![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/XTJZAU0.jpg\")
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I\u2019ll say I had zero expectations in regards to \u201cAccepted\u201d, mainly because it looked so ridiculous, and vapid. And it is, but I enjoyed it, because it provides a very entertaining ninety minutes that starts out as a typical college comedy and transforms into a somewhat interesting social commentary. And it\u2019s funny as hell. I like Justin Long a lot, I\u2019ve liked him since \u201cJeepers Creepers\u201d and in \u201cAccepted\u201d, he\u2019s funny as a quasi-Ferris Bueller named Bartleby Gaines who has slacked off through high school, and to prevent breaking it to his family that he can\u2019t get into any schools, he instead invents a school which then snowballs into a grand hoax.<\/p>\n
He creates the South Harmon Institute of Technology (Look at the acronym, it\u2019s very intentional), and discovers that the news of the school has broken out to every reject and invalid within a hundred mile radius. \u201cAccepted\u201d made me laugh out loud constantly, and that\u2019s due to the strong script which hurls memorable one-liners back and forth, particularly from Adam Herschman (you may remember him from \u201c40 Year Old Virgin\u201d) who is very funny as Glen, an eager over-achiever who has to contend with his friend\u2019s plans to expand the school as the obstacles become harder and harder. He\u2019s really given all the best lines and plays the uptight foil attempting to keep the secret from getting out; he also has one hysterical scene in particular where he shows his inner-woman. \u201cAccepted\u201d is an interesting and very entertaining throwback to eighties comedies; sort of like \u201cFerris Bueller\u2019s Day Off\u201d meets \u201cRisky Business\u201d in the spirit of \u201cCamp Nowhere\u201d. It has more heart than the crappy \u201cVan Wilder\u201d and really tries to make a point by the time the climax rolls around. But the film is watchable because it\u2019s a lot of fun.<\/p>\n
The gags are often very hysterical from the chef who invents a food called wads, the hyper ADD inflicted student who is confused for a mental patient, and the strippers who have no definition of the word discretion. And then there\u2019s Lewis Black who is hilarious as the misunderstood angry psychotic dean of their pretend school. But beneath it all, \u201cAccepted\u201d really aspires to have a point, and in its own merits, it succeeds. In the end it makes a commentary on how American education, particularly college education forces you into a corner, instead of giving you the profession you chose to pursue. The students are told what to learn, instead of catering to their ambitions, and are forced to lower their own ambitions or leave college. You have to appreciate a comedy that tries to be more. The message of \u201cAccepted\u201d is this: It\u2019s okay to be mediocre. Now in a world that\u2019s actually subscribed to the ideal that trying your best really is frowned upon, and to perform at a mid-level to spare everyone else\u2019s feelings, \u201cAccepted\u201d really is misguided and moronic. While the moral of the faulty education system is interesting, the message of being mediocre and average as an acceptable lifestyle is pretty idiotic in the fact that it sends out a bad message and a potentially damaging one.<\/p>\n
When we first see Bartleby, he\u2019s taking fake ID pictures and not even in class, and we\u2019re supposed to sympathize because he didn\u2019t get into college. And the film asks us to feel bad for him because since he didn\u2019t work hard in school, it\u2019s horrible that he didn\u2019t get into college. Most of all, there\u2019s the immense lapse in logic that audiences will have a hard time swallowing. There\u2019s asking us to delay our disbelief: Creating a fake letter and tricking your parents into believing you were accepted into a fake school, and then there\u2019s insulting our intelligence: They\u2019re building and renovating an abandoned mental institution across the street from an actual college, and no one notices, or asks questions, or puts to rule regulation and zoning laws, or notices that the abandoned building has been taken up by a bunch of people, or that there\u2019s not actually a branch to Harmon University. That\u2019s a hard pill to swallow that keeps \u201cAccepted\u201d from really taking off as a purely perfect comedy.The movie is dumb, the message is completely stupid, and the plot insults our intelligence, but I had fun because Justin Long and Adam Herschman are hilarious, Lewis Black chews the scenery; I dug \u201cAccepted\u201d and if you approach it as a pure guilty pleasure, you\u2019ll enjoy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ll say I had zero expectations in regards to \u201cAccepted\u201d, mainly because it looked so ridiculous, and vapid. And it is, but I enjoyed it, because it provides a very entertaining ninety minutes that starts out as a typical college comedy and transforms into a somewhat interesting social commentary. And it\u2019s funny as hell. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[50,71,219,874],"class_list":["post-1261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-a","tag-adventure","tag-comedy","tag-romance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}