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School Ties Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 17 Reviews)

The School Ties That Bind
School Ties is about a poor, exceptional football player who gets accepted to a prestigious prep school on a scholarship but chooses to hide his Jewish heritage.
Once he's revealed by a jealous jerk, everybody turns on him.

The film examines prejudice and acceptance. Not just acceptance of others, but acceptance of yourself. David hides apart of himself because it is convenient. But he learns at the end that denying his faith and ethnicity was wrong, though I can't exactly blame him. When he first arrives, he hears an anti-Semitic phrase ("I jewed him down") by a guy he ends up caring about as the guy suffers a nervous breakdown because he failed a French test.

Matt Damon is the villain. This was the first film I saw with Damon in it. He's definitely a p-rick. Incidentally, I don't like Matt Damon as an actor or person at all. Everytime I see him, he has this smug smirk on his face. He comes off as a real a-hole. In my opinion, he should play villains all the time because I don't buy him as the good guy, which is why I have avoided his Bourne...movies and basically anything else with him in it; except for the Talented Mr. Ripley where he also plays a sleazy villain.

The cast list reads like a Brat Pack Part Deux: Brendan Fraser, Chris O'Donnell, Amy Locane, Matt Damon, and even a slightly chubby Ben Afflack (not a typo).

What I also like about the film is the ending. It doesn't suffer from the usual Hollywood ending in which everything has to be neatly tied up at the end of 2 hours. I certainly like closure in most films, but with this film, there can really be no closure. David's fight against bigotry is going to be ongoing. At the end, no one has changed. And in real life, it's mostly like that. If Matt Damon's character had changed by the end, it would have been stupid. I'm pretty sure the thought police have a problem with the bigot not being reformed by the end, but bigotry can't change overnight.

School Ties is a great movie.


Falls flat on its Star of David
I was hoping for more from this movie. I was disappointed. This movie had a lousy ending, and didn't even seem to end. I couldn't believe it when the credits came up. So the Matt Damon character gets kicked out, and makes a bold anti-semite statement at the end? Huh?

I remember reading the description, and imagnined that the students were going to rush forward and support the Brendan Fraser character, as he's about to get kicked out, for cheating? Huh? Nobody showed support? It was just a sad story, with no real feeling. I actually disliked it more than I learned from it. Every direction he turned there was no support. Who wants to watch that?

I agree with another reviewer. I think the movie ran over budge, and they had to kill the last 20 minutes of filming.

Boo!!

A Gem! Smart and spirited...
Films like this just don't get made anymore. It's a shame.

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