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“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Bad Teacher stars Cameron Diaz in the title role, because otherwise who would want to see a movie about a bad teacher?

Bad Teacher

Teachers are supposed to be good. Teachers are supposed to be helpful. Teachers are supposed to be able to teach difficult subjects to recalcitrant students.

And if you don’t know what “recalcitrant” means, then you just might have been one.

Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a seventh-grade teacher at John Adams Middle School, and when the movie begins, it is the last day of school and she is being honored by the principal after having taught only one year.

Elizabeth is given a $37 gift certificate as a bonus, which doesn’t say as much about her teaching abilities as it does about the sad economic state of the education system in general.

Elizabeth tells her colleagues that she doesn’t need a blackboard or a classroom to set an example, but Elizabeth doesn’t plan to return in the fall to teach a second year at the school. She plans to marry her wealthy fiance and be taken care of for the rest of her life.

However, when Elizabeth goes home that day, her plans change completely, and three months later she is back at school to teach another year.

Well, “teach” is such a loaded word. Let’s just call it sitting at the front of her classroom and planning how she is going to pay for the boob job she believes will land her a rich husband.

In fact, Elizabeth starts showing movies about teachers instead of doing any teaching herself, and when the principal questions her teaching-by-movies technique, Elizabeth says, “I think that movies are the new books.”

Then when Justin Timberlake shows up at the school as Scott Delacorte, the new substitute teacher, Elizabeth learns that he is independently wealthy, and so she schemes to snag him as her sugar daddy, but nerdy Scott has hie eye on another teacher whom Elizabeth doesn’t get along with.

Now, of course there is a scene at a fund-raising car wash in which Elizabeth shows off her body that is like many other movies before this one, of course there is a major plot to get money that backfires, and of course there is a kind gym teacher attracted to Elizabeth whom she rejects.

Bad Teacher has worse writers.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”