The Wall Street Journal - 11.03.2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, March 11, 2020 |A

deadly. His wife screams at him to

stop, frantic. He spits out the drink,

thinking it must be tainted. “There

are 43 grams of sugar in that soda,”

she says.

Mr. Zobel: “The gas station is

where the premise of the movie is

in its most sharp relief. In a world

where I know what the Hollywood

elite would say, I definitely don’t

feel worried about the humor that

we can aim at ourselves. I wasn’t

necessarily holding back in the

other direction as much as just not

finding that to be really as funny. I

have seen enough hillbilly stereo-

types. With the elites, there were

new jokes there.”

Butt of the joke: Red states

Crystal and another hostage jump

on a train, where they meet a

group of refugees hiding in the

same boxcar. Crystal’s fellow hos-

FAMILY & TECH| JULIE JARGON

School Closures

Bring Digital Hurdles

Shift to remote learning and home setups exposes haves and have-nots

Grace Jurado’s three children, Emma,

Alicia and Benjamin, below, are doing

online school work while their

suburban Seattle schools are closed

due to the novel coronavirus.

BROOKE FITTS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)

about its divisiveness fill the

movie poster—the studio’s signal

that the film’s premise is not

meant to be taken seriously and

viewers should judge the result for

themselves.

In the film, rich liberals have ab-

ducted a group of unsophisticated

conservatives who believe in out-

landish conspiracy theories and

own lots of guns. The hostages are

brought to a remote area and given

weapons to defend themselves, but

most don’t stand a chance.

A hostage named Crystal (Betty

Gilpin) is smarter than everybody.

She takes on the hunt’s ringleader

Athena (Hilary Swank), who op-

poses cultural appropriation and

gendered language but is OK with

using a high heel to gouge out a

stranger’s eyeball.

With its culture-war stereo-

types, the movie attempts to make

fun of everyone, left and right. The

only neutral party is a pink pig.

Mr. Zobel breaks down a few of his

choice takedowns in this edited

conversation. Warning: We’re

about to spoil three jokes.

Butt of the joke: Blue states

A liberal couple pose as proprietors

of a mom-and-pop gas station and

store in small-town Arkansas. Cer-

tain concession items in the shop

are poisoned. The husband grabs a

soda from a refrigerated case, mo-

mentarily forgetting it might be

IN THE NEW movie “The Hunt,”

the blood runs red and blue.

The action thriller, a bombastic

satire about liberal “elites” making

a sport of trying to kill a dozen con-

servative “deplorables,” attempts to

expose how red-state and blue-state

Americans have demonized each

other. It also calls itself a farce,

with violence so extreme it borders

on cartoon—like when a character

is not only skewered by spikes but

blown in half, too.

“What if the craziest conspiracy

theories that you would think

about another group of people

were true?” asks director Craig

Zobel. “Right now, it feels like

what maybe the healthiest thing

we could do would be to start to

laugh at this stuff a little bit.”

The film opens in theaters on

Friday. Universal Pictures canceled

the original September 2019 debut

in the wake of last summer’s mass

shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El

Paso, Texas. The film prompted an

anti-Hollywood broadside from

President Trump, who accused the

movie’s creators of trying to cre-

ate chaos.

Nothing about “The Hunt” has

changed since then except the

marketing. Instead of a straight-

forward horror movie, the studio

now is pushing it as comic social

commentary. Scathing quotes

BYELLENGAMERMAN

tage accuses the refugees of being

paid crisis actors to further a lib-

eral immigration agenda. He wants

them rounded up.

Mr. Zobel: “In the initial conver-

sations about the story we were

talking about internet conspiracy

theorists and that was where we

found the humor. Oftentimes we

would escalate the joke, looking at

the characters’ assumptions about

other characters and pushing

those beats further. Whenever it

felt judgmental it wasn’t funny, so

we would throw that away and go

toward the direction that would

make sure it was absurd. I was re-

ally trying to be inclusive of mak-

ing fun of everyone instead of cri-

tiquing a particular idea.”

Butt of the joke: America

Crystal storms the bunker where

the captors are holed up. A liberal

in a get-up fit for a British fox

hunt suffers an arrow to the stom-

ach. Crystal aims her gun to finish

the job, but another hostage tells

her not to shoot because the tar-

get is a woman. Crystal stops, asks

the bleeding liberal if she thinks

women should be treated differ-

ently than men. Trapped in her

own belief system, the woman re-

plies that they should not. Crystal

pulls the trigger.

Mr. Zobel: “That’s a purple joke

because it starts with everyone roll-

ing their eyes at a man saying the

liberal should be spared because

she’s a woman. That’s a big, chau-

vinist point of view, right? Then the

liberal on the floor, even when

faced with a life-or-death choice,

she still rolls her eyes and scoffs at

the chauvinism. It’s funnier the

more stuck in your beliefs you are.”

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

Betty Gilpin as Crystal in the controversial satirical thriller out this Friday.

In ‘The Hunt,’ the Joke

Is on Red vs. Blue

T

he ability of schools

across the country to

hold classes remotely

is being tested as

more close in an effort

to contain the spread

of the novel coronavirus. Also being

tested: the ability of families to get

their homes tech-ready so children

can log in to virtual classrooms.

More than 23,500 students

across 33 campuses of the North-

shore School District in suburban

Seattle began joining Zoom or Mi-

crosoft Teams meet-

ings with their teach-

ers on Monday

morning and complet-

ing assignments via

Google Classroom.

