Teaching Mrs. Tingle

Starring:Helen Mirren, Katie Holmes, Jeffrey Tambor, Barry Watson, Marisa Coughlan, Liz Stauber, Michael McKean, Molly Ringwald, Vivica A. Fox, John Patrick White, Robert Gant, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Cameron Glenar, Lesley Ann Warren, Alan Heitz, Cherie Johnson, Brian Klugman
Director: Kevin Williamson
Studio: Dimension
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

The poster for Teaching Mrs. Tingle may feature young TV cuties Katie Holmes (Dawson's Creek), Marisa Coughlin (Wasteland), and Barry Watson (Seventh Heaven), but the real star is the actress playing the title character: Helen Mirren. Mirren plays a bitter, tyrannical teacher who, due to circumstantial evidence, believes goody two-shoes Holmes is guilty of cheating on her history final. Holmes, Coughlin, and Watson go to Mirren's home to convince her that there's been a misunderstanding, but Mirren refuses to listen. Terrified that this will ruin her chances to go to college, Holmes and her compatriots knock Mirren out and tie her to her bed. Unfortunately, they haven't any idea what to do next; when Mirren awakes, the situation becomes a battle of wits in which the teenagers are hopelessly outmatched. Coughlin and Watson are pretty to look at and Holmes has some genuine talent and a lot of charm, but Mirren--who's played Shakespeare on the stage and been in movies ranging from lurid and trashy (Caligula) to eerie and arty (The Comfort of Strangers) to lurid, trashy, eerie, and arty (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover)--combines the cutting intelligence of Vanessa Redgrave, the steely will of Judi Dench, and a sensual energy that any young starlet would kill for. For fans of the British TV series Prime Suspect, in which Mirren plays the tough yet vulnerable Inspector Tennyson, this teen comedy-thriller is just an amusing footnote in Mirren's career; but if you've never been transfixed by this actress's mischievous sidelong glances, Teaching Mrs. Tingle might provide a good start. --Bret Fetzer

Description

Written and directed by Kevin Williamson (SCREAM, SCREAM 2, TV's DAWSON'S CREEK), TEACHING MRS. TINGLE is a cool, cutting-edge comedy starring Hollywood's hottest young talent! Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes -- TV's DAWSON'S CREEK, GO, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR) is the brightest girl at Grandsboro High ... but her dreams of a much-needed college scholarship are sabotaged when her history teacher, the dreaded Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren -- CALENDAR GIRLS), falsely accuses her of cheating! Desperate to prove her innocence, Leigh Ann conspires with her friends Luke (Barry Watson -- SORORITY BOYS) and Jo Lynn on a scheme that will teach Mrs. Tingle a lesson of her own! Before they know it, however, their plan spins hilariously out of control ... and becomes an endless comedy of errors! Also featuring Vivica A. Fox (KILL BILL VOLUME 1) and Molly Ringwald (SINCE YOU'VE BEEN GONE) -- you're sure to delight in all the fun and thrills of this hip movie treat!

Customer Reviews:

GREAT ENTERTAINING MOVIE WITH THE WONDERFUL HELEN MIRREN!!!!!.......2006-10-02

This is a greatly entertaining movie about the teacher you love to hate ~ with the wonderful and extremely talented Brittish actress Helen Mirren. It has a surprise ending too ~ to add to your viewing enjoyment. It is a must see ~ so buy it ~ you will not be disappointed!!!!!!

Never quite accomplishes anything.......2006-08-05

This teen flick tries to be hip, tries to be suspenseful, and tries to be meaningful but never really attains any of these goals. When three young people kidnap their domineering teacher, the stakes could potentially be huge and traumatic, or just a lot of fun,but the screenwriter pulls back anytime viewers might start to care what happens, or might start to enjoy themselves.

In the Scream films, at any rate, the stakes were huge: Life or Death. In this film, thought they try to make you think the kids academic and career futures are at stake, it never quite rings true. Nor do any of the characters--who are all cliched and unlikeable. The scariest thing in the film (besides the whole premise) is the facile way they handle teen sex as just a consequenceless, "fun" thing. ONe of the characters loses her virginity to a guy her best friend likes and its handled as if she'd eaten the friend's last donut--a little annoying but no big deal. I'm not a prude, but this just seems wrong to me.

