STH Newsletter

Occasional updates, plus bonus idiotic ramblings. (We've never sent more than one e-mail per month.)

Top 10 Must-See Movies for Liberals

Deceased Minstrels Brothahood

by Jason Roth

Tom Hanks is a discouraged antiquities professor who sacrifices his job at a top New England university in the hopes that he can rekindle his passion for teaching. He moves to East Orange, New Jersey to take a job at an inner-city high school teaching Sanskrit to mentally retarded black children.

The teacher experiences the first spark of hope when a boy tells him he's reevaluating his career plans of becoming a professional rapist and instead considering going to college to dual-major in non-profit management and changing his own diaper. The teacher senses that the boy is calling out for help, and with a father who impregnates unmarried women for a living and a mother who works part-time as a crack whore, he's reasonably sure the boy isn't going to get it from home.

Hanks goes the extra mile, by donning a basketball jersey and coaching the school team to the first "retarded versus non-retarded" championship game in state history. In the tear-jerking finale, he transcribes an inspirational minstrel ballad into hip hop and teaches the boys that, in the words of an ancient Sanskrit tomb inscription, "You got to wipe yo brotha's saliva, if you wanna stay aliva."