Mr

Mr. Woodcock

Seann William Scott, Billy Bob Thorton

When I was a child, society was still practicing a quasi-form of social Darwinism, weeding out the weak and the dumb children. If you made it through elementary school in one piece, your DNA was worthy enough to join the gene pool. Playground equipment like jungle gyms, see-saws, and green bars were set into asphalt just waiting some kid to reenact Humpty-Dumpty, because you knew there was not going to be a teacher there to stop your fall. Most of them were around the corner sneaking a smoke. Boys greeted their best friends by punching them just below the breadbasket. Parents lovingly gave their young children chemistry sets, b-b guns, and lawn darts for Christmas. The only car seat a child had was the backside of his pants, and if the crumb cruncher’s mom took a corner too fast, the toddler would hit the window so hard, he looked like a sucker fish on the side of an aquarium. You could enjoy your candy cigarettes in the flammable pajamas you were sent to bed in. Bicycle helmets and knee pads were unheard of. If some poor elementary soul would have strapped one of these protective devices on, the abuse he or she would take from the other kids would make a stay at Joan Crawford’s house look like a weekend at Disney World. There were still permission slips that were sent to certain children’s homes that allowed the principal to take a paddle off the wall and treat their rear end as a piñata when they misbehaved.

It was survival of the fittest, and from talking to my nieces and nephews, the only hold over from this era is the physical education class, a Lord of the Flies world, where the personalities of many a future Young Republican take root and blossom. Fifteen-year-old girls, whose idea of physical activity was shopping with their girlfriends, are asked to play on the same field with the no-necked Neanderthal who won the big football game the Friday night before. The games that are played are akin to watching Mad Max excite the crowd at the Thunderdome.

Gymnasium hockey always meant some poor seventy-pound girl, who spent most of the period doing everything she could to avoid the plastic puck, was going to get hip-checked into the bleachers because she could not get out of the way of some lobotomized thug, whose fragile ego depended on the victory he would achieve that day in that class. Flag football brought crumbled bodies, forearm shots, and bruises, and at least one burnout lying on the ground rolling around like he was the giant joint he was going to 420 later after taking a plastic football, at point blank range, into a region whose name need not be mentioned in a family paper. A trip to the swimming pool still means that the girls are going to get groped by pimple faced boys more than a Playboy Playmate sitting between Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton after four margaritas at some single’s bar.

Then there is that one game, the game that Darwin himself probably invented, the two words that 90 percent of the students dreaded hearing – dodge ball, bombardment, or, as it was popularly known “smear the queer”. Red rubber balls with just enough tread to leave marks on some poor kid’s face (when drilled properly) were better than bullets in the damage they could inflict. If someone didn’t bleed within a half-hour, the game is not being played right. Macho, right-wing, sexist, meat-eating, good old boys regularly made their bones as the gym filled with that “tinging” noise, that only happened when the ball hit a kid’s head like something out of a Zapruder film.

The ringleader of this post-apocalyptic circus was the gym teacher. All gym teachers seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Other teachers viewed them akin to a physically active, study hall teacher. After all, let’s be honest, nobody who goes to work in sweat pants, t-shirt, and a gym whistle is going to get respect from their colleagues. The phys-ed teacher had a Matrix-like philosophy behind the cruelty they inflicted each day, teaching children skills they would need to survive and prosper, and more importantly, they got their summers off. They taught valuable lessons, such as where you fit in when it came to popularity in the school by how low you dropped when it came to picking teams. Most of the time, you just hoped you got picked ahead of the girl in the back brace and the foreign kid who just nodded his head when you talked to him, because he spoke no English. All of the phys-ed teacher’s first names happened to be “coach,” and the only thing special they appeared to have done to earn that title, is to polish off a keg of beer by themselves in their mid-20s. The remains of which can still be seen on their waistline. The females always looked like escapees from the former East German Olympic women’s team. There was a fifty/fifty shot she would be asking your mother if this lady with a whistle could comb her hair at parent-teacher conference. The men with the smell of perma-sweat clinging to them, like Leonardo DiCaprio grasping the raft in Titanic, always seemed a bit too interested in watching the girls that puberty visited a few months earlier, do their stretching.

[publishers note: Trevor is on his own here. His address is available on request to Phys-ed teachers]

Billy Bob Thorton has made a career of playing off beat characters and is one of the few actors that can get away with playing the rogue in films like Bad Santa and Bad News Bears. Well, he is back again as Mr. Woodcock, the man who tortured John Farley’s (Seann William Scott – American Pie, The Dukes of Hazzard) junior high years as his physical education coach. John has grown up and become an up-and-coming motivational speaker and self-help guru with his book Letting Go: How to Get Past Your Past. He has one little problem, returning home he finds that his widowed mom, Beverley (Susan Sarandon), is dating Mr. Woodcock and they might be getting married. Of course, Mr. Woodcock appears not to have changed. John will do anything possible not to have Woodcock destroy his life again. Rounding out the cast is Ethan Suplee (“My Name Is Earl”) as John’s childhood friend Needleman and Amy Poehler (“Saturday Night Live”) as Maggie Hoffman, John’s agent.

Not since The Toy (1982) when the butler referred to young Eric Bates as “Master Bates” has such a double entendre nickname been so unfunny. Woodcock, get it, hee-hee-hee, I’m in fourth grade, not funny. This joke is supposed to be the staple of the movie and it misses more often than Casey At Bat. Going to the movies is expensive. With gas and snacks, a date is going to run you close to $40. It is why I like the modern trailers that basically tell you the entire story and show you the funniest bits. Instead of enticing a person to see the film, the studio saves the potential audience member three or four Jeffersons, especially if it turns out to be a reject. While Mr. Woodcock has some humorous moments of dark humor, it ultimately is a failure.

September is one of the main months that Hollywood drops its dogs in milk bone underwear on an unsuspecting public. (February is the other month.) With students, the main audience Hollywood courts, returning to school and Friday evenings being filled with football, a cinematic abortion can be slipped in under the radar, into the theaters, picking off a few unsuspecting audience members, and out onto DVD, just in time for Christmas and a few extra sales. Mr. Woodcock is one of these films. Who doesn’t like Seann William Scott and Billy Bob Thorton? They are rarely in a bad film. With the right marketing, who would not be tempted to pick up a light comedy as a stocking stuffer or something the family can watch while folding clothes and wrapping presents. My advice is get Superbad or Knocked Up when they are on DVD instead, if you want a laugh.

Verdict: Catch It On Cable