Rating: 
Summary: Oleanna : Communication Breakdown.
Review: ...Oleanna is not an average, everyday run of the mill movie. It has none of the glitzy, glamorous trapping traditionally associated with Hollywood. What it does contain is a powerful and thought provoking movie-going experience. Through irregular dialog David Mamet manages to touch the raw nerves of the audience. Oleanna's basic premise is the lack of communication, and how it can have devastating effects on normal benign situations. Perception plays a big role in this film. Oleanna shows what can happen when a person's perception of reality is blurred by their arrogance and solipsism. The movie is told in 3 major scenes, each scene shows the strong development of the student and the decline in the confidence of the professor.
The intro scene allows the viewer to see the professor in all of his glory. For 20 years he has built a professional career, now it is about to bear fruit in the form of tenure at the university. This achievement comes crashing down around him when a female student who believes his sexist ways need to be stopped confronts him. The professor feels a connection with this female, through their similar past experiences. The professor shares with her the tools necessary to develop into a productive student.
As the movie progresses the viewer sees the girl gain confidence in herself and her motivations to effect change in her surroundings. The ability to touch a life and have a monumental impact on the course of a student's path in life is every educators dream. In the female student the professor has achieved this dream, but at the cost of his professional career. This is because he becomes the target for her anger and her need to make a difference. She will rid what she perceives to be an evil in the education system, a man who would use his clout to make others suffer for his own pious amusement.
I would highly recommend this film to anyone. Everyone who watches this movie will leave with a different take on communication and perception. The movie forces the viewer to take a side. During the movie it is easy to side with the professor, but what happens in the last 5 minutes makes for great discussions...Like the movies tag line says, "Whatever side you take you're wrong."
Rating:
Summary: Oleanna : Communication Breakdown.
Review: ...Oleanna is not an average, everyday run of the mill movie. It has none of the glitzy, glamorous trapping traditionally associated with Hollywood. What it does contain is a powerful and thought provoking movie-going experience. Through irregular dialog David Mamet manages to touch the raw nerves of the audience. Oleanna's basic premise is the lack of communication, and how it can have devastating effects on normal benign situations. Perception plays a big role in this film. Oleanna shows what can happen when a person's perception of reality is blurred by their arrogance and solipsism. The movie is told in 3 major scenes, each scene shows the strong development of the student and the decline in the confidence of the professor.
The intro scene allows the viewer to see the professor in all of his glory. For 20 years he has built a professional career, now it is about to bear fruit in the form of tenure at the university. This achievement comes crashing down around him when a female student who believes his sexist ways need to be stopped confronts him. The professor feels a connection with this female, through their similar past experiences. The professor shares with her the tools necessary to develop into a productive student.
As the movie progresses the viewer sees the girl gain confidence in herself and her motivations to effect change in her surroundings. The ability to touch a life and have a monumental impact on the course of a student's path in life is every educators dream. In the female student the professor has achieved this dream, but at the cost of his professional career. This is because he becomes the target for her anger and her need to make a difference. She will rid what she perceives to be an evil in the education system, a man who would use his clout to make others suffer for his own pious amusement.
I would highly recommend this film to anyone. Everyone who watches this movie will leave with a different take on communication and perception. The movie forces the viewer to take a side. During the movie it is easy to side with the professor, but what happens in the last 5 minutes makes for great discussions...Like the movies tag line says, "Whatever side you take you're wrong."
Rating: 
Summary: scorching drama
Review: A professor about to get tenure has a run in with a student who resents his condescension and mis-interprets his efforts to help her, all of which leads to emotional and practical complications. A believable set of twists and turns will have you squirming and wanting to interrupt to straighten out these two ernest but headstrong individuals from their collision course. This is a classic that all people in education should see, if for no other reason than it shold scare the pants off of them.
