Contest

Message movies can be a bore but not contest. A good cast and a refreshing twist on encouraging positive behavior with a very timely cooking contest at the core Contest is like a sports movie with food! As in most sports movies you may well guess the ending, but you may be surprised, and the journey is with it.

Young actors and a fresh group go filmmakers make this a new entry that will hopefully reach the target audience. This is a good film for families to see together. But as teenagers and young adults may balk at that prospect parents can be comfortable with this as a date night special for their teenagers. The cast is attractive and the romance angle is well played. Contest delivers a message without being preachy and that is very welcome.

Good family movie about bullying in high school. The cast of young folk all were great! It plays like an after school special, which in my mind is a good thing. I still remember the ones I was shown as a kid in the 70's and 80's. One thing that stood out to me was the lack of a mean girl focus. These kinds of story lines seem to leave the boy friendships in the background and focus on the girls.

Most impressed with the soundtrack. Katherine McNamara, Kenton Duty, And Daniel Flaherty all have amazing songs! Daniel sounds like a young Bob Dylan and Katherine's voice is beautiful and I understand she co-wrote the song.

I was beyond impressed with this movie. I knew before seeing it that it carried an anti-bullying message, but I wasn't prepared for just how inventive the messages would be made in the film. It seemed like so many of the characters in the movie had been bullied in ways large or small, and some were the bullies themselves. I got the impression the creators of the film really wanted to highlight the complexities of the issue, how it's not easy to just find one person completely guilty and the rest innocent, or vice versa. Really well done! I was also extremely impressed with how funny the movie was! At totally unexpected moments, I found myself laughing hysterically. Great acting, great story, great movie! Well done to all involved, and thanks for giving the world a new anti-bullying movie that's far from the cookie cutter expectations of the past!

This film devotes itself to a series of increasingly unbelievable escalations that are more about out-of-school criminal behavior than about school-bully problems. The theme is endearing, but the delivery is way, way off-topic. Worse, a fair amount of this movie seems almost comedic, which makes it hard to be sure sometimes just whom to feel sorry for.

The script was hard to follow and the direction literally seemed to leave out moments that one had to infer or guess at. Our twelve-year-old son kept asking questions that started with, "Wait! Why did he just say...?" An amazing number of characters are played by actors who look rather a lot like each other, too, so it wasn't always even clear who was whom.

Overall, this wasn't really a story about bullying. It seemed more like an episode of one of those cookie-cutter Disney Channel shows that all seem to star the same adolescent kids, with an unconvincing set of problems dealt with by absurd solutions, all coming together in a silly ending.

If you're looking for a way to connect with your child about this topic, I really would stay away from this one. It unintentionally makes light of a serious issue, and confuses the phenomenon of bullying with complex (and over-the-top) criminal conspiracies. If you even suggest to your child that bullying is similar in school to what it is in this movie, expect to hear the words, "You just don't get it."

When I saw "bullying", I thought "Oh, geez, another over-the-top, sensitive, feel-good movie that doesn't make a real point." but Contest isn't so far off from real life, although it tosses in a few over-the-top points, which are supposed to help the viewer become aware, not distract them from the message.

It's obvious that it would be tricky to attack bullying without seeming ridiculous, especially since no one really knows how to handle it in real life. I suspect that everyone has been bullied in real life, especially the bullies, but dealing with it in in real life always seems to be non-confrontational.

It's also obvious that everyone in the film tried to make it work and that there was some good chemistry between the characters. Daniel Flaherty's character, Tommy, seems as good a victim as you would hope--someone who just can't catch a break, but still hard-working and caring. It's evident in a scene where he's being swindled by another teen who says his parents lost their jobs. Kenton Duty's character, Matt, doesn't really seem a bully though his brother Kyle does, but that he doesn't want to be bullied, so he goes along with it rather than be ostracized by the rest of the team, and tries to have some fun along the way. Katherine McNamara's character, Sarah, is the intelligent, don't-take-no-for-an-answer type. Tommy's grandmother is the only character that seemed unrealistic, as she wanted to cook for the bullies, to ply them with food, to make them see reason. I don't know of any place in the northeast where that works and I don't recall a grandmother who wasn't at least a little feisty. Still, along the way she has words of wisdom and becomes the voice of reason.

There is plenty of scheming and double-dealing and you might need a score card to keep up with who is on which side. Sarah seemed to be keeping up with most everything, but strangely never threatened.

In the end, things work out pretty well for Tommy, despite the minor disasters and soul-searching but all the scheming behind the scenes because of Kyle and Joe made me wonder if Matt was safe. Kyle and Joe didn't seem to learn or regret and there weren't any real consequences that would make them change their minds. Wrapping up the story with a perfect ending is fine when you don't have a fabric store full of loose threads, like a 1960s sitcom.