Hope they paid Mirren a lot to be in this film because it's a low point in her career as far as I'm concerned. Nothing could be lower in Katie Holmes' career than marrying Tom Cruise, so this may be a high point in her life.

Guilty Pleasure.......2006-08-03

Like Justin Timberlake, 'Teaching Mrs. Tingle' is a major guilty pleasure. It's not a great movie, but it's fun, smart and sassy and it has enough going for it to overshadow it's faults. The story follows Leanne (Holmes) as she struggles to make valedictorian so she can get her scholarship and get out of the small town rut she finds herself. The only problem is her history teacher Mrs. Tingle (Mirren) who fancies herself at ruining Leanne's life. When she accuses Leanne of cheating of her history final things spiral out of control and Leanne, along with her boisterous, somewhat ditzy friend Jo Lynn (Coughlin) and the school pretty boy/bad boy Luke (Watson) take matters into their own hands by kidnapping Tingle. There's just one problem. What do they do with her now? The movie is funny and smart and while not perfect it's enjoyable and complete entertainment from start to finish, with true talent like Holmes and Mirren chewing up their lines and Watson and Coughlin looking good while they let the pro's do the work (not to say that Holmes is a 'pro' but I have to admit that she is talented). I personally find this to be a film I can watch again and again and it always retains its fun factor.

"Paging Mrs. Tingle!".......2006-05-22

While attempting to pound out reviews on Straw Dogs and Santa Sangre, a friend of mine lent me Teaching Mrs. Tingle which in comparison felt as light and fluffy as a down comforter. Here I was sweating bullets over two agonizingly lofty and intense pictures that require near perfection before a review could be deemed worthy of appearing in a public arena, and now I had at my fingertips a subject that I could easily discribe in simplistic terms of what works and what does not, needless to say, I decided to give my limited brain cells a rest and leave those two monstrosities in a couple of chaotic piles on the back burner.

Teaching Mrs. Tingle is a comedy that bases its humor on the familiar comedic elements of paying off long running gags, and exaggerating normality. Kattie Holmes has a long running gag about not getting the meaning of the word "ironic" right untill the closing moments of the film when she pays off the gag by teaching Mrs. Tingle what irony feels like, not that this gag is particularly funny but it does give the story a conveniently contrived conclusion. Marisa Coughlan's long running gag is that Mrs. Tingle can see right through all her acting attempts which is her characters life ambition, this gag also pays off at the conclusion of the film in a similarly contrived manner when she finally fools Mrs. Tingle with her acting ability. The problem is that this film has long since lost any of its funniness due to several plot twists that end up turning this comedy into a psycho thriller.

The best thing about Teaching Mrs. Tingle is Mrs. Tingle. The stylistic choice to exaggerate her character into the evilest teacher in the history of high schools is by far the most engrossing element in the whole film. Helen Mirren plays Mrs. Tingle, a role that recalls her days as Morgana in John Boormans Excalibur. Like Excalibur she is pretty much playing a mythological character, quite possibly Medusa. Her first introduction to the viewer is from the neck down as she briskly walks through the center of campus hallway in her severely buttoned down dark bussiness suit which looks like the attire of a modern day wicked witch. In a scene reminiscent of the running of the bulls in Pamplona Spain, or the parting of the Red Sea, the students and faculty members alike scatter from her path in total fright in a nice build up her insurmountably evil persona. Later in class she destroys her students ridiculously elaborite assignments and shakey psyches with her razor sharp mind and acid tongue as she floats in front of her students like some manevolent crocodile salivating for the next tender morsel to expose its weakness to her.

Playing the role of a sinister beast as opposed to just another straight person already places Helen Mirren at a huge advantage for stealing the attention away from the rest of the cast, but this disparity is all the more magnified by her incredibly powerful film presence which dwarfs the acting ability of her youthful counterparts. It is also interesting to notice the degree in which she separates herself from her hot young co-stars in the area of sex appeal. This is no small feat concidering that she was 53 during the filming of this movie, and is basicly playing a monster. Yet dispite these character and age drawbacks, and dispite not taking part in the films love triangle she still grossly overpowers her nubile co-stars with her sultry sensuality.

