity in a smile that will expose her crooked teeth, which almost feels like a goddamn heartbreaking metaphor.

Like the title of this post suggests, the chances of this film coming to Fort Collins is close to nil. However, I thought that about Little Miss Sunshine, and it seemed to do well enough to have a wider release, so I guess I'll just have to be patient. I guess I'll have to settle for seeing The Last Kiss with every god damned 18-28 year-old in Fort Collins. Who am I kidding? I'm stoked for that one and have been for a while. (http://good-bloggie.blogspot.com/2006/06/do-you-have-scoop.html)

Listening to: Faster Kill Pussycat -- Paul Oakenfold feat. Brittany Murphy

Oh! I almost forgot! With three more clicks, Good Bloggie will have had 1200 views. That's big.