Oleanna

1994

Action / Drama / Thriller

6
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 53% · 19 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 61% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 6.5/10 10 3593 3.6K

Please enable your VPN when downloading torrents

If you torrent without a VPN, your ISP can see that you're torrenting and may throttle your connection and get fined by legal action!

Get Surf VPN

Plot summary

Carol, a college student, comes to John's office, her professor, to discuss the grade she has received for one of her papers.


Uploaded by: FREEMAN
September 21, 2018 at 04:07 AM

Director

Top cast

720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
742.94 MB
1204*720
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 29 min
Seeds 1
1.42 GB
1792*1072
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 29 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by rsternesq 9 / 10

Disturbing and Illuminating

Context. Now There is a word used often in college and not often enough after. If the context really was the savage confirmation hearings to which Justice Thomas was subjected, this movie/play is useful. If the context is the entire post modern hash we are making of our art and even of our lives, this movie/play is essential to our survival. The two characters are archetypes/avatars and that is perfectly fine. Each is a bit exaggerated and perhaps the student is too easy to despise and the professor too easy to like. As our postmodern students would say, "whatever." The point (at least as I see it) is the destruction from which absolutely nothing good will come. The professor is utterly destroyed and any enlightening epiphany will come too late and too privately to balance out the murder of his life (Kafka, anyone?) and the student is is, ironically, empowered in her ignorance and will now be forever locked in a moment of victory that closes off any possibility of her ever learning to be compassionate. Others may cheer when the professor explodes. I saw it as his death. Every hope he had died and the blood that ran from his arm was in fact his life blood and he saw it. This is a tragedy and it is our tragedy, whether or not we are teachers, students, bosses, underlings, whatever our relationships to each other, the world of Carol and John threatens us all with the loss of personal liberty until we reject it and it doesn't seem that many have the courage within our society to look at our PC truths and declare them to be errors in judgment. The barbarians outside of our society do not suffer from our PC-driven misery but also don't have our old hard won liberty. A very disturbing and illuminating look at our brave new world and our fellow creatures and, of course, ourselves.

Reviewed by paul2001sw-1 8 / 10

Brilliant but biased

In the cinema, David Mamet is perhaps best known for his tightly-scripted thrillers, but he was first (and still is) a playwright. His plays are generally stylised, didactic, very verbal and tend to address big conceptual issues. 'Oleanna', his take on political correctness, is essentially the film of a play, and at first is off-putting, resembling more a therapy session than a drama. It's worth persevering with, and is eventually gripping and intriguing, but it also left an uneasy feeling in this viewer.

"Political correctness" (Mamet is far too intelligent to actually use this term) is a phrase that damns efforts to offset the disadvantage that minorities suffer, particularly through the use of language (a subject one can presume is close to any playwright's heart). Those who rubbish its absurdities usually have a point, but in focusing on them, they often appear not to care for the injustices that motivate it (of course, it is logically possible to care about both the underlying cause, and the over-reaction, but many seem to worry about one of these only). 'Oleanna' depicts a nightmare scenario for a many a middle class male: William Macy's professor behaves slightly unprofessionally, but scarcely wickedly (and with only the most indirect of sexual motivation), and finds his life and career ruined. The character is pretty unsympathetic, but also unquestionably innocent of the charges, and in telling his story (and even, at the end, seemingly encouraging the audience to applaud his final resort to violence), Mamet apparently reveals which injustices are most important to him. Aside from it's unfairness, another complaint made against the strictures of political correctness are their anti-intellectualism, and Mamet also enjoys exploring this aspect. The female student who brings Macy down reminds me of Naomi Wolf when she wrote of her experiences of being harassed as a student, in that she unashamedly upholds her right to blame others for her failure to love herself. Her manifesto is that her teachers should make her understand what she wants to learn and moreover convince her of its own integral worth: not least of Macy's crimes is a scepticism affordable, she suggests, only to those in power. Mamet deconstructs such beliefs quite brilliantly, but again, perhaps, tells only one side of the story in what is still a male-dominated world. But the film also demonstrates how true power resides in control of the discourse, something which tellingly shifts over the course of the play. Ultimately, though, it is the writer who truly controls the discourse, and however well-acted and highly thought-provoking, 'Oleanna' also leaves one wondering whether it is truly aimed at a real target of importance, or just a straw man. A more humorous, and maybe more honest, treatment of the same subject can be found in the first chapter of Jonathon Frantzen's book 'The Corrections', which makes an interesting companion piece.

Reviewed by =G= 7 / 10

He shoulda whacked her with the chair.

"Oleanna" is a claustrophobic, dialogue-intensive, manipulative two actor pseudo-intellectual sorta-psycho-drama which shows a shrinking violet student seeking help from her professor and then turning into an emasculating pitbull. A spellbinding flick for those who don't nitpick the script, this highly improbable story offers some serious entertainment value. The fact is, however, it would not be difficult to write a similar story for we all live in a world of push-pull communication whereby productive bilateral communication requires a desire to understand by both parties. Forsake this principle and you can manipulate a story in any direction with relative ease. No biggie but a worthy effort.

Read more IMDb reviews

No comments yet

Be the first to leave a comment