Tuesday, July 30, 2002

What was old will be new again

Lazing in front of the TV last night, I discovered that To Sir, With Love was being shown on AMC. I'd seen parts of the movie before, but never from the beginning, so decided to watch the first 30 minutes or so. Two hours later (well past my bed time), I was still watching, as enamoured of the film and Sidney Portier in the film as the annoying host of "Grrl Cinema" (or whatever they were calling the time slot).

The film was firmly rooted in a working class London high school in the late 1960's. Portier plays a engineer-turned-teacher who connects with his unteachable students by treating them with honesty and respect and talking about life. As he talks about rebellion, he mentions that their stylish clothes are a means of rebellion, but the clothing style was from the 1920's while the hair styles were all the rage in the Renaissance. Watching this 35 years later, I can't count the number of times the mod look of 1967 has come back in since then.

At one point in the film, the students explained to their teacher ("Sir") what cockney rhyming slang was, and that only the old folks still used it. What's funny is that I recently read that the slang is all the rage again in the UK.

Ah, the great circle of life...

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