Andrew Fleming’s low-budget indie about a lame-duck Drama teacher at West Mesa High in Tucson, forced to share classroom space first with the cafeteria workers and then with the girl volleyballers. The beady-eyed, seaweed-haired Steve Coogan is often funny as the affected artiste in a cruel and mocking world, and even when he’s not making you laugh he’s persuading you of his talent. Best evidence: his dark night of the soul in front of his word processor, staring at the blank screen with inextricable shock and terror (“Writing is so hard!”), snarling at the placid housecat (“What is your fucking problem?”), responding to a sudden burst of inspiration, or anyhow a sudden burst of actual typing, with a blurred back-and-forth between tears and laughter, a sort of Bipolar Express. His latest and last project, a musical time-travel sequel to Hamlet, never sounds remotely plausible (the eventual sight of it doesn’t improve matters), and the fractious Latinos in class, in addition to further reducing the plausibility of the project, take precious time away from the teacher’s devoted disciples, a repressed homosexual and a goody-two-shoes ingenue, winsomely embodied by Skylar Astin and Phoebe Strole. Elisabeth Shue — remember her? — is well cast as Elisabeth Shue, more precisely as an alternative Elisabeth Shue who might have quit Hollywood in disgust and taken up a new career as a nurse at a fertility clinic in Arizona. With Catherine Keener, David Arquette, Joseph Julian Soria, and Melonie Diaz. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.