Rating: 
Summary: answer the darn phone
Review: Although some directors have served the work of playwright David Mamet well, think of About Last Night and Glengarry Glen Ross (American Buffalo is best forgotten), and Mamet has been successful directing his own original screenplays - House of Games, Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner - the only one of his plays that the playwright has directed himself is a cinematic failure, being hopelessly stagebound. As a two hander, it's certainly well acted by Mamet regular William H Macy and Debra Eisenstadt, and Mamet even throws in some songs he wrote on the soundtrack, but the set traps us in the two rooms that the college professor accused of sexual misconduct and the student charging him, inhabit. It doesn't help matters that she is always trying to leave and he is always stopping her. The telephone interruptions scream theatre and so does Mamet's way of having the characters interrupting each other's mannered sentences. The film only breathes when the characters do something apart from rant. Having seen the play on stage, I thought even then the opening act was too much. It's necessary that it be rambling so that we can see how the student can misinterpret the professor's hands of comfort on her and then hear her accusations in a brilliantly written second act turn, but boy does it ramble! And then it's her turn. Eisenstadt actually resembles Mamet's former wife Lindsay Crouse which may explain his joy when Macy attacks her, and which only underlines Mamet's notorious mysogyny.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh, the damage two people can do...
Review: As mentoined by others, this is not a film for the unprepared. Take Mamet's trademark choppy and rythmic prose - add that there are two characters in the whole film - put that together with the fact that the film is about one of the most controversial subjects and yet, does no 'moralizing' of the 'who's right' variety. What do you get? Boredom? Torture? That's what you'd think, right? Wrong! This film is outstanding; that is...if you are a David Mamet fan. I am, and quite frankly, if you're not, you should be. Oleanna is the story of a girl who goes to see her college professor for help in a class she is failing. He means well (so it seems) and tries to help, but says (and does?) some thing that lead her to suspect sexual harrassment. Before long a complaint is filed and he may lose his tenure and his job. Yes, the whole film - THE WHOLE FILM - is dialogue between these two characters in his office (three acts). But as a testament to Mamet, no one has ever made a two-person dialogue stretched over 90 minutes so forward moving, exciting, confusing, nuanced, and awesome. The ending is explosive! The reason for the knocked out star is for the Mamet-ness which, though I am accustomed to and love, may seem strange to the uninitiated. His style is this: the dialogue he writes containes fragmented and somewhat choppy sentences as an attempt to immitate real speech (why do movie characters always talk in complete sentences?). Further, instead of the actors improvising the "ums" and stammers, Mamet actually WRITES THEM INTO THE SCRIPT and the actor's job is to perform it completely as written! What does this make for? If done correctly and properly it makes for a highly rythmic and forward moving style. If done poorly, it makes for a mechanical and almost dull recetative that gets under your skin, it's so tight. Fortunately, it is done quite well by the two actors (with ever-so-slight slippage into the monotone from the actress). All in all, this is a film I will watch again and again, and I'm confident that I'll see new nuances each time (that's just Mamet's way!). If you want to see some great art, get this film!
Rating:
Summary: Classic Mamet
Review: David Mamet, the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Broadway and later cinematic masterpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross, and other works, wrote and directed this artistic and quasi-realistic look at the gender wars. It starts out so slow that I almost gave up on it in the middle of the second reel (or actually in the middle of what would be the second act-it's adapted from his play) but I am surely glad I held on as it gathered momentum and power. It's about a college professor and a student who accuses him of sexual harassment. He's weak willed and likes his position and she's a ball-breaker who projects her desire for him by attacking him. He doesn't see the danger until it's too late. William H. Macy, lately seen as the fifties TV husband in Pleasantville (1998) and before that as the murderous car salesman in Fargo (1996), plays the pompous professor while Debra Eisenstadt is the unpleasant student looking to hurt. The dialogue is repetitious and purposely banal in an attempt to imitate actual speech. If you've never seen or read a Mamet play, his unique and highly characteristic style may startle you. What he tries to do with the repetition and the indirection is to imitate and burlesque the manner of normal speech. He effort is less successful here, in fact annoying at times, partly because Macy's unique acting style is almost a natural parody of misdirection and obtuseness. Taken together perhaps we have overkill. Nonetheless, this is fascinating to watch. People do talk at cross purposes and practice miss-communication. The tension, once developed, is maintained throughout because we can't decide whose side we're on. Both characters are purposely unsympathetic, and both compromised because of their personality weaknesses. Mamet is a master at exposing human hypocrisy and ulterior motivation. We can see that the professor is in fact innocent of sexual harassment, but entirely guilty in his heart, while the unattractive girl although lying and out to hurt has been devalued by our society to the point of self hatred. They are unsympathetic, yet we can, through them, if we are honest with ourselves, catch a glimpse of our own compromised nature. They are out to abuse or hurt one another because of established character defects. The lecher leches to control and to prove his masculinity, while the harassed "victim" seeks some attention to spice up her dreary life.
