UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

SnoopyStyle Ben Wekselbaum and Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) are fast-talking high school debate teammates in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Then Ben goes blank in the big tournament and Ginny is stuck with second place. In school, Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson) stutters terribly. His parents are separated and his brother is a kleptomaniac. He's struggling and then surprisingly Ginny recruits him for the debate team. She wants to mold him into her new partner.Anna Kendrick's quick talking is hilarious. It's a relentless non-stop flow of thoughts. Reece Thompson is endearing. When he tells her that she's not an object of desire for pedophiles, her reply "That's the worst thing anyone has ever said to me" killed me. There is this aura of quirky indie that will either enchant the audience or annoying them. I could probably use less of it. Hal needs a better friend character. I would have loved to see Jonah Hill in that role. The movie doesn't quite work all the time when Ginny isn't with Hal.

a_flynn78 You know how there are stories that are adversity to triumph, unstable to stable, confused to knowing. This is not a happy story, i sat through all the frustrating bits in the movies, putting my shirt over my head whenever he tried to debate with his enormous stutter, thinking its okay, because I'm gonna see some scenes at the end where he has finally lost his stutter. I didn't. Maybe i had the wrong idea when i watched this movie, i was convinced from start till perhaps the last scene, that i was going to see an inspiring transformation, where i would no longer feel sorry for the kid, and that marred my view on the film. All i could think about during the whole film is not what this kid was talking about, what he was thinking about, but how he was speaking. Its like a movie where the main character looks like a bunyip, all you can think about is this main character looks like a bunyip, and not really what he/she is saying. I was convinced the inevitable transformation was going to be in his speaking patterns so i wasn't particularly interested in his views on love, because I'm sorry, i don't mean to be offensive to anybody but having a speech impediment as BAD as that, is something i couldn't bear to hear for the rest of my life, you have to try and do something about it. I thought thats what this movie was about! Look I'm sure what the kid was saying was important, and meaningful, but i was looking for more blunt changes that were imperative to me saying at the end of the movie, wow that was good. The stutter was a vehicle to portray a message about love when i went through the whole movie thinking it was the opposite, that all the references to love would make him lose his stutter. Not a horrible movie, but after i finished watching it, i felt horrible, Im a bit tired of movie producers thinking 'it will be more meaningful if we deprive the movie of a happy ending'. To be honest, i don't need happy endings, but what i do need is some light. At the end of 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind' i was left thinking, despite its lack of a cliché happy ending, that the main characters were not doomed because of it, that they could bounce back from the issues in the movie. I felt at the end of 'Rocket Science' that the kid was never going to get rid of his stutter, and when did his last debate and he turned to the judges and said 'Im killing it right?' that he was in fact, not killing it, he sucked, you can't debate in a musical tone, there was no growth there. Was it that hard to put a happy ending in!?!

TxMike Very interesting movie, although in the end not very realistic. It features a type of debate style I had never seen, where participants speak in a very rapid style, to get out as much information in their alloted time. Although the actors weren't necessarily chosen because of this trait, they do it very well.Reece Thompson is arguably the main actor as Hal Hefner, the meek high school kid with a bad stuttering problem. Hal is smart, he analyzes his own situation well, he has sessions with a teacher to learn how to overcome the problem, but nothing seems to work.So Hal and we, the audience, are quite surprised when one day on the bus to school Anna Kendrick as cute and smart Ginny Ryerson approaches him to convince him to join the debate team. Seems one stellar debate team member just up and quit, and left school, and they needed to recruit someone. She just knew Hal could be a stellar debate member.Hal of course is reluctant but is attracted to Ginny who it seems is also leading him on a bit. She has ulterior motives, but it doesn't surface until much later.In my earlier remarks I said the story doesn't seem realistic. In high school (or college, for that matter) would a debate team coach put up for competition a stutterer without ever having that person demonstrate that they could perform properly in practice? From my experience the answer is "no".Anyway the story is really about Hal and how this experience was the catalyst for his own growing up, to be able to realize what is really important in life.SPOILERS: Ginny had an ulterior motive. She wanted to add someone incompetent to the team, to help her own chances of winning the state title. The prior year she and her partner would have won, had he not quit during the final debate. Feeling cheated, she made plans to partner with a boy on the rival team, and after getting Ben on her own school team, she quit and enrolled at the other school just in time to compete.

