The Players…
Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Columbus Short, Maria Thayer, Blake Lively, Adam Herschman and Lewis Black, with Anthony Heald, Travis Van Winkle, Mark Derwin, Ann Cusack and Hannah Marks.
The Story…
Graduating high school senior Bartleby is blithely confident he’s gonna get into college. If not the one of choice than surely one of his backups. He’s sure of it. His folks are hoping on it. His little sis is doubtful of it.
Big ups to sis. Even his backup, backup schools said no thanks. According to his mom and dad if Bartleby doesn’t get his rear in gear his future is in beyond doubt. Hello minimum wage job at the Costco.
Not having any of that, Bartleby cooks up a scheme: invent his own college! All he needs are the right papers.
And curriculum.
And campus.
And mascot.
And you get the idea.
The Rant…
Getting into the college of your choice is hard.
Wait. No it’s not. Not anymore. At least not in the conventional way. Listen.
Hold it, I know I’ve regaled you here at RIORI about my collegiate misadventures. Not gonna do that this time out. Well, not much.
As you know, dear reader that I am a cook. I went through culinary school, yeah, but before these dark days I studied and eventually graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in English. Actually, the mouthful on the CV was a Bachelors’ in English & Textual Studies with a focus on Continental Philosophy, minoring in Secondary Education and Creative Writing. Looks good on a résumé, until you have to explain to the interviewer what the whole wad meant. I then went so far as pursuing a Masters’ in Secondary English Education. Needless to say things didn’t pan out. How do you want your steak?
Now. Let’s set the wayback machine to, oh, 100 years ago. Back then, only the well-heeled could afford to send their spawn to college. It was as prestigious as it was expensive. Graduate and head out into the working world and said world was your oyster. Even more so if it was a “name school.” You’d have it made, and make your folks would be proud. Return on investment.
Post WW2, with America’s expanding middle class, average families could better afford their kiddies the opportunities Mom and Dad wanted at their age. It grew easier to find the college of your choice: the GI bill, scholarships (both academic and athletic. Sometimes both), student loan programs, all sorts of gateways to golden educations that would demand careers.
Then came the 60s, the Baby Boomers. Them and their weed and Grateful Dead LPs and vainglorious notions of shaping the future. Getting into college became mainstream. The workforce and the armed forces were no longer the only places to go post-high school (especially when the draft came calling. Saint Stephen with his rose and all). The skies were as high as they were. Opportunity would come knocking with a degree. A world in the making for the Boomers and later their privileged progeny. Right?
Um. I smell grease.
Enter Gen X. College was not an option. It was a directive. The factories and trolling for unexploded ordinances in some rice pattie Dad defended were for the rabble. You are going to college. Why? Good job, steering clear of time clocks and twitchy napalm. We, the parents, are going to be either bled dry or horns-waggled by the nice lady at the student loan citadel. Anything, anything but “do you want fries with that?”.
At the butt-end of the 20th Century, getting into college was no longer precious. It was ironclad; high school grads would go to college, or else. No longer an overt privilege. Dad would call it marching orders, waving a stump he put to best use at the now closed John Deere factory. We saved up for years to have you get to college, against the odds of risking another pattie and having to keep up with the Jones. And the Smiths. Maybe the Millers, too. You call this a report card? How the hell could you flunk lunch? Let’s hope the boards overlook that. And stay away from that manure spreader.
Don’t get stumped (no apologies there). Getting into college these days can be a real boondoggle. Lots of choices, lots of reasons, lots and lots of paperwork. Forget earning the golden ticket to the ideal job. Simply getting accepted is a real job. A chore. And don’t think the Millenials have it any easier. F*cking FaceBook posts have merit now, even if they only consist of videos of cute cats robbing banks, anime style. It went from once tricky and for the rich to the average getting tricky, if not tricked. My folks recently covered my student loan debt. I graduated with that long-winded shingle decades ago. The bill was paid in full in my early 40s, me now as a divorcee, single dad and a lot of cool recipes. None of them concocted based on the musings of Sartre.
I view it this way: back in the day, college was for the privileged, therefore a degree earned was not just accreditation, but esteemed in select, special circles. By mid-century, college screamed opportunity for every young adult! A good job awaits, not the sh*thole GI Dad had to endure at that age. Go get ’em, kid!
Into the 1980s, where college was de riguer for any high school grad and post-grad it was out into the working world and, well, so what? You went to college? And made it through? Fine. What else can you offer?
