Stop Casting Her
I watched The Dangerous Lives of Altarboys last night, another film inexplicably containing Jena Malone. She’s just terrible, but keeps landing all these great roles, which she doesn’t slaughter so much as do nothing with. Anyway, part of my rancor for Miss Malone comes from her starring role in Cheaters, the most insidious piece of crap ever. It was this HBO film about the whole Whitney Young (my HS)/Steinmetz cheating scandal, of which you’ve probably never heard.
Here’s the actual story: During the State Academic Decathlon competition some number of years ago, all the teams, including the 9-year winner WY, dramatically dropped their scores. All except for Steinmetz, a school that had never posted an impressive score, who all of a sudden gained 2000 points (that’s a lot). So WY, along with the State Decathlon Board and others, raised a challenge. Turns out, one of the kids had gotten their hands on the test, and the coach and the other kids decided to cheat on the test. They got nailed, Plecki got fired, and WY went on to place second in the nation, only the second time a team outside of CA or TX had managed such a feat. A few years later, Larry Minkoff, the WY coach, retired and died shortly thereafter of lung cancer.
The HBO version goes a little differently. WY is composed of white kids wearing button-down Oxford shirts – every kid they showed wouldn’t have lasted a day at my HS. Minkoff is a huge bastard who is willing to crush poor little neighborhood school kiddies in his quest for Decathlon domination. All the WY team members are bastards, too. Yes, the Steinmetz team cheats, but (get this) they had to in order to expose the corruption in the system that allows the same team to win every year. Literally, the last monologue from Plecki is about how they did this noble thing and fought the system. By stealing tests and a competition from other kids that had worked really hard. They are the heroes of the piece.
Yes, the system that pits magnet schools against the neighborhood schools is inherently unfair and unfortunate. Ultimately, however, the competition isn’t so much about smarts as much as it is about research. Either way, I’m not sure that cheating your way to the top is something that should really be held up as an ideal. Not to mention that I’m sure it was really fun for Larry’s family to watch his character be assassinated on screen. It’s just made me think about how true all these “based on a true story” movies really are. Unless Cheaters in an anomaly, not really true at all.
Jesus, I’m off the soap box now, but what a crap film. I was going to write about running into people. I guess that’ll be another day.
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