Guy takes Chaitanya out on the town, introducing him to booze and prostitutes, and for a moment there he actually seems like a human being. Somehow, Guy still comes off as occasionally likeable, making friends with fellow contestant Chaitanya Chopra, a chatty 10-year-old who just wants some friends other than his spelling cards. The movie is blatantly R-rated, and can’t be seen by most of the actors in it for another 10 years. He fires off racist joke after racist joke, right over the heads of the nine year olds he’s talking to. It doesn’t matter that they’ve studied for years, have foregone friends to learn Latin roots and are just trying to make their parents proud Guy Trilby will stop at nothing to win the competition.īateman takes a break from playing the likeable pushover he always seems to play, including Michael Bluth in “Arrested Development,” to instead be the crude, foul-mouthed scoundrel that gets to say plenty of bad words. “Bad Words,” also starring Bateman, follows Guy Trilby, a 40-year-old man who forces his way into a children’s spelling bee and ruthlessly eliminates his competition. Who knew Jason Bateman could spell, let alone direct a film? Well, he probably can’t spell without his cue cards, but Bateman made his directorial debut with “Bad Words,” a dark comedy opening Friday. (Note: All boldfaced and hyperlinked terms are the “winning words” of National Spelling Bee champions.Photo Courtesy/Creative Commons/Wikipedia For all its meticulosity, the film is about as nourishing as a knaidel (last year’s winning word in the real National Spelling Bee) on Purim. The movie never makes Guy’s deification intelligible, leaving viewers in a state of deteriorating narcolepsy. It must be the Dictionary-Industrious Complex. Bad Words seems to be heading into the creepy realm of a sociopath’s case study, yet it’s presented as a breezy satire about a rebel against the system. Guy then slips a smidge of ketchup under a girl’s seat and whispers that her first menstrual blood is showing through her skirt she bolts in shame. Fondling Jenny’s panties, which she’d left from an erotic encounter the night before, he hands them to one child, saying he’d had sex with the boy’s mother the kid freaks out and is sent home. Put baldly, Guy’s strategies to win the Bee amount to emotional child abuse. He does have a motive for revenge, revealed late in the proceedings, but it hardly justifies his serial humiliation of the kids. But the children here are decent, bright and focused. We readily grant that kids, especially kids from Hell, need to learn that adults can communicate in other ways than begging the young to behave. That’s supposed to be a generous gesture on Guy’s part - what any good dad would do for his naïve child.īad Words nestles in the modern movie tradition of surrogate-parenting as exemplified by Bad Santa, Bad Teacher and Bad Grandpa. So he probably survived Guy’s treating him to the spectacle of a prostitute’s large breasts. This charming young actor has already played the son of terrorist Abu Nidal in Homeland and Adam Sandler’s adopted boy in Jack and Jill. He also hooks up with a genius 10-year-old named Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand). His only supporter is the journalist Jenny (Kathryn Hahn), whose online blog sponsored Guy’s appearance in the Bee, and who isn’t enough of a Si Hersh to find out why he’s doing it. Deagan (Allison Janney in the Jane Lynch role). Bowman (Philip Baker Hall) and his officious aide Dr. In the acrid script by first-time screenwriter Andrew Dodge, Bateman’s Guy finds loopholes in the rules of Bowman’s fictional spelling bee run by the esteemed educator Dr.
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