Pun Salad

This movie got an outstanding 91% on the Tomatometer, and Ryan Gosling got a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance. Not my cup of tea, however.

Gosling plays Danny Dunne, unfortunately bearing no relation whatsoever to the science fiction whiz kid I remember fondly from my youth. Instead, Danny is a substance-abusing high-school history teacher in Brooklyn, coaching girl's basketball on the side. You might expect that even a doped-up a history teacher might be requireed to teach, you know, history, but Danny gets away with blathering to his class about Marxist dialectics. He's also a lousy coach.

This does not stop his long, slow, slide to the bottom, however. Along the way, he develops an unusual relationship with Drey, one of his female students with her own family problems.

So it's all very grim and gritty. Apparently this impressed a lot of people, but I can't understand why.