The schoolyard bully may be a stock character, a clich�, but in the world of Lee Hirsch?s earnest documentary Bully, he?s very real: The picture tells the stories of several kids — all of them from fairly rural parts of the United States — who suffer daily at the hands of their classmates, fielding everything from hurtful taunts to physical assault.
Some of them, like 14-year-old Ja?Meya, fight back by blowing up: Fed up with her schoolmates? gibes and insults, Jackson gets a hold of her mother?s handgun and brandishes it on the school bus one day, a tactic that earned her multiple felony charges and a long stint in a detention center. Others, like 17-year-old Tyler, break down and commit suicide. But the movie?s most poignant case is that of a kid who is still, at least during the span of time covered by the film, toughing it out against his tormentors: Alex is a smallish, graceful-gangly 12-year-old who deals with the cruelty of his classmates with a shrug and a sideways smile, as if he were somehow hoping his faux indifference would make them stop. His father lectures him, urging him to fight back, but we can see that sweet, open-hearted Alex is incapable of doing so — not so much physically as temperamentally.
Alex?s story is the centerpiece of the movie, and of all the case studies here, it?s the one most likely to break your heart. Bully is effective as a document of the suffering that too many kids suffer at the hands of their cruel and sometimes possibly even psychopathic peers, particularly in parts of the country where the idea of ?normal? is pretty narrow. All of the kids in Bully live somewhere in Middle America, which is not to say that bullying…
Ana Beatriz Barros Ana Hickmann Ana Ivanovi Ana Paula Lemes Ananda Lewis Angela Marcello Angelina Jolie Anna Faris Anna Friel Anna Kournikova
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