On S List of Movie Reviews

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Stand and Deliver (1988)

Rate: 8
Viewed: 3/03, 12/03, 2/12, 1/21

StandDeliver
2/12: I won't go so far as to call Stand and Deliver a powerful film; in fact, it's misleading.

However, it's a good motivational piece of work for education. If these Mexican American kids can do calculus, the movie says that you can, too. I've been doing mathematics for over thirty years and know all of the subjects up to calculus pretty well. Well, guess what? Most people can't do it.

There's too much involved; it takes years of hard work to get to that point and do it as well. It's due to a combination of many concepts from algebra, geometry, and trigonometry with tons of memorization of rules which often involve multiple steps. Hence, the film saying anyone can do it in a year's time, going from arithmetic to calculus, bothers me.

It's why only a small percentage of people get this far. The ability to read is also fundamental. There are a lot of word problems involved in math. Anyway, I'll let you in a secret: calculus is worthless and never used almost 100% of the time in real life outside of academics; it's just a nice practice for the brain.

Back to Stand and Deliver, it's an okay film but highly inaccurate in some respects. The AP Calculus program at Garfield High School was a decade in the making. Already equipped with twelve years of teaching experience under his belt in Bolivia prior to his arrival, Jaime Escalante didn't start teaching calculus until his fifth year on the job. And no, he didn't suffer a heart attack but an inflammation of the gallbladder. By the way, he died from bladder cancer two years ago.

When Jaime Escalante started teaching calculus in 1979, he had five students, and the prestige of the program rose slowly after a couple passed the AP exam. What most people don't know is the students who scored 4's or 5's were already Ivy league material; in other words, they were among the elites in the academic sense who would've succeeded anyway, not the poor, simple-minded Mexican Americans like the movie would have you believe. They may have been handpicked out of over 4,000 students.

After Stand and Deliver was theatrically released, Jaime Escalante suddenly became popular, and it began to get through his head, causing a fallout with the school. Because of the growing number of students in the AP Calculus program, he wanted to create two math departments: one for him and the other for the rest. After Jaime Escalante left in 1991, the success rate of the AP Calculus program dove big time by over 70%, and today, it's zero at Garfield High School.

Edward James Olmos is perfect for the role although his looks have shockingly declined since the heyday of Miami Vice. He gained twenty pounds and went for the receding hairline look to emulate the teacher. Obviously, it's Lou Diamond Phillips who steals every scene. An Oscar nomination for him shouldn't have been out of the question. What he did in this and La Bamba was the apogee of his career. Afterwards, Lou Diamond Phillips gradually disappeared from the Hollywood map.

All in all, regardless of the negatives, Stand and Deliver makes for a worthwhile viewing, but how the AP Calculus program was constructed as shown is simply impossible.

1/21: Stand and Deliver is a solid, if quite misleading, movie.

What sucks is the paucity of mathematics shown. When Pancho was doing a problem, which is the integral of x2sinxdx, that made him mad, he did the correct procedure: integration by parts. What he did wrong was to expand instead of condense it, so he had the parts in the wrong order. Anyway, it's a common mistake that happens to everybody.

The scandal happened in 1982 when 14 students were accused of cheating on the AP Calculus exam because of the unusual consistency in the low number of errors across the board. There are only two explanations: they either cheated or were taught the same way. A simple resolution would be retaking it. So, 12 did, at a higher level of supervision, and still showed the same level of excellence. However, nine students cheated on one problem, #6 of the free response section, by passing around a note with the same flawed solution.

After encountering problems at Garfield High School, Jaime Escalante quit teaching in 1991 and was hired at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, having enjoyed a small amount of success, before retiring in 1998. Either way, for a student to make this far to take AP calculus and pass the exam, he has to be pretty good in math when the movie tried to say anyone could do it which isn't possible. There's a selection process involved, hence the math courses to weed out the weak ones.

Great acting is all over the place. Although Edward James Olmos received an Oscar nomination, Lou Diamond Phillips should've gotten it, too. Andy Garcia was actually cast to play one of the students but convinced the filmmakers to make him an ETS official. If Jamie Escalante's wife looks familiar, it's because Rosanna DeSoto played Lou Diamond Phillips' mother in La Bamba. The writing is very good, but it's high on motivation talk but low in math. Then again, the words came from Jaime Escalante himself. When he confronted the officials from ETS, what he said in the film was exactly the same.

All in all, Stand and Deliver is a fine movie but does the public disservice by not telling how it happened for real.