A reader writes:
I am a teacher in a Title 1 Bronx HS and I have run the chess club here for a number of years, so this documentary really appeals to me. However, Linda Holmes is more than right to worry in terms of film history. The focus will not just move from student to teacher, underprivileged minority student to white teacher, but just as bad, the film will likely slip easily into the Hollywood trope of the Teacher as Martyr.
In the NYT Op-Ed a few years ago, teacher Tom Moore wrote a piece called Classroom Distinctions (01/19/07) that discussed a nearly endless list of inner city school-based movies that share all the same qualities. All of them are teacher-centric films where the teacher "saves" the students by believing in them. The price for this salvation is usually the teacher's relationships outside the school, the teacher's health, or both. On the list of movies in that article, you may not be surprised to learn, is a movie about chess, staring Ted Danson as the savior/martyr, called Knights of the South Bronx. The word "trite" just doesn't seem strong enough to me when I think about the continued oversimplifying and mythologizing of the role of teacher in America.
Another writes:
If Hollywood does make a movie about these chess players, I hope they will give a starring role to Sean Nelson, who starred at age 14 in the underappreciated movie Fresh (1994), about a chess prodigy from the projects who puts his talents to practical use. It was a movie that still burns in the memory, 18 years later.
(Video: a scene from Fresh)
The Dish 