lion_and_boar Seriously. I have to agree with the writer of the review at the top of the string of reviews. There's insight and brilliance in the script and in the direction. Movies about high school kids will draw comparisons to all the high school films that preceded it, from Hughes to Apatow. Americans, we take our high school years very seriously...especially after we graduate. And we all have our favorite movies that deal with those four years of our lives (mine: "Donnie Darko," "Rushmore," and "Election"). Given time, I think "Rocket Science" will settle somewhere between "Election" and "Napolean Dynamite," for me."Rocket Science" is unique if you're willing to look beyond the surface similarities. Yes, this movie has a young protagonist who wants to overcome the odds to get the girl, with the help of friends, with interference from an antagonistic sibling, and parents who just don't seem to understand. That's practically a classical form by now. Euripides could fill in that outline.Already, there are 4 pages of reviews and I can only add this: the roles of the Asian Americans that writer and director Jeffrey Blitz carved out deserve comment. And that comment is: sweet! Astonishing, really. Someone mentioned "Juno" in these reviews and how "Rocket Science" achieved where "Juno" may have fell short. I skipped "Juno" but listened to at least three separate discussions on public radio and on the local AM stations about the Chinese-baby line used in the promotions. I understand that, in the context of the movie, it wasn't so bad. Nothing nearly that clumsy in "Rocket Science." Two Asian American actors get speaking roles and their lines are often hilarious: Stephen Park as Judge Pete who is jovial for no good reason and Aaron Yoo as his son, Heston, who crosses that line from admiring muscly dudes to really admiring them. The roles are clearly written as Asian American roles. In fact, father and son are identified, specifically, as Korean American, highlighted by Judge Pete's wailing of "ummah" in a scene where the judge is not so jovial. Blitz does wonderful work in identifying the characters as Asian American while not announcing their scenes as "The Asian Scenes." The jokes come, but not at their expense. There's a funny line about the casserole they bring to dinner which I won't spoil for those who haven't seen the movie yet. The exchange says more about the mother, aptly played by Lisbeth Bartlett, and her appetite for the exotic than the Asian-ness of her guests.Later in the film, the protagonist and Heston pair up in a speech competition, and employing a technique suggested by his school counselor to quell the stammer, Hal decides to affect an accent. The scene is brilliantly written, directed and edited. The last time I was surprised by how loud I laughed in a movie was when Bart had a full-frontal scene in "The Simpsons." There's also a scene with that same counselor speaking from home to Hal on the phone. There is a shot that includes his significant other who is Asian. It's uncanny (or is it uncannily canny). The casting: she's a good looking woman and, by most measures, he did better than his station or his looks. The composition: she is positioned in a way that suggests detachment and self-absorption, showing no interest in the conversation. She's in a bathrobe, trimming her toenails (or something similar) on the couch, displaying a level of comfort, in particular with her body, many Asians would find immodest and not-so-classy. A director with less skill would have had any Asian actress fiddling around in the background. Jeffrey Blitz creates something as precise as something Wes Anderson put on film, without the elements becoming ornamental.Yes, there are jokes in "Rocket Science," but it's not the joke-gag-joke rabbit punches of Apatow and his bunch and none of that numbing repetitive dissonance of their adult language spoken by what we're supposed to believe are goofy high school kids. They write as if they are haunted by moments from their high school years in which they could have uttered something clever and snappy but the words came only after dinner. Another memorable scene in "Rocket Science:" Hal visits the principal's office at a private school, and while he waits there, he discusses 2nd base with a girl that could be a delinquent. The girl's final remark is hilarious. And you believe it is something that could be said by a girl who was sent to the principal's office.