How to Build a Girl
"Peter Weir's film makes much noise about poetry, and there are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau's Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to their language; they're simply plundered for slogans to exhort the students toward more personal freedom."
Roger Ebert's "Dead Poet's Society takedown," which crushed me as an O-Captain-My-Captain-desk-standing-aspiring teenager, is acutely applicable here. "Girl" purports to be about the transformative power of words and music – rock and rock criticism, specifically – but doesn't exhibit even a rudimentary interest in either. -ABK