By the turn of the 21st Century—say, 100 years after the Armistice, with all yer silly iPhones, Nintendo Switches and a sh*tty grasp on proper grammar—you’ve been to college, right? Okay. So what? Where?
Name recognition. Branding. What kind of product are you? That’s not such a new worldview; it goes back aways. You want to be a lawyer? You attend Yale. You want to be an atomic physicist? You attend MIT. You want to be the next Yo Yo Ma? You lug your battered cello to Juilliard. You want to be a cook? You attend Syracuse University and graduate with a Bachelors’ in English & Textual Studies with a focus on Continental Philosophy, minoring in Secondary Education and Creative Writing. You want your steak how? Go Gen X!
Let’s face facts here. Finishing college lost its spark during the Clinton years. Getting accepted somewhere was no longer significant. Earning a sheepskin was akin to having a valid drivers’ license. You drove here so you’re hired. Get this validated. No, the other bit.
Here’s the real truth about college ultimately teaches you. I learned this from a nice girl I dated at SU. She was so nice I had a hard time absorbing her brutal, cynical truth. That being claimed, she had a bruh crush on Leo DiCaprio and spend more time analyzing Titanic than Cameron did post-production. She was a stitch.
She told me that the only thing college really teaches you is how to work a system. You give them what they want, they’ll give you what you want. It’s a business.
My scales fell. I understood she was cute, but also right. And slyly devious as well as practical. And I slept with her. I knew everything then. I was king of the world!
*klonk klonk klonk*
Needed that, thanks.
Wrapping up here before wrapping up later, college is a system to work, a game. A gamble. Getting in somewhere is a fun nightmare. Fun because you are an active subject in your own vetting process. A nightmare because you have a weak flashlight. Before I settled on SU I had to visit a lot of other prospects. There’s a feel to each and every school, and when you feel the right feel you apply.
That’s it. It’s how it’s been for the past quarter century. You find a home away from home. You’re not going to be denied an education; that’s the business before the business. It’s not as if you have a question for your prof pertinent to your midterm that they’re not gonna answer. What’s that? No. You’re going to have to go to Harvard to get that info. Hand in your blue book.
Getting an education at college is the program, the end run. You’re going to learn something. These days it’s the campus, the environment, the feel of the school that makes you want to sign on. That’s key, and f*ck all to my blustering earlier. Still think it’s relevant, if only as a slog to getting into college, but at the end of the day as a prospective college student you ultimately gotta find your niche. A school where you feel you belong.
Once in, limping through your chosen major (mine: waffles and Melville), you pick and choose your personal needs, both in academia and finding your Mark (refer to the Zack And Miri Make A Porno installment. Wear a raincoat). You find your wants over your scholastic needs a lot, be it discovering indie rock, burning, the Greek System, beer bongs, basketball games and/or a creative writing workshop dissecting the works of Sylvia Plath (Cliff Note: she was only great cuz she couldn’t figure out the new oven).
As of this installment, getting into college is simple (if you’re rich, white and male…or poor, black and not male). Smile and nod, and keep in the back of your mind all the well-to-do tags stapled to your nuts back in 1918 after thwarting the Hun and your folks investing in Mr Astor’s furrier enterprise. May seem like ancient junk now, especially facing the impulse to find a college that’s you. Where you can get the best education focusing on your skills and needs. Connect with the right friends that both support/inspire you and/or craft a fake ID before Friday night. Maybe even taken under the wing of an esteemed, ancient and most likely boozy prof exposing you to the hidden social commentary in Raymond Carver’s works as well with Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Choose that. Go learn.
Smart move. What’s yours now? Want fries/Proust with that?
I was accepted at SU. I learned a lot, both academic and social. I found my niche.
Twenty years on I sear duck breast for $12 an hour and am not at all remotely full of regret or bitter…
College is the melted cheese that covers up all the crap you had to endure those lame four years in high school. This is Bartleby “B” Gaines’ (Long) devil-may-care attitude come graduation. College acceptance? Easy. His apps went out, cluttered with average grades, no unnecessary extracurricular activities, precious few blemishes on his non-existant permanent record and no parking tickets in the student lot on Mondays. Getting accepted should be a breeze.
The only breeze blowing is over the empty mailbox, too weak to raise the red plastic flag. Even B’s backup backup school passes him over. And his parents are mad.
Since no school wants B, he concocts a wild idea. College is all about making yourself, right? Then why not create a college that would accept a mediocre grad like himself? All he needs is some hacked acceptance letter to show his dismayed folks!
“The South Harmon Institute of Technology?”
