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Starring Michelle Pfeiffer. To be honest with you, I haven't seen Michelle Pfeiffer in many films. Prior to Dangerous Minds, I had only seen her in Batman Returns and Wolf. I found her performance in Batman Returns stunning. Part of this stemmed from the fact that I thought she truly grasped the inner drive of her character, and part of this stemmed from the fact that she was outfitted in a black, skin-tight, patent leather bodysuit for 90% of the movie. One element of Pfeiffer's performances in Batman Returns and Wolf that I did take with me though, was her remarkable knack for accurately portraying naive and quietly coquettish characters, two traits that usually don't go hand in hand with being a white woman teaching in an inner city high school in Los Angeles. However, much as I was surprised by Jon Lovitz's take as a leading man in High School High, I was charmed by Pfeiffer's transformance into an ex-marine, teaching high school in Dangerous Minds. Of the dramatic Inner City High School films, Dangerous Minds stands out as being the best. The reason for this is simple: Pfeiffer's lead is a character with whom the viewer can identify and sympathize. Although director John N. Smith focuses on the relationship between Pfeiffer and her students, Smith also sets aside a significant amount of time for Pfeiffer to be away from the classroom, allowing her character to gain an extra dimension. Despite the inspirational story behind Stand and Deliver, so much of its time was spent in the classroom that as its students trudged to school each morning, I felt as if I were back in high school with them, thinking up new and even more creative reasons to tell my calculus teacher, Mr. Bonney, why it was that I didn't have my homework. Showing Pfeiffer at home, and, on occasion, going out with her friends for drinks gave me a sense that her character was three-dimensional. I saw that her character had other interests besides teaching, and had something that may have been called a life, which was one element I didn't see in the leads in Stand and Deliver or 187. Dangerous Minds' biggest surprise though, came when I saw that it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson, the testosterone heavy, action film producers who have graced us with Top Gun, Bad Boys, The Rock, and this summer's own Armageddon. Even though Bruckheimer and Simpson did bring their savvy on how to make a marketable and profitable film--both revolve around the word 'Coolio'--their decision to break from their normal 'large planes running out of gas over large city' movies, to make two relatively smaller pictures like Dangerous Minds and Crimson Tide have brought me a new found respect for the duo. This wasn't Oscar worthy, but contained a sense of character dimension that was not found in any of the other dramatic Inner City High School films. This was hands down the best of the dramatic genre.
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