That was an excellent one.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The excitement, of anticipation, is the boredom of the present. The present is the inability to expect. The inability to expect is the inability to know - the inability to know is the ability to not know.The ability to not know is boring. The ability to not know is not the same as not knowing - the ability to not know is an insincere type of ignorance.The experience of boredom is an insincere type of ignorance. An insincere ignorance is a sincere knowledge. A sincere knowledge is not sincerity or knowledge - a sincere knowledge is the same as an insincere sincerity. The experience of boredom, or, the experience of no importance is the same as an insincere sincerity - a dangerous honesty.Unimportance is a dangerous honesty - importance is an honesty that's not dangerous.Importance is an honesty that's acceptable. An acceptable honesty is not acceptable.Importance is not acceptable - unimportance is the only force of nature that can be acceptable.The only way for reality to be acceptable, is if reality is unimportant. The worthiness of reality is dependent on the unworthiness of reality: the ability of worthiness is predicated on worthiness hating itselfThe ability to destroy hatred has to be preceded by hatred having already been accepted; the ability to not hate must be preceded by the ability to hate

Having over fifteen years of space away from this film, watching it again makes me realize how utterly disconnected from reality this film is. The characters are stereotypes, the college campus is nothing like reality, and the whole affair screams 'Do the Right Thing' but without any real understanding about what that really entails. Spike Lee's film had a lot of valid points and understood the nature of racism and portrayed it brilliantly. This film just takes pleasure in reducing everybody to stereotypes, tossing in an education spiel that would make Bill Cosby roll his eyes, and basically just waste the audience's time and money.But it does have value. The movie attempts to portray America as a land seething with anxiety and bitterness over social norms breaking and bursting. But it's a childish movie in that it wants to be revolutionary without really knowing what it's trying to do. Why does rape equal becoming a lesbian? How does being dismissed by a bunch of black men immediately follow into racism? Huh? What is going on in this movie? And we'll never know. Higher Learning is a product of the '90s. If anything, it shows how we cannot judge history while we are living it. It's a bad clone of Do The Right Thing and is ultimately pointless and meaningless. If anything, it serves as a very good warning about moralizing in cinema: you better be damn sure you make something that, even if proved wrong, proves a point. If not, you're just making Sid Davis films with better stock.

Despite, or perhaps in part because of the clever use of music to underscore the motivations and ideologies of each of the major characters, stereotypes are in, and verisimilitude and characterization are out in this not-too-subtle cinematic screed.One gets the sense that John Singleton was dabbling in post-structuralist literary theory because it was the flavor of the day, and "Higher Learning" was the tendentious result. The low point of the movie is the "peace" rally, in which the symbols of the 1960s "free love" movement are appropriated for what much more closely resembles a "Take Back The Night" rally with live, stridently identity-conscious musical acts in tow. Perhaps in his prim revisionism the director was trying to assert that identity politics is the new Vietnam? Ooh, how Adrienne Rich of him—and Remy's firing into the crowd is a nice touch, if you're into Rich's sort of political posturing.I wish I could give this movie negative stars. I can recommend it only to those interested in the 1990s as history, a time when radical feminists brought the academic trinity of race, class, and gender to popular culture and declared man-hating "a viable and honorable POLITICAL option". Where's Camille Paglia when you need her?

For some reason I thought this was going to be a goofy college movie but it isn't at all. It truly is an ensemble cast with no clear "main character", because the stories involved all of them.Omar Epps is Malik, at college on a partial scholarship as a track athlete. He has a giant chip on his shoulder and has trouble adjusting.Kristy Swanson is the freshman away from home, Kristen Connor, and needing to learn much to cope with this new college life.Michael Rapaport is Remy from Idaho, lonely and easily influenced, and gets pulled into a group of white supremacist skinheads.Jennifer Connelly is Taryn, borderline lesbian and one that identifies with "causes."My favorite is Laurence Fishburne as Political Science Professor Maurice Phipps, very "Morpheus-like" before he became Morpheus in "The Matrix". It was funny hearing him talk to students about "the real world", a term we hear so often in "The Matrix." But in a good way.Among the others in the cast were Ice Cube, Tyra Banks, Cole Hauser, Regina King, and Busta Rhymes.This is not a delicate movie. It has date rape, ethnic struggles, murder, and suicide. But it is a movie that holds your attention.MAJOR SPOILER: This is the movie where Rapaport as Remy wants to be accepted by his skinhead friends and, egged on, he gets a rifle and decides to snipe from a roof top and kill a black person. He ends up killing two students, one of them the girlfriend (Tyra Banks) of Malik. Later, cornered, Remy puts a pistol in his mouth and kills himself.