Light It Up (1999) *

Directed by Craig Bolotin. With Sara Gilbert, Forrest Whitaker and Usher Raymond. Rebellious students take over a inner-city high school, holding a cop hostage and making political demands for better learning conditions. It's a weird film which tries to accomodate three very different genres: a "heroic teacher" melodrama like Dangerous Minds, a hostage thriller like The Negotiator and an Old Left political drama like Medium Cool. Needless to say, it utterly fails to reconcile their widely divergent goals and styles.