Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Mr. Holland's Opus (1995): Dir: Stephen Herek / Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Glenne Headly, Olympia Dukakis Alicia Witt, William H. Macy: Powerful film about those who have influenced our lives for the better. Mr. Holland is a music teacher who wishes to help students develop a love for music. Tragedy strikes when his son is born with a hearing impairment. Soon he is cut from the school budget and fights a losing battle to regain his place. Detailed story of thirty years but the results are somewhat overrated. It is directed by Stephen Herek, very different than his Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and certainly a superior film in all accounts despite a different genre. Heartfelt performance by Richard Dreyfuss as Mr. Holland in what is the best element of the film. Glenne Headly as his supportive wife is more accepting of her son's condition but the role is more predictable. Olympia Dukakis has the standard role of principal who will be more a setback than an asset. Alicia Witt plays a student who wishes to learn the clarinet. The result of this is also predictable but Witt is very good. William H. Macy provides bewildered humour as a vice principal. While the screenplay isn't as good as it should be, it does point out historical element within those thirty years. It also presents a message regarding how one person can impact and influence so many over the course of time. Score: 9 ½ / 10

This movie receives an awful lot of praise and I find that I quite enjoy it as well. It chronicles the life of a music teacher at John F. Kennedy Highschool (arriving after the name was changed from Ulysses Grant Highschool). He came into the school reluctantly because he wanted some time to compose some music but ended getting caught up within the school.Mr Holland's Opus is a movie about shattered dreams and about how what we look to do is not what we end up doing. Holland's dream is to write a symphony but he finds that he is doing too much to get any time to actually dedicate to it. He becomes a teacher and almost immediately after he has a child forcing him to buy a house. To pay off the house he decides to take up summer work which drains even more of his time. Each of these things are unplanned and he finds himself caught up in the affairs of the school for thirty years.He is overjoyed at having a child and dreams of raising this child as a great musician, but once again his dream is shattered when he learns that the child is deaf. As such he begins to isolate himself from his son and embrace his students. He feels that he can not relate to his son because he believes that he cannot appreciate that which he loves. This causes dissension between Holland and his son because of this.Mr Holland's Opus tries to create a real person with dreams, desires, and heartaches and it is a movie about how he confronts these heartaches. Though he finds that he cannot write his own music, he is drawn further into the school wanting to work with the students there. Another shattered dream comes when the jock who he teaches to play the drum is killed in Vietnam. He saw a lot of potential for the boy, especially how he struggled with his incapability to learn only to be killed in a war that nobody wanted. This is contrasted at the time with another student who is so intelligent that he ends up wasting Holland's time. Holland drags him along to a funeral to point out to him a real student who struggled to learn only to have his life struck away from him.In the end Holland feels that he has gained nothing. He is dumped in a budget cut and even though he fought, there was nothing he could do. He walks out of the school thinking that he had done nothing only to walk into the auditorium to be confronted by all of the people that had been through his classes in thirty years and what they had become. It is interesting to see the first girl he worked with, the one who struggled with the oboe walk up as governor of the state. Holland believed that he was a failure but when he looked upon all of the people who he had influenced it struck him that he was not going to be forgotten.This movie shows us that even though we may not have made a huge impact on the world nor have got where we have wanted to, all we need to do is look around at the people we have interacted with to realise that we have made an impact in our own way. Even though we may not have risen to the heights, our close friends will remember us and what we have done for them.

Mr Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) is a frustrated musician and composer. He is frustrated at his teaching job. It was supposed to be temporary to pay the bills. But the years pass, his life passes, and he feels he has achieved nothing. But what he discovers is that his life has meaning for all those he has touched over years.This is definitely one of those feel good movies. The individual stories are memorable. The feeling of lost palpable. The moment when he finally connects with his deaf child. That was powerful. All the stories are poignant. Richard Dreyfuss is perfectly suited as the old disillusioned teacher. It's a good cry movie all the way.

A heartfelt performance by Richard Dreyfuss is the strongest asset of this good, though not great, movie. Dreyfuss was nominated for Best Actor in playing Glenn Holland, a young man who dreams of one day completing a memorable piece of great classical music. In order to make ends meet and feed his wife and deaf son, he must lower his standards by taking on a frustrating teacher's job at a high school. Holland initially has a tough time trying to interest his lethargic students in music appreciation, but his efforts ultimately pay off as he begins to make a difference in their lives. Spanning a period of 30 years from about 1965 to 1995, the film does not successfully realize that transition as well as it might have. For example, I was able to spot a number of chronological errors in how the montage of passing years was represented. But one personal highlight in the film for me involved Holland's devastation upon learning of the murder of John Lennon in 1980. *** out of ****