It fits. He’s up sh*t’s creek anyway. But a letter ain’t enough. B recruits his best bud Schrader (Hill) to snoop around and create a bogus website, find a campus, a student body, a skater half-pipe, the usual to keep this ruse alive and kicking. Thus SH*T is born. All will be well.
Until jillions of washouts from other colleges become barbarians at the gates demanding degrees.
What to do? SH*T has become more than a ruse. It’s fast becoming a sh*tstorm. Now what?
Simple. Launch motorcycle stunts into the student pool with a hella pyrotechnics.
Ain’t “college” fun?
I liked this, heaven help me. And not just based on my broken-wing concept of college life. Well maybe a bit.
I know I’m showing my cards here, but after weeks of shaking my head at my viewing selections I need some comfort food. Namely, a flick devoid of artistic pretensions. Any pretensions really. With Accepted, it made for some decent yuk-yuks. Even if it’s under your pillow or a latent snort when you’re taking a leak. You get where I’m coming from. I hope.
Accepted is a classic comic example of “just go with it.” There are no twists, no “serious” ones you couldn’t’ve predicted. Carbon copy characters/stereotypes with a dash of tokenism you can root for. You know all will end well. It’s a straight line. You might have seen this before. Well, thanks to the ur-college comedy, the green jello snorf of Animal House casts its guitar-smashing shadow over Accepted, as well as all the other college comedies that got thrown up in its fart you have seen this coming. Revenge Of The Nerds, Old School, the original American Pie here. Slobs versus snobs. Freewheeling versus square dealing (or really?). Saddles versus paddles (wait a minute). You get it. Now go with it.
I call Accepted a good Saturday afternoon movie. Off work. No errands. Slouched on the couch and, hey, there’s the remote. Snap on the Netflix feed and there go 90 minutes. The spazzy, overwatered dog can wait at the door. A good waste of time, curled up with a dumb, self-aware comedy. You’re already seen Casino too many times already. Time for some popcorn fodder.
In my opinion there are two types of comedy: clever and intellectual or shameless and derivative. The first is like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. The second is like John Landis’ Animal House (my fave ever comedy. Shocker there). With Annie Hall, you gotta sift for the joke. With Animal House the joke is all over us. Thankfully, Accepted mimicked Landis’ magnum opus shamelessly and with great aplomb.
Director Pink knew exactly where to come from here. College comedy? Animal House is a safe bet. Any new spin? Um, nope. Enough nope to blatantly rip off tons of scenes and tropes from Landis’ marvel. With no shame. And all for the better.
Justin “I’m a Mac” Long was an inspired bit casting as our hapless B. He’s like Ferris Beuller lite. Rather than winging it in his collegiate charade he’s flying be the seat of his pants to keep his SH*T scheme aloft. A lot of thinking on his feet, which always goes catastrophically right furthering making hole deeper. He’s good at being just on the cusp of awkward (“This is another fine mess…”), stumbling and taking his fellow washouts with him. SH*T is a character in itself, akin to the doctor’s Monster and is always teetering on going on the rampage. B’s never truly cool under pressure, and his provides enough tension with his last-minute, half-baked plotting to keep you interested.
If only as an avatar for featuring a chockful of young stars no sane audience would mistake for actual high school grads. That being said, behold the birth of Jonah Hill’s dry, slacker wit. Hard to believe that super fluffy Hill here would go on to earn an Oscar nom, but gift for one-liners are here. Roughhewn, but here. His nerdy Schrader (a nod to infamous, scandalous scenarist Paul Schrader maybe?) is the “sweat act,” the voice of reason, the guy who got into his first choice real college, the protag’s best bud and the Flounder analog for Accepted. His was the not-so-envious position to picture legit college life against B’s freewheeling experiment in Camp North Star meets Lincoln Tech, which of course is far more liberal arts and precious few pretensions. His head’s in Harmon U, his wing is around B, snarky to the end. After wearing a hot dog suit, where do you think Schrader’s allegiance lies? I think Hill’s role as lovable loser here was his breakout.
