Gambii's Picks #1 • School of Rock (2003)

School Of Rock (2003) • trailer

Ratings:

imdb: 7.1/10
tomatometer: 92%
gambii: 6/7

Review:

Beware, I am very, very biased regarding this specific movie because 1. Rock is my favorite genre of music, so I will definitely enjoy any movie about it; and 2. The moment Jack Black is in it I will 10/10 love it to the moon and back. I have never in my life seen a movie with Jack Black that I didn’t love to bits and I dare you all to find one. (Spoiler alert: you won’t. He’s amazing and I’d crawl back from hell for the chance to tell him so.)

The first thing you need to know about this movie is that it is a comedy, and therefore one can’t really take it seriously (which means no getting pissed off at “math doesn’t matter”). I love this kind of humor, this is what I live for.

Story time! (SPOILERS ahead, obviously.)

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Jack Black is Dewey Finn. He eats, drinks and breathes Rock. He lives for and because of it and he dreams on making money off the thing he loves most: music. In the beginning of this story, we see this cocky lazy son of a gun who’s leeching his friend (and former band bass player), Ned Schneebly; he doesn’t have any money so he obviously doesn’t pay rent or anything, Ned just kind of pays for everything while Dewey rocks on, hoping to one day have great success. Now, Ned is this substitute teacher, like really just a “normal guy with a normal job” kind of person. He quit playing and went to try and find a “real job”, which he did. He is a major pushover and in dire need of growing a couple cojones. And then there’s Patty Di Marco, who’s Ned’s girlfriend and keeps pushing him conform to The Man.

Thanks to Patty’s nagging, Ned goes and demands rent from Dewey, and so he needs to get money. When all else fails, Dewey accepts a job in Ned’s name and goes to teach a class of 10 years old children, to whom he presents himself as “Mr. S”. After a couple days of “!!!!! recess!!!!!” and “The Man will bend you over and take it to brown town so just give up already”, the kids have a music class. Dewey happens to hear them and goes to check them out, which is where he gets the idea of making those kids his band, take them to the Battle of the Bands, win that thing and ta-da! Dewey gets easy money!

At this point, Dewey gears up and fills his classroom with instruments for his little band to play and gives each and every one of them a job he thinks fits them. Now, here’s where you start realizing he’s actually a pretty decent person, despite the whole fraud thing, because he’s giving off tasks like “you, you and you! security!” and one of the boys asks if he could be the band stylist instead, and Dewey just straight up tells him “of course you can”. He’s always very positive and he embraces whatever these kids throw at him. When his keyboard player was all insecure because he wasn’t “cool enough” to be in a band, Dewey told him that he was in fact cool and that by rocking he’d get everyone to think so as well, and then nicknamed him of “Mr. Cool”. When one of his backup singers was freaking out because she thought she would be laughed at because she was “too fat”, he told her of a bunch of other artists who are also large and still amazing, he told her that he too was a bit overweight, but once he stepped on that stage to rock, people worshiped him nonetheless, because he was “sexy, and chubby” and when she asked him “why don’t you diet?” he just shut down that kind of thought by going like “because I like to eat, is that such a crime?”.

As the movie rolls, you see each and every one of them growing, and it’s magical. You see the kids getting out of their comfort zone and finding more about themselves than they ever would hadn’t Dewey crashed into their lives. He inspires them to reach out to the stars, to stick it to The Man, to rock out their feelings. He encourages them to accept themselves as they are and he constantly congratulates them for the great job they’re making.

At the climax, Dewey goes like “you’re 10 and you’re already better than me, we’re doing your song if you agree”, and they rock like there’s no tomorrow, which pays off at the end. Dewey doesn’t quite get what he wanted, but he kinda does, and that provides him with what he needed: a job.

Verdict:

Not only I’d pay to enroll my hypothetical children in this School of Rock of his, I would also sign up myself.

This is literally one of my favorite movies ever. It inspires me to be creative, work hard and to never give up on my dreams, and the only reason it doesn’t get a 7/7 is that it doesn’t really show you how hard it could be for them to just learn all of that in three weeks. Actually, I’m pretty sure there’s only a couple scenes where they show that off, and one of them is when one of the kids literally says “we’ve worked too long and too hard not to play this show”. You see them enjoying themselves throughout the whole thing, you see them having fun with these schemes and games, but the kids themselves look at the whole project as nonsense for like half the movie.

It’s a fun movie to watch, and it will provide some motivation to fight for what you love, but it won’t give you that feeling of “this is hard but it’s worth it” because they all make it seem so easy.