After reviewing this film twice, I believe that overall it promotes premises and ideas which undermine the health and welfare of our children. Generally, the film portrays anger as only a negative emotion without any positive impact. I believe anger is used in many positive ways. For example, if there is a young athlete who gets angry from losing and funnels anger to improve himself, then his anger has been used very positively.
The movie states absolutely that anger is a secondary emotion always preceded by another emotion. It seems to me that any emotion can be preceded by other emotions and that any emotion can occur first. I think before making this kind of statement, further research is required.
The ways the film suggested the students deal with anger actually only fell into two categories. The first was participating in physical activity to stem the emotion and the second included various types of self-reflection methods geared to defuse the emotion. Again, there is no credit given to the positive use of anger. Also, I would question the effectiveness of these techniques.
I found the first scenario amusing. This scenario dealt with a student being ignored by her "friend", Catherine. The episode seemed very contrived -- but this isn't the main problem. The scenario offered no positive way to deal with the situation itself. If you deal with the situation constructively to begin with, you don't have a reason to be angry. The only alternative scenario consisted of an "aggressive" approach where our "hero" basically screams at Catherine. As just one alternative, we could have shown an "assertive" scenario where our hero walks up to Catherine and says "Hello" to her and takes control of the situation.
The film also refers to the fact that if you feel anger you are really covering up for your own suffering. It further states that this suffering is what you should really be going through and it more accurately depicts your feelings. I guess the film wants to teach our children how to be passive wimps.
The entire scenario with the boss at the pizza shop was scary. In the film's depiction, young people should take responsibility for other peoples anger, take any abuse from any boss because they are a boss and bow down to the almighty paycheck. While in real-life, you sometimes take abuse from other people, do things to appease other people's emotions and make decisions based on money, it is dangerous to depict these things as the only reasons to do something and to show them distorted. They are distorted because they are out of context to one's individual value system. This scenario also implies that an individual, student or not, has no impact on a relationship that is a boss/employee relationship. I think this is one of the last things you want to teach our children. Any person can have an impact on any relationship. We should teach our children to explore this impact in different scenarios. Things are rarely what they seam --especially when it comes to relationships. Good interpersonal skills will serve our children well throughout their life. Bending over (notice the boy's position in the film) and giving in to over-bearing bosses, with out good and well thought out reasons, is not something we should be teaching our children.
The film also wants you to believe that you have no control of your life. Take for example, the runner who doesn't get a promotion and says that there was nothing he could do about it anyway. This is a truckload of happy horsesh*t. There were many reasons why he didn't get the promotion. He needs to analyze those reasons, allow himself to be angry and formalize a game plan to not let it happen again.
The "Dealing With Anger" handout lists a couple of other ideas that can be very dangerous. The first idea is that sympathy and humor are effective techniques in dealing with anger. I would recommend that you use these techniques cautiously. Uninvited sympathy or careless use of humor could escalate an already volatile situation. Empathy, seeking to understand the situation and listening could be better techniques.
The handout makes a distinction between elementary school students and students in the upper grades. The premise is that elementary school students get recess thus they have an effective way to channel their anger since they're getting physical activity. Throw me a bone here. This type of thinking only trivializes a person's feelings and emotions and over simplifies the skills necessary to deal with other people.
There is also a premise that being angry means that you have at least partially accepted somebody else's negative judgment of you. This is another example where the premise is that anger is always bad and that when you're angry there is always another agenda.
Initially, I was going recommend that this film be used with children that were habitually and chronically unable to positively deal with their anger. After reflecting on the plethora of negative images portrayed in the film, I would not use this film in any situation.