Sunday, October 08, 2006

ACCEPTED - ridiculous, cheesy, yet alarmingly enjoyable

Ask me about my wiener! ACCEPTED is not the greatest frat-boy comedy ever written. It holds no candle to ANIMAL HOUSE or even more schmaltzy recent additions such as OLD SCHOOL. It doesn’t have gross-out humour; it doesn’t have a bunch of central characters who want to get laid and it surely does not do anything remotely new with the genre. Heck, even the concept behind the movie sucks. I spent the first twenty minutes of the movie rolling my eyes and inwardly shouting, “This is ri-DIC-ulous!”

Because the movie asks you to believe that three smart high school kids would be so incompetent as to leave themselves without a college place. Honestly, if you are smart enough to apply to Yale, you’ll probably stick a few fall-backs on your application form. It then asks you to believe that these kids would be so desperate to be accepted, that they would fake a college! Yes, yes, where the guys in OLD SCHOOL created a frat-house and have to fight for accreditation, the guys in ACCEPTED create a whole singing-and-dancing institute of higher education! It’s like the A-Team does Open University. You too can take a derelict insane asylum, a bunch of paint and a mop and successfully fake out your parents, your girlfriend, the local Ivy League college and about three-hundred freshman! Seriously, no parent is going to drop off their kid at this shaky-looking shop-front, happily hand over $10,000 in tuition and drive away without smelling a rat.

Thing is, ACCEPTED is a real pleasure to watch. I’m not saying I bought the premise, or laughed my ass off, but I had a fun time watching this film. Why? Because Justin Long – who plays the charming loser who comes up with the plan – is, well, charming. Because there is something really heart-warming about seeing a bunch of losers have their day. And because the stand-up comedian, Lewis Black, provides a cynical ranting bite to a movie that would otherwise collapse under its own liberal good-intentions. (Think George Carlin-lite) Who’d a thunk that in a week when I saw the new Scorsese film, I’d have a better time watching this?

ACCEPTED was released in the USA in August 2006 and is now on release in the UK. It opens in Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Sweden later this month and in Australia, Denmark and Iceland in November. It opens in December and Germany in December and in the Netherlands in January 2007.

3 comments:

  1. "It holds no candle to ANIMAL HOUSE..."

    I've never understood why Animal House is so popular. I prefer Porky's.

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  2. Porkys is good. The point is that ACCEPTED really isn't a frat-boy comedy at all - it's way more touchy-feely.

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  3. Actually, Porky's is a bit touchy feely too.

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