Lee Hirsch made ''Bully'' to help him cope with his own baggage and to help bring to light a persistent problem in our schools
By Chris Heller Photography by Todd Franson
April 19, 2012
Figuring out the rest of the shooting schedule — specifically, obtaining permission to film inside a school — wasn’t as easy. After many rejections, Hirsch pitched his project to a school district in Sioux City, Iowa.
“They were receptive,” he said. “They were like, ‘Hey, we’re on this journey and we want to do better. If this can help us do better and others do better, let’s do it.'”
Watching the documentary suggests that the school has a long way to go. In one of Bully‘s most infamous scenes, an assistant principal chastises one student when he refuses to shake hands with the bully who has been harassing him for weeks. (His rejection is as bad as bullying, she tells him.)
“Teachers and administrators have to recognize that they have a lot of power to make things better — and a lot of obligations as well,” Hirsch says. “We don’t hold back, but it doesn’t come from a place of ‘us versus them’ either.”
“Us versus them” seems to be the antithesis of Hirsch’s method of fighting back against bullying. Because all kids can get bullied, he believes, it’s important to give them all help.
“I think special-needs kids are just as at risk as gay kids,” he says. “I think it’s a mistake for the LGBT community to say, ‘We own bullying’ or ‘This is really just our problem.'”
Asked to clarify, Hirsch reiterates his empathy for all bullying victims.
“I don’t like bullying being a politicized issue,” he says. “I don’t want to give right-wing people that look for any platform they can find to be anti-gay a reason to not teach their kids to be empathetic. We need to get to the kids before the hate comes in.”
Two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali trained for years to swing a sword onscreen as the MCU's new incarnation of vampire hunter Blade. Yet, as film fans know by now, the studio wasted that man's time, while certainly adding to his bank account, with no Blade feature ever coming to fruition. And it never will with Ali, he's declared, understandably ready to keep it moving.
Fortunately, from the ashes of the scuttled project -- and half a decade of Ali developing a Blade film alongside Mogul Mowgli writer-director Bassam Tariq -- a new hero has arisen in their gripping collaboration Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.
Everybody just wants Ridley Scott to get on with it.
By that, of course, I mean wrap up the damn Alien trilogy he started with Prometheus and left dangling -- quite unnervingly -- nearly a decade ago with Covenant. But Ridley is a stubborn old director, and he's going to make what he feels like making, even if he teases us sadistically with promises of "Maybe it'll be my next film -- I'm developing it."
Kodak film from 1966 develops faster.
I am one of those people -- a fan, if I'm being honest -- who really, really, really want to see how David's story resolves and how the Xenomorph actually comes into being, if that's even the point anymore. So you'll pardon me for going into Scott's latest film, The Dog Stars, with a critic's chip on my shoulder. I didn't expect to be thrilled, interested, or moved. I didn't expect to like it, even slightly.
Alejandro Iñárritu's rambling satire Digger is a woolly mess of a film, though admirable in its ambition. Few modern movies aiming to reheat Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove recipe of doomsday dread, political satire, and broad absurdist comedy come as close to the Kubrickian ideal as Digger does in fits and starts.
Digger likewise plants us beside the President of the United States (John Goodman) and members of his cabinet cartoonishly fighting in the war room over what to do to avert an imminent disaster. Here, the threat's not an atomic bomb, but rather an American-made climate catastrophe that could wipe out thousands, maybe millions of lives.
