IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name Theatrical Review of Accepted 2006...

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I saw more than my fair share of movies when my friend came to visit the other week...

The thing is though, I was completely baffled by the fact that the amount of enjoyment that I got from each film was pretty much the opposite of what I originally imagined going into the theatre...

Talladega Nights looked great in the trailers, but just couldn't live up to the hype. Snakes on a Plane was great, but just could've been so much better if only I had seen it in a place packed with screaming fans at the motherfucking sight of motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane...

Oddly enough, there was one movie out of them all that was just so damn stupid and just so damn utterly predictable, that it actually turned out to be the damn most enjoyable of them all...

But truth be told, considering I was with my old high school friend at the time, I guess a bit of old skool, teen crap movie nostalgia (without being forced to endure that god-awful film, Old School) was just what the doctor ordered...

The film revolves around that goddam asshole from the Mac vs PC commercials, Justin Long, as his character of Bartleby Gaines doesn't make it into any of the colleges he applied to. He then goes off the deep end, buys out the lease on an old and abandoned mental institution, cleans it up in a hilariously brainless montage sequence, and somehow creates a university filled with the hottest damn chicks you can ever find on campus. What are the odds?...

I personally would've preferred a sequel to Galaxy Quest, but I guess I can accept this as well...

There were obviously other characters in the film besides him, but none of them really mattered. Hands (played by Columbus Short) looked to be a real playa in the film at first, only to be reduced to the role of the guy who gets wood in the end. Rory looked cute and adorable at times, but there's only so much you can take from the goddam Yale-wannabe turned New Age bitch, doing the goddam campus in-thing to do by going all zen and goddam Buddhist like my goddam obsession. Then there was this guy with ADD who conveniently finds his inner peace (and a cute girlfriend? WTF?), a reject rocker who somehow manages to entertain the crowd, and a whole host of other cliches that all predictably turn into one big happy ending...

Accepted is definitely one of those films where you know almost every single frickin' thing that will happen to the characters before the film even starts. But when it comes to that shit, the predictability of the teen comedy genre is definitely also one of those things that you just end up accepting in the end, as it's more about the experience of the journey getting you there than it is about the stuck-up details of the formula...

I think Justin Long said it best in that goddam Mac vs PC trial of his at the end, that you can get away with a hell of a lot of bullshit as long as you jazz it up with a bunch of clever punchlines. Pretty much everyone in the theatre would've rolled their eyes at the sight of the entire school behind him, all cheering Bartleby on when it came to his fucking college that just cheated twenty frickin' thousand bucks of tuition out of each of their pockets. Well, I would've rolled my eyeballs out of their sockets, if it wasn't for the fact that his speech actually was written and acted out really well...

Now, the students all experienced real learning at South Hampton Institute of Technology, right? But in the real world, will it actually help them get jobs? Who would trust this university on a resume? Aren't they just paying twenty frickin' thousand bucks a year just to get away from their parents and do whatever the fuck they want? Why the fuck can't they all just get into some shitty ass community college? WTF?...

Common sense would dictate that people don't like being cheated out of their goddam money, especially twenty fucking thousand dollars of it. But I guess common sense is SHIT, because of course, we still get the sappy ol' ending of everyone being happy at the end, with even Bartleby's parents cheering him on against The Man. And to be honest, even I was rooting the goddam Mac enthusiast on, if only because he really did seem to have a passion for all the bullshit he was spewing out of his mouth...

Seriously? Learning engineering principles from fucking building a skate board ramp? Do I learn electronic principles from just typing shit into my computer keyboard? Who writes this shit? WTF?...

But the guy's got balls. And he's got a hot bitch sucking them too. What's not to like?...

And as predictable of a film as Accepted was? There were just so many stupid ass laughs along the way, that how the fuck couldn't I find it to be my favourite damn comedy of the year to date?...

Poor Sherman Shrader. He was reduced to the poor fraternity cliche of sucking up big time just to get accepted by the guys wearing the blue blazers. I never suffered from that bullshit myself (considering I never tried to be popular in university), but you can't help but feel for the guy as he silently screamed his little girlish lungs out at never being able to fit in. Then again, you also can't help but laugh at the guy as he's dressing up as a sperm or demanding others to ask about his weiner. The stuff he was put through was just so heart-breakingly dumbass, that you almost do pull of a victory fist pump for the guy as he throws away his life to join the South Hampton Institute of Technology that he ironically created...

Monica was an air-head of a bitch, but hot damn was she a hot one. It's rare these days for the lead actress in a teen film to actually be more smokin' hot than any other bitch in the background, but Blake Lively pulled it off with style and I for one definitely approve. She was a complete, clueless dunce in never noticing the nice guy until he ironically made it rich by forming his own goddam university. It was cliche as hell that she would find college boring, and instead take up photography by fucking paying 20 grand to the guy she's sleeping with (what a whore). The complete 180 she pulled in personality after leaving the rich campus was almost ridiculously extreme. But still, did I mention she was hot? Hot damn, I think you need to know she was HAWT, and isn't all that matters?...

The funniest damn character in the film was definitely Glen. Seeing an ugly bastard like him be the cocktease of every whore's fantasy gives new hope to a loser like me, except for the fact that university has already come and gone for me without any bitch making me come. Still, who here didn't actually enjoy his transformation from gas station loser to the king bitch chef in the kitchen? From the moment he zapped himself insane in the chair (or lack thereof), he became the real star of the show. You know it's a party when you've got Glen wasted on a raft with three other girls. You know you wanna be Glen...

But the vast majority of the film belonged to Bartleby. And I don't know what it was with his performance or whatnot, but I don't think there was a single moment in the film where I didn't have a smile on my face thanks to this guy. Whether he was stealing a blazer jacket from a jock, having his room walls busted in by neighbors or wrestling with Sherman over insurance policies, Justin Long proved that he really does deserve a teen angst movie of his own. Sure, most of the film was just pure cheese, with him wooing Monica over with goddam hand-clapping lights and wet T-shirt parties (and hopefully wet panties as well, but that goes without saying...). But goddammit, the mood and atmosphere still just all worked somehow, as Accepted never took itself seriously, and Bartleby just enjoyed the fuck out of being the man on top...

Now, would I want to go to the South Hampton Institute of Technology, where you can pick your classes and do whatever the fuck you want to do?...

... considering I still would have went the boring route and picked goddam computer engineering as my goddam major...

But with characters like Uncle Ben's Rice there, telling it like it is with the working world being the shaft that fucks you up the ass? I probably did learn more just from watching the morons at South Hampton learn their own bullshit, than I ever actually absorbed from my own goddam university career...

I mean, I skipped four and a half fucking years of university, yet I sat through more lectures in Accepted than I ever did in school?...

Now, I don't understand why that bullshit school was allowed to continue, when basically it was a college where no formal education takes place and thus there was no real fucking need to actually pay Bartleby twenty fucking grand of money just to be there. I mean seriously, at the end, his parents were wishing him luck at learning during a semester at a school that he fucking created and runs? Unless they want him to become a conniving, conning businessman, what the fuck do they expect him to learn?...

But that's just the thing. Accepted is just so damn dumb and so damn ludicrous at times, that it actually became borderline genius...

Out of all movies I've seen this year, by far Accepted was the most enjoyable...

And since yes, I was a student of the stuck-up universe of rich man's universities and shit like that?...