The History Boys

On Tuesday, December 19, 2006, I went to see the movie The History Boys. This was a movie about a bunch of intelligent school boys who got really high grades on their exams, and thus is now under more pressure to succeed on these exams to get into Oxford or Cambridge.

The headmaster of the school, of course, does not care about making these students well-rounded individuals, but as people who can get into Oxford or Cambridge, so that the school becomes more reknown, and then he can charge more for students to go there. He had no interest in his teachers, or rarely he had interest in them, but always for bad things.

There was also the problem of one of the teachers who couldn't control himself and groped his young students, while he was giving them a ride home on his motorbike.

This was a very clever film, lots of clever English humour, and heartfelt and warm. The French part of the movie (when they were in a general studies class, studying French), was not so hot, because their French accent is heavily anglicized, but it was fun nonetheless.

It condenses the play into two hours and two minutes, which I did not find dull at any moment. In fact, when the end of the movie came, I found it abrupt, I had no idea that it was the end.

The only thing that ruined the movie for me, which I had no control over, was the two idiots who sat behind me. They arrived late, they sat down and were chatty. I gave them a nasty stare, they stopped for about five minutes, and then they chatted throughout the movie. I nearly left the theatre having snapped their necks. Or performing one of those Mortal Kombat III Trilogy fatalities...