Accepted

Day 267 - 9/24/09 - Movie #267

BEFORE: I've been meaning to get to this one for a while - wanted to see how my buddy Justin Long did in this film. I met him twice, once at the Sundance Festival, outside the Egyptian Theater, and then I contacted his agent a couple years later to see if he would do a voice for the animated film "Hair High". At the time he was famous for being in the NBC show "Ed" and the movie "Galaxy Quest"- and now he's this big mega-star in Macintosh commercials and "Die Hard" movies - so of course I take some of the credit.

We cast him as the voice of this evil greaser/punk high-school student, then asked if he would record a couple of random characters, pick-up lines and so forth. So my boss said, "Can you do, like, a geeky kid's voice?" and Justin said, "Are you kidding? That's what I'm famous for!"

THE PLOT: When a high school burnout discovers he's been rejected from every college he's applied to, he creates a fake university in order to fool his overzealous parents.

AFTER: At first it seemed like this was every "underdog" comedy thrown into a blender - with parts cribbed from "Animal House" (fighting against oppressive dean + school), "Revenge of the Nerds" (social outcasts vs. preppy fraternity), plus "Stripes", "Caddyshack", "Old School", "Dodgeball", etc. And in one sense, that's exactly what it is.

But what saved the movie for me, and made it stand out, was Mr. Lewis Black as the fake dean of the phony school. Black plays an ex-teacher, ex-shoe salesman and alcoholic who slips into the role of the elderly curmudgeon and rage-aholic sounding off in the school's courtyard. If you've seen his stand-up act, you know that this comes as naturally to him as playing a geeky kid does for Justin Long. Before long, as "Dean Lewis" rails against taxes, the health-care system, and capitalism in general, he's got a couple hundred kids tuned in to his "lectures".

The outcasts eventually get called on the carpet, and have to show up before the Board of Education and try to become an accredited school. Instead of shoveling some B.S. about their experimental education plan where the students get to set their own curriculum, they should have just played a tape of one of Lewis Black's lectures - I would approve them on the spot.

There's a sub-plot with Jonah Hill attending the real college and learning that it's not all it's cracked up to be, but I found this part rather boring. We learn that preppy college kids are stuck-up and vacant, and fraternity hazing is bad - yawn, we've seen all that before. But running a scam by creating a phony school, from the web-site and logo right down to the course curriculum, OK, that's a somewhat original idea. And gathering a bunch of outcasts and encouraging them to follow their dreams of wood-carving and meditation, while probably ill-advised, is moderately inspiring.

Reportedly much of the movie was improvised - which means some of the snappy dialogue lands and some doesn't, and some of the plot points go absolutely nowhere. I would have liked to see what could have been done if this movie had a real script...

RATING: 7 out of 10 tuition checks