I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

One of my all time favorites.

We all have secrets, most often the concealing of a minor infraction. However, what if the secret concerns someone's identity or ethnicity among his or her peers? If the secret was revealed, would his opportunities be jeopardized? This is the plight David Green (Brendan Fraser in a fine performance) must face in "School Ties". In the 1950's, a prestigious college prep school, St. Matthews (modeled probably on Exeter Academy in New England) has been losing football games year after year, and the alumni is at their wits' ends. The alumni concoct an interesting strategy: put together a football scholarship and use it to compel an outstanding athlete to enroll in their school and improve their team.They find a crack-jack quarterback from Scranton, Pennsylvania, David Green, and compel him to attend their school for his senior year of high school. However, there's one catch: Green is Jewish, and St. Matthews is a private Anglican school where students are required to attend Christian services. Green decides to conceal his Jewish heritage and "play" along by attending services and hiding a Star of David necklace. He makes friends, and as the new quarterback, the football team becomes a success.However, Green's appearance at the school causes disruption in the tried-and-true storytelling device of "a stranger comes to town". He has knocked Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon in an outstanding supporting performance) out of the quarterback spot, and the latter will now play running back and blocker. Green becomes the star player. In one interesting scene, Dillon makes the crucial difference in a score but Green receives most of the credit. However, things continue to get worse for Dillon. His "girlfriend" Sally Wheeler (Amy Locane) begins to fall for Green at a school dance.Dillon has only one trump card to play against Green to undermine the latter's meteoric rise to the heights of school super-stardom, potentially the turning point of the story. A thoroughly compelling film from beginning to fade out. The cast is excellent with many young actors who will become name talent in their own right: Fraser, Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O'Donnell. And the story asks the question: will ethnic prejudice or individual character win the day?

I was at (3) elite Prep Schools at the same time: 1958 -1965 beginning in 7th grade. There were Jewish kids at the schools and a few black kids. I don't buy all the discrimination whatsoever - there wasn't any.Funny, at one school I went to we recruited an ethnic Catholic kid and we were a Protestant School. That kid eventually played in the NFL. No problems at all.Another school I went to was the best football team in the state and the stars were mostly Jewish and no one thought anything of it.So, be careful when you watch what B.S. lines Hollywood wants to feed you. They mostly voted for Obama who has shown himself as a total racist 100% of the time after promising "healing". What a liar.

I think it's a mistake to judge this film as a message film. It's not essentially about anti-Semitism, still less about prep schools. What adolescent male peer group isn't riddled with prejudice of one kind or another, absorbed unthinkingly from adult society, and even without such baggage, what young male peer group isn't prone to creating invidious distinctions of its own between the "in" group and the dweebs or nerds or whatever? Or even to hounding those who are hopelessly different? As for the school administration, give them credit for doing their best precisely to promote fair-mindedness and individual moral responsibility on the part of their charges. And note that in the end the honor system, and the school's way of handling it, worked, although not, perhaps, in the way it was expected to.This film is best compared, not with such focused anti-semitic message movies as Gentleman's Agreement, but with the likes of 12 Angry Men, which is a film about prejudice all right, but about as many kinds of prejudice as there are jury members. If this film falls short of 12 Angry Men as a film about prejudice (and it does - I give 12 Angry Men all 10 stars) it is because its subjects are partially formed boys and not men, and one might say the same about the actors, although both individually and ensemble they did a superlative job given their inexperience.Both these excellent films are about people and how they handle prejudicial baggage, both as individuals and as a group, and their merit as dramas doesn't depend on any particular messages, if there are any. One comes away from both films uplifted. In 12 Angry Men, despite all the ranting, and the ugliness, it appears at the end that justice has probably been done, and the judicial system shown to have worked (a view that today seems quaint and nostalgic). In School Ties, you can bet that many of the boys who have gone through the climactic ordeal have been broadened and improved by it, even as others will never change - they will just harden into the attitudes of their peer group, and their class. That's human nature.Arguably the boy who has been most broadened and improved by it is David Greene himself: he has learned to recognize and to stand up manfully to the prejudice he will be encountering in adult life as he makes his way up in the world. Sadly, he has also acquired chip-on-the-shoulder prejudices of his own, as he ungraciously rejects the chastened and conciliatory overtures of the headmaster and the school chaplain. But that too is human nature, and the way of the world.Just a few final personal comments. I matriculated at just such an elite prep school in 1954; in fact Middlesex School, where much of the film was shot, was our chief sports rival. I only attended the one school, so I hesitate to comment on the typicality of the fictional school in the movie, but I suppose that each school had (and has) its own character - although in the 1950s and 1960s, all drew the majority of their students from the same narrow socioeconomic pool. Still, our school was most definitely open to boys of varied social and economic backgrounds (provided their aptitude test scores were exceptionally high) and it has become much more liberal since (not to mention coeducational), so to regard these schools generically as hotbeds of prejudice or snobbery would be to embrace a stereotype no less invidious than the ones invoked in the film.In fact, having spent five years at my school, I graduated from it still unaware of the specific religious backgrounds of any of my fellow students, and even (so naive were we then) with no awareness that certain students, viewed in retrospect, were undoubtedly gay. Somehow, even though the school was denominational and Protestant, and chapel attendance was required, not three times a week, but "every day and twice on Sundays", all but the main Sunday service contrived to be non- denominational, and the school's evident aim was to foster spirituality in general, and moral behavior in particular. I believe there were a number of Catholics, and a few Jews, who sometimes attended their own denominational Sabbath services in town, and there were a few students of other races and nationalities (and I'm sure no quotas), but such prejudice as there was turned more on class than on religion or ethnicity or race, per se.There was, in my day, a subtle distinction between the boys of old money and "good family" who had contributed many of their sons to the place over generations (not to mention money to the endowment fund), and the rest of us who were there to make it (perhaps with scholarship aid), sink or swim, on our own - like David Greene. But the school administration, and the masters, took particular pains to eradicate such attitudes, or at least to balance them with a high sense of noblesse oblige, in just the way this was articulated in the fictional headmaster's chapel invocation. And I must say that I have encountered far more, and more injurious, prejudice of all kinds in real life than I ever experienced at the school, which as an institution endeavored always to stand for something better, and genuinely seemed to care at least as much about the character of the young men it turned out, as about their academic attainments and the colleges they got into.

Every fine Eastern school has some old traditions. When selecting a college or University which will eventually become your Alma Matter, it become doubly prestigious. Therein, too are the seeds of bigotry, racism and often as not antisemitism. This story written by Dick Wolf and directed by Robert Mandel is a fine addition to so many others which bring out the often buried hatred of classmates whom we so often considered our most steadfast friends. This then is the story of David Greene (Brendan Fraser) who selected as his best friend Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon). Together they strive to make their way through the school year. However, even though they share the hardships and principals of the rigors of the school, theirs is also a tenuous friendship based on wealth and social standing. Both of which are prerequisites for social acceptance. When Dillion's envy of his best friend gets the better of him, he uses any means to right what he believes to be his share of the school popularity. Chris O'Donnell, Ben Affleck and Kevin Tighe round out the cast. The movie is exceptional for exposing what many schools lack the courage to do. Further, the combination of it's cast insure this will become a Classic, for the young actors. ****