The real problem with this movie is that writer director Kevin Williamson made a poor choice to tie the films best feature to a bedpost and leave her there motionless for most of the film. To fill in the missing action, the story had to slither into its side stories which unfortunately revolve around tedious adolescent dramas. I guess he made a choice to do a humorous parody on the Exorcist, yet this very choice placed the film on an endless downward trajectory, it peters out, flatlines, and once it does it never recovers. It creates an maddening film experiance in that it starts off so promising only to lose all its bubbles and go flat. By the end of the film I no longer felt like I was watching something funny, in fact, while watching two of the principle characters violently tumble down a flight of stairs in slow motion, I was suddenly reminded of my review of Straw Dogs which I placed aside because of the scary feelings it gave me. Somehow I do not associate seeing a painful Peckenpah like action sequence with a fun highschool comedy, and I can't help feeling like Kevin Williamson wanted to do far too much with this idea and in the process made it so that none of it worked.

Ultimately this film might make an okay rentail if you are really really bored and have nothing better that you want to do, but ownership is out of the question, dispite how nice it was to see Helen Mirren play such a dynamic character. In keeping with the theme of irony, the true irony is that the choice to make a comedic Exorcist homage at all cost is ultimately what killed all the fun, now thats ironic.

Amusing, but doesn't quite live upto its potential........2006-05-18

Teaching Mrs. Tingle (Kevin Williamson, 1999)

I avoided this film for years despite my fanboyish obsession with Helen Mirren simply because it was written and directed by the awful Kevin Williamson. I finally decided to get around to seeing it, and I discovered, much to my surprise, that Kevin Williamson is not really all that awful. (I am now faced with the idea that Craven and Williamson's collaborations are bad because of Craven and not Williamson, which is a truly depressing idea.) Teaching Mrs. Tingle is at least smart and funny, if predictable and cliched.

Eve Tingle (Mirren) is the history teacher from hell, a tyrant whose class is the one that keeps just about everyone from getting uniformly good grades. Thanks to a series of events that could only happen in Hollywood, good girl Leigh Ann Watson (Dawson's Creek's Katie Holmes) is discovered with the answers to Mrs. Tingle's final exam in her bag. With her best friend Jo Lynn (Pumpkin's Marisa Coughlan) and Luke (Seventh Heaven's Barry Watson), who was responsible for the whole mess in the first place, Leigh Ann goes over to Mrs. Tingle's house to plead her case. Things spiral out of control, and the three teens find themselves locked in a battle of wits with the teacher.

There has been a great deal made over the title's changing from Killing Mrs. Tingle being thanks to Columbine; did no one notice the incredible similarities to the 1997 TV movie Killing Mr. Griffin? Eh, guess not. In any case, you get pretty much what you came for. Jo Lynn is all too stereotypical. Luke is a tad more three-dimensional, but of the three teens, only Leigh Ann is drawn with anything akin to depth. Eve Tingle is the movie's best creation, but much of her depth is shown to the viewer and then made to disappear.

Despite the movie's weak characterization and derivative plot, it is at least amusing and decently-paced, which accounts for some of its watchability. You won't find classic film here, by any means, but not a bad way to kill an hour and a half or so if you enjoy staring rapturously at Helen Mirren. ** ½

Average customer rating:

Teaching Mrs. Tingle [Region 2]
Starring: Helen Mirren , Katie Holmes , Jeffrey Tambor , Barry Watson , and Marisa Coughlan
Director: Kevin Williamson
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Comedy | Genres | DVD | Video

( T ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
ASIN: B000069JE6

Average customer rating:

Teaching Mrs. Tingle [Region 2]
Starring: Helen Mirren , Katie Holmes , Jeffrey Tambor , Barry Watson , and Marisa Coughlan
Director: Kevin Williamson
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Comedy | Genres | DVD | Video

( T ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
ASIN: B00004VXST

Average customer rating:

Teaching Mrs. Tingle [Region 2]
Starring: Helen Mirren , Katie Holmes , Jeffrey Tambor , Barry Watson , and Marisa Coughlan
Director: Kevin Williamson
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Comedy | Genres | DVD | Video

( T ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
ASIN: B00004X074

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