School Of Rock (2003)

After being fired from his own band, the guitar player Dewey Finn (Jack Black) needs to raise some money to pay for his rent and his bills. When his friend and school teacher Ned Schneebly (Mike White) is called to a temporary work in an expensive private school, Dewey pretends to be Ned and accepts the job as hilarity ensues. He finds talented young musicians in his class, and he decides to form a rock-and-roll band with the students and win a competition called "Battle of Bands" to raise the prize and be recognized in the show business.

Trivia: The idea for the movie came when writer Mike White moved into an apartment next to Jack Black. White would often find Jack Black running naked through the halls or blasting much of the music featured in the movie at full volume. Writer Mike White is actually not a fan of classic rock. The basis of the movie is actually used so Jack Black could perform his own favorite music. The rock band Led Zeppelin are notoriously hesitant to allow their music to be licensed for commercial purposes. Knowing this, Richard Linklater filmed a plea by actor Jack Black in front of 1,000 screaming fans, imploring the band to let the production use the "Immigrant Song" in the movie. The plea worked and the filmed request is included on the DVD. Miranda Cosgrove, who plays Summer in the movie, can sing. She took about a 45-minute "bad singing" lesson to sing horrible for the song "Memory" when 'Jack Black' 's character was looking for backup singers. All the kids really play their instruments, and the backup singers are real vocalists. Jack Black also played a bit of guitar in the movie (for example, when he is teaching "Smoke on the water", "Iron man" and other songs to Zach), but he didn't do the guitar solos.

Now most of you know that I am not a fan of stupid humor like Dumb and Dumber and movies like that, (which is weird because I love the Naked Gun movies and Airplane!) The reason I said that is that Jack Black is noted for his in your face comedy so when Mick picked this movie for me to watch I groaned. But here is the thing, Jack Black is great...when he is playing semi serious, he is even very funny...when he is playing semi serious, and for most of this movie he is doing just that. His interaction with the kids was fun to watch. The kids were really great and in a movie like this you have to have good kids. Miranda Cosgrove was fun as the teacher's pet know it all. Joey Gaydos, Jr. who is the lead guitar player in the band was great. So all in all it was a fun movie to watch. As a side note, I stayed for the credits, meaning that Jack Black and the gang sang a song all the way through the credits with lyrics like "The movie is almost over!" It was great.