But despite their

proximity to Amazon and Micro-

soft’s headquarters, many families

in the community were unable to

meet the technical requirements.

The district had to lend out com-

puters to more than 2,600 homes

and provide many with wireless

hot spots as well.

Other schools, from San Fran-

cisco to New York, also have

closed in recent days. Many are of-

fering online classes so that stu-

dents don’t miss too many days.

As more schools close in re-

sponse to the health crisis, this

unprecedented remote-learning

situation is expected to expose the

tech gap between affluent and

lower-income families and dis-

tricts, as well as between urban

and suburban districts and rural

ones where high-speed internet

doesn’t always exist.

And even when everything

works, there is always a question

of how focused kids can be with-

out the structure of a classroom.

“There are some districts that

will rather seamlessly be able to

shift to an online platform if they

need to and there are many others

that won’t because they lack the in-

frastructure,” said Noelle Ellerson

Ng, associate executive director of

policy and advocacy for the School

Superintendents Association. “It

comes down to an equity issue.”

Michelle Reid, superintendent of

the Northshore School District,

said that because of its proximity

to Seattle’s tech giants, it has the

funding to provide devices for ev-

ery student. “Not all school dis-

tricts have access to the same re-

sources we have,” she said. “The

access kids have to technology

based on their ZIP Code is a con-

versation that needs to happen.”

Education experts already de-

scribe a “homework gap,” in which

many lower-income and rural stu-

dents have trouble keeping up

with online homework assign-

ments unless they can go to public

libraries or other quasi-public

spaces to get internet access. Ap-

proximately 17% of U.S. students

don’t have computer access at

home and 18% don’t have access to

broadband internet at home, ac-

cording to an Associated Press

analysis of census data last year.

“Even in cases like mine, where

it’s not a financial issue, we have

more kids than we have comput-

ers,” said Grace Jurado, president of

the Northshore Council PTSA, and a

mom of three school-age children.

“My oldest has a laptop, we have a

desktop and I have a laptop, which I

need to work during the day.”

Several friends have offered to

lend her their laptops.

Still, many parents in the dis-

trict, including Ms. Jurado, are

wondering how it’s going to work

having children at home while jug-

gling their own jobs—and whether

their internet data plans will have

the capacity to handle so much us-

age at once.

Ms. Jurado manages a restau-

rant chain and can work from

to the internet by phone, and

found that more than 90% could.

The district chose a web-based

platform called Schoology that al-

lows teachers to conduct video les-

sons, assign work and chat with

students over any kind of device.

The district got the system run-

ning and all teachers trained on it,

but a lack of snow kept it offline

all winter. Now, the preparation

doesn’t seem to have been in vain.

Administrators have been field-

ing calls from districts around the

country, looking for help with their

coronavirus closures. Glen Irvin, an

instructional coach at Sauk Rapids-

Rice High School, said, “We’ve

adapted our plan to fit whatever

scenario comes up.”

Avi Bloom and other administra-

tors at SAR High School, a private

school in Riverdale, N.Y., began for-

mulating a plan for distance learn-

ing in early March. The school had

to enact its plans earlier than ex-

pected last week after it learned a

parent became the state’s second

coronavirus case. The man’s imme-

diate relatives—including his teen-

age daughter, who attends SAR—

also tested positive. SAR’s lower-

school campus is also closed.

Mr. Bloom, the high school’s

technology director, said all stu-

dents have iPads and he was

quickly able to create Zoom ac-

counts, push the video-meeting

app to all of the devices and train

teachers on how to sign in and in-

vite students to Zoom meetings.

Last Wednesday, the first day of

remote instruction, there were 231

Zoom meetings among the high-

school students and staff alone.

Even when the technology is

working, there are still challenges.

“When they’re in my class I can

expect certain things but I don’t

know what’s happening for them

when they’re at home. There’s less

oversight and less ability to have

the pulse of the class,” said Adina

Shoulson, who teaches history at

SAR High School. “The other big

question is, what are the kids re-

sponsible for? The answer can’t be

nothing, because otherwise why

are we doing this? But there is a

concern that we can’t hold them

responsible to the same degree as

when they’re in class.”

Mr. Irvin, in Minnesota, echoes

the concern. “It’s a very tough po-

sition to put parents in.”

home when she needs to. But she

finds it hard to be productive

when her kids are home and isn’t

sure how productive they will be

without close supervision. The dis-

trict has provided sample sched-

ules to help kids structure their

days. “They’re mostly able to be

self-sufficient for a day, but every

day? I don’t think so,” she said.

Ruby Bennett, a 16-year-old

sophomore in the Northshore dis-

trict, said not having to wake up

earlyevery morning sounds ap-

pealing but actually attending vir-

tual class might not be. “Without a

schedule I won’t get as much

done,” she said. “I’ll miss the in-

teraction with teachers, and it

won’t be as easy to directly com-

municate questions.”

Many districts are turning to

Minnesota. After a few years of

heavier-than-usual snow, some

Minnesota school systems decided

to develop remote-learning plans.

Sauk Rapids-Rice Public Schools

wanted to offer a system that

could be accessible at the most ba-

sic tech level: a smartphone with

cellular connection. The district

surveyed parents to learn how

many of them are able to connect

18%

U.S.studentswithoutaccessto

broadbandinternetathome

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