Rating:
Summary: Tiresome premise.
Review: Ever since Jerry Goldfarb's "The Student as Niggar," written over 30 years ago, the academic teacher-student relationship has become a metaphoric battleground for exploring authority, manipulation, and control. Although Mamet must think he's evening the playing field, that's not the case. First, his characters are stereotypes (students will no longer do "anything" for a grade, though professors are more than willing to do so rather than risk damaging a student's self-esteem). Secondly, the fatal flaw is not in character but in a system that equates grades and credits with knowledge. Within such a politicized, institutional context, a sympathetic case can be made for the professor but none strong enough to exonerate him. The primary victim will always be the student, deluded into thinking a grade might be some sort of accurate measurement of knowledge, competency, or personal worth. Oscar Wilde said it best: "The central paradox of education is that the only things worth learning can't be taught."
Rating:
Summary: UNCONVINCING AND STILTED
Review: I am university professor from a midwestern state university. In all my years of teaching I think I may have come across a student this bright and literate perhaps half a dozen times, if that. I found the dialogue between her and the tenure seeking professor unconvincing and so stuffy it's hard to believe. Mamet's writing, far more suited to the stage, is hard to take. It has the same clipped and far from real life tone as it did in "House of Games" (a far better picture, in my opinion). I do not see where this film portrays some big deal intellectual game between these two. I'd just have thrown her out of my office and tell her to the grade appeals committee.
Rating:
Summary: Worth watching yet ultimately dissappointing
Review: I'm a fan of both Mamet and the actor William Macy so I came to this one with high expectations. This movie centers on the power struggles between a college professor and one of his female students, touching on issues of male/female relationships as well as the perception of power between the genders. An ambitious plot which, unfortunately, seems to meander all over the place before leading to a rather chilling, climactic ending. While Macy does a fine job of communicating Mamet's dialogue his character, a university professor on the verge of tenure, seems artificially constrained by the stilted dialogue and the peculiar rhythms of speech ( a trademark of Mamet which sometimes works, but not in this movie). The young woman who plays the student seemed equally restricted by the dialogue. Even with the unevenness and flaws within this movie, I couldn't tear my eyes from the screen as the plot was intriguing. Ultimately, however, I was left with a feeling of confusion and a sense that this one fell far short of its ambitious intentions. What was the message Mamet was trying to convey, I wondered? Or was there any message at all?
Rating:
Summary: UACT-Critial Thinking
Review: If you are looking for a movie that will not make you think. If you want a movie that where the hero carries a big gun, and saves the world. If you want a movie that you can watch without emotion. Oleanna is not for you. Oleanna is about a teacher that trys to help a student grow and learn. Durring that process the student, either on her own behalf or her group, feels that the teacher tried to rape her. As a on looker you are able to see what really was going on and are able to be either annoyed by the student or sympathize with the student. Durring the process of the teacher helping the student the teacher looses control and the student becomes the person with power. That builds to the very last sence. As long as you are not annoyed easily and want to think after watching a movie. Oleanna is a great movie to watch. Everything builds off something else. If you are annoyed easily I would suggest that you try not to watch this movie.
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