Since my brain was turned off from my Scorsese-vision and allowed to just sponge, I let myself pay some attention to the minor players. At first I found them driftwood (read: Lively as the romantic interest who was so much wallpaper, doy), but I eventually warmed up to the supporting cast. At first the aforementioned tokenism is its drab guises told me yeah, okay. These folks are gonna fade into the background. Big ups to scenarist Adam Cooper et al to actually use this dips as essential to the A plot. There was a hint of actual filmmaking going on there. A crossbreed between Annie Hall and Animal House, Jugdish! To put it simply, the intro of lost scholarship Hands and Yale-denied Rory was just, yeah, whatever, B’s fellow washouts. The second act proves different, but in a friendly, soul-searching kind of way. Isn’t that a part of the whole (non) college experience? Between marching band practice and endless philosophy seminars I discovered Bob Mould and Korean food. Guess what went further? Maria Thayer and Columbus Short’s awakening as guru and artisan proved if not honest but refreshing, and not just a gimmick. Simply put, we got some money with our minors. Even the minor minors. I’m not gonna so far as to say the supporting cast was “colorful,” I’m saying Pink, Cooper and our rogue’s gallery were good stretching a cinematic dollar. You didn’t feel ripped off of your two Saturday afternoon dollars. Overall predictable, sure, but yeah. Vacuum the FunYuns off your sweater before your kids want some.
I found the ultimate appeal of Accepted was the geek factor. Look, if you set the wayback machine to high school, only the precious few found/created their own cliques of like-minded plastics and/or nerds. High school is that tricky time during adolescence as crucible tenuously balanced between the very deep “Who am I?” up against the greater, often superfluous “Who are we and why care?” Such social structures take the back seat with Accepted (this is post-grad ennui we’re lapping at here, not the cool kids’ lunch table). All that is woolgathering. Here we know the dorks will triumph. Accepted is all about how said mutants do so. The model students at the alabaster Harmon U are an afterthought Omega House, and their subplot is mostly forgotten as SH*T evolves into a pseudo-legit school. That’s where the honey is. Pink may be no DeMille, but he knows how to shove around a cast of thousands—okay, hundreds, if that with multiple stunt doubles and pro skateboarders—into the right places. The rabble is as much as much a singular character as, well, you are. The uncertainty of your future. The ensuing circles you run in. The dopey choices you make for good or for ill. If this sounds like a lot of existential hokum, it is. Either flowing from B’s seat of his pants thinking on his feet, or you just being in a potential life-changing clusterf*ck, figuring it all out and keep at least one foot on the ground is relatable for everyone. At it core, watching Accepted is like talking yourself out of a speeding ticket. And how relieved you feel if you pull it off.
Yeah yeah yeah. I’m going on like Accepted was the second coming of Chaplin’s The Circus. Call it slow burn elation that comes with an entertaining film you don’t have to think about. Accepted is deliberate fluff. It kinda works. I say kinda because if you’re a thinking person, capping the cynicism lens might prove difficult. You gotta be in the right mood to watch this trash. Guess Netflix caught me on a needful day. Don’t forget, this has been done before, shoehorning tropes from milestone movies into lesser specimens, if only they are trying pay homage. The film understands this. It’s all about how the ornaments. Your Xmas tree already lost all its needles.
Just let me quote this once more when it comes to mediocre movies (it should become part of The Standard by now). It’s like the blues: it’s not the notes, it’s how they’re played. Accepted had easy pacing, inoffensive characters, a reliable story device and a thorough stream of chuckles. I started watching Accepted with my cynic lens firmly capped. I plotted on my notebook a “laugh meter” and tacked off every time I giggled. I gave up in the first act. What I sat down for delivered just fine.
So it’s Saturday and you’re waiting for the college boards to call. While you wait (and wait and wait), queue up Accepted as a good waste of time. Lars Von Trier can wait (and wait and wait and…)
*stirs, brushes pretzel salt off crotch*
Where was I? Right. Learning how to work the system while schilling for Apple. Here’s hoping.
The Verdict…
Rent it or relent it? Rent it. Like I said, funny and a fair time waster. Feel feel to pore over the latest from Werner Herzog some Monday evening on PBS.
Stray Observations….
- “Are you huffing grass?”
- Bartleby, as in “the scrivener?” As in “ghostwriter?” Hmm.
- No matter what role Lewis Black plays he’s always Lewis Black. Even for Inside Out. God bless ‘im.
- “Yeah. In human dollars.”
- Dr Chilton—er—Dean Van Horn’s motives echo Dean Wormer’s. No Millennial fun of any kind.
- “I want to learn how to blow sh*t up with my mind!” Hey, who doesn’t?
- I think Pink has a Cusack crush. He’s worked within and out of that film family before. That’s John and Joan’s sis Ann as B’s mom. She has the best cleavage of them all. Especially John.
- “This is so cheezy in the greatest way.” The movie in a nutshell.
- Did they ever clean up that bathroom?
Next Installment…
John Q Archibald takes on the health care system with a very specific agendum: find a way to save his son’s life. Hell, after tossing all those forms to the floor what else would you do? F*cking vote?