Five Things I Watched in High School Less Educational Than The Daily Show

When my Spanish teacher showed us this Penelope Cruz epic the day before Christmas break her heart was it the right place. It was in Spanish, we were in a Spanish class, the logic was there. But one of the main plot lines is the attempted rape of a teenage girl and the subsequent quest to hide the body of the attempted rapist she stabbed to death. We could hear Elf through the walls. We weren't soaking up any vocab words.

This should have ranked pretty high on the objectionable public school movie list. The book it's based on is sub-titled-"A Tale of the Christ," and Jesus curing two of the main characters is as blatantly religious as you can get. My peers and I were less concerned with the mixing of church and state and more angry about the two and a half hours running time. By the end we were begging for math.

We watched an episode in Latin that was set in ancient Rome, or an ancient futuristic Rome,or contained some detail that let the teacher rationalize we weren't watching it because he was a huge fan. But he was a huge fan, and we really couldn't afford anytime off from conjugating.

In 9th grade science we watched a library of films with decreasing scientific significance. We started with Twister, went through Dante's Peak, until we finally got to Disney's Dinosaur and The Incredibles. This is why I still don't know why the sky is blue.

When you see Stomp live it's an impressive percussion spectacle. When you see it on a 32 inch TV screen it's a bunch of people who don't know how to sweep quietly.