Accepted (2006)
Genre: Comedy
Format Viewed: Digital Cable
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
It sure has been a while since I’ve seen a good college movie…
This one caught my eye while I was channel surfing the other night and after recognizing Jonah Hill from Superbad, the film that pleasantly surprised me when a chance was taken on it a few weeks ago, I thought I’d give Accepted a whirl as well. The on-screen description was a unique young adult transitional story from high school to college-life, with the monkey wrench in it all being that the lead character doesn’t end up getting into college and is forced to take drastic measures to please his parents, who are very old-school, “college is the foundation of adult life”-types. Of course, as any of us would suggest, the next best thing to getting into the college of your dreams is simply creating your own, and now we’ve got an interesting movie!
I’ve got to admit when I come across movies like this one that I’m a bit surprised…and confused…that I hadn’t heard of it sooner. And it seems to be quite the steady stream of amusing, but not quite blockbuster comedies like this, too, so it can’t just be that one year when I didn’t go out to the movies all that much! New Suit was a good example, now Accepted is another one, and heck, even the granddaddy of them all – Office Space – is it maybe that Hollywood just doesn’t give these flicks the time that they need (and deserve) up on the silver screen to turn a respectable profit? I suppose sadly it’s probably just one of those things where the low-budget movie doesn’t grab eyeballs like your huge, multi-million dollar blockbusters, so even if they did make a nice profit for what they initially cost, they’ll never even show up on the radar because Hollywood considers anything less than $100 million a wash. But I digress – this movie was too good to waste my whole article griping about Hollywood politics…
Justin Long is a good lead, as the student who opted to take higher education into his own hands in this film. We saw him earlier this summer alongside the infamous Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard, but hands-down this was a much better role for him, proving that he’s certainly capable of playing a lead character as long as he’s cast appropriately, and simply put – he fit this particular character well. He did have some great back up from the likes of Columbus Short, who you might recognize as I did as Darius from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Maria Thayer who made her debut at least in all the movies that I’ve seen and did a great job, and also of course, Jonah Hill, who managed to play nearly as awkward of a character in this film as he did in Superbad. Which does make me a bit curious to see what we can expect from him in further movies to come, however at least with his track record thus far I’m still happy to give him the benefit of the doubt!
Case in point – one of the first scenes at South Harmon, when Bartleby is up on stage and he asks everyone who got into other colleges to raise their hands and Hill’s character is just arrogant enough to be the lone one with his hand raised … it doesn’t translate back into words here nearly as hilarious as I found it to be, but just trust me on this one.
I think if I had only one negative thing to say about the whole thing, however, it would have to be just how out of place Lewis Black’s dialog felt in the story – not so much that I didn’t like seeing Black himself, as I think he’s a hilarious comedian, but just that it seemed almost like the writers just left that part of the script blank and told him to “Go nuts!”, adlibbing any speaking parts that his character had. They even called him Lewis at one point in the film, whether by accident or planned I’m not sure, but it ultimately just seemed out of place to me – there’s simply no need to fall back on proven comedy tracks in this movie because otherwise they went outside the box and did quite well on their own anyways.
Overall, the movie had a really fun, almost light-hearted feel to it that made it enjoyable for me, without being overburdening with any of the other aspects like excessive, pointless language or endless partying that tends to ruin most college movies for me. I’m sure that Schrader would argue differently, but not just any idiot can create their own college from the ground up – this was a pretty smart flick and I enjoyed it quite a bit! Ultimately, Accepted filled a 90-minute void in an otherwise boring evening with something that was quite amusing and would definitely be worth suggesting to friends for them to fill their boring evenings with as well! Friends, errr, like you